How To Sell Tickets To Your Event With A Value Packed Lead Magnet – The Digital Marketing Superhero’s Club Volume 1 Chapter 12

Are lead magnets are a thing of the past? I know it’s harder to get people to part with their email addresses and agree to get info from you since GDPR was implemented.

But no, this week’s Superhero shows us they aren’t. What I love about the lead magnet BizPaul created is that it was a perfect match for his ideal customer.

A report built from the past attendees responses and including input from some of their heroes.

But first…

Superhero Tips – 5 Signs You Need To Get An Online Marketing Strategy

“When does all this social media stuff start paying off?”

That’s a real question asked in a Facebook group I’m a member of and it’s not the first time I’ve seen it.

Spending time on digital marketing can seem pointless, a time suck, a waste of time. 

Unless you’ve got a strategy.

Let’s look at some signs that you need to put together and implement an online marketing strategy for your business.

1. You’re overwhelmed

Do you get that sinking feeling? There’s so many things you want to do to market your business but you just never have the time. You don’t know where to start so you try to do everything at once, it’s exhausting.

A strategy will help you put a process in place, including the networks and types of content you need to create that will deliver real business results.

Goodbye overwhelm, hello customers.

2. You don’t know if it’s working

Is it working? You think it is (or isn’t) but you can’t be sure.

Measurement is at the heart of a good strategy. When you know where you want to go you’ll know when you get there.

It’s magic when you can look at the stats and know what is working for you and what you need to change.

3. It’s hard to be consistent

Everyone is telling you to be consistent with your online articles but that blog post, video, Facebook post just slides down your to-do list. You put it off because it just seems like so much head space to do.

Enter… strategy. Part of your strategy is planning content in advance. When you create a strategy, you build the content you need around that.

Because you’ve planned in advance, it’s so much easier to keep it going on schedule.

4. Time ugh

How do you even find the time for your marketing activities? There’s so much else to do.

Somehow you have to. Your strategy isn’t just about who you want to reach goals and content. It’s also about mapping out your time and looking at tasks you can outsource to make it happen.

5. You need to make more money

A business needs revenue to survive but sometimes money seems like a dirty word. One you avoid online and in polite company.

But you have to sell. If you don’t tell people what you do and try to sell to them, you will never see results. It sounds simple but so many people, including me forget to sell sometimes.

Making sales is the most important thing for your business so it needs to be the ultimate goal of your strategy. When you know those sales are the end point, you can map the roads you need to take to get there.

Speaking of which…

If you want help with your online strategy give me a shout here. 

Superpower of the week – Find Out How You Are Spending Your Time With Toggl

I mentioned mapping out your time above. If you want to be more productive with your time, you need to know how you are already spending it.

That’s what Toggl is for. It’s an online tool and mobile app that tracks your time. You set it off at the click of a button, tell it what you are doing and it will show you at the end of a day or a week where you spent that time.

It’s helped me see the tasks I need to outsource and it means I can leave enough time in my schedule to do the more important jobs.

Best of all, it’s freemium so you can use the basic version for free.

You’ll find it at Toggl.com. 

Superhero Interview – Paul Ince MarketEd Live

Paul Ince (BizPaul) has worked in the IT industry for nearly 20 years, a time of incredible change.

Since starting training customer service systems to call centre agents, through to designing customer focused CRM solutions and now digital marketing strategies, the direction his career has taken him has been incredible.

As a technology enthusiast, he’s relished the changes and encouraged businesses to do the same. Your customers and key decision makers of tomorrow are digital natives – you need to be one too.

Paul helps organisations understand the strategies that will help them succeed with social media and, more broadly, with content marketing.

Amanda Webb:

It’s so great to have you on the show, and I know you have a really interesting campaign that you’ve been running, to share with us today. So, tell me about what it is, first, and what were your goals of the campaign.

Paul Ince:

The campaign was to try and sell tickets. That’s basically what it comes down to, selling tickets to the event. One of the ways that we were thinking we needed to do that was to get people to understand a bit more about what the event’s about and why it’s different and the value of attending.

We thought, how can we do that? We can do things like, a Facebook Live, and we have a podcast, which we put out nearer the event, but we wanted to be able to do some more email marketing. We wanted to capture emails so that we could then talk to people and have a conversation, really, that’s how I see it.

It’s all about having a conversation with those people. I want to see them in person. I want to get to know them individually if I can, but get people into that sort of funnel, we felt that we needed something a bit more valuable than just saying, “Here’s a checklist, or here’s this, or do this, or just why not just sign up for updates?” On our website, we have a thing that says “Sign up for Updates.” Well, do you know what? No one’s really interested in our updates, so we thought, “Well, what else can we do?” So, we decided that we needed something, something to download.

There is a little bit of a story to it because the event before, in the 2018 event, before the event itself, I did a survey of all of the attendees and asked them things like: what are you using? Do you use Facebook more than you use LinkedIn? How’s your website? All these questions, and that then gave us quite a bit of data.

So, when we were thinking about what should that download be, it was pretty obvious that we should write that into a report and give people something that will help them with some data that people can go, “Well, there’s the evidence.”

Amanda Webb:

And that’s your download, then. I suppose we should name the event, as well.

Paul Ince:

Yes, I suppose we should. That would be good. So, the event’s called MarketEd Live, and it takes place in Nottingham in Britain on the 30th of September.

Amanda Webb:

Okay. Perfect. So your goal was to get email subscribers, but the right email subscribers. I love the way that you’ve done that. You’ve looked at who … It’s almost like a look-alike audience in my head. You’ve created something that you know that’s going to attract people, not just that have attended before but who are similar to them. I’m thinking that’s the methodology.

Paul Ince:

Yes, totally. I think we know the type of people that enjoy the event. It’s a marketing event, and so we wanted to think about what it is that they need. Yes, data’s useful, but they also want strategies or evidence or inspiration, as well.

So, not only did we publish the findings of the report, and it wasn’t just question one, these are the results. It was my very personal interpretation of those results.

For example, on questions like are you going to use more or less Facebook in the next 12 months? I was quite astounded at how many people said that they were going to use more Facebook when everyone knows that Facebook reach is declining.

I used that data to say why is this? Well, actually, if we delve into the roles of the respondents, a lot of people that said that they would use Facebook more were dedicated social media managers, whereas those people who are more business owners weren’t going to do that.

Maybe people who are more traditional print or generalists said that they weren’t going to as more. So it’s kind of in social media marketers interest to do more Facebook, so we could put that interpretation on it. I think that also added some value.

Amanda Webb:

Yeah, that is really interesting, isn’t it? We could have a whole podcast episode on that.

We have to tell people where they get it once we finish.

And then other thing is you had some pretty major names included in this report, so tell me about that.

Paul Ince:

Well, instead of it just being this data and we ask these questions, and here’s what you said, I felt as though it just needed something extra if possible.

Interestingly, I was having a chat with Teresa Heath-Wareing, one of our speakers this year. She’s an expert in these sorts of things, and she was saying, “Well, okay, what do people do with that information?” I can give my interpretation on it, but I’m only one voice out there. Although I like to think I have some credibility, there are people out there that have a lot more than me.

I decided that I would ask all of our speakers for this year if they could contribute something, and then I fired off a load of emails to anyone that I respected, anyone that I knew about, people that I thought other people would like to hear from, and I just sent very, very quick email, because I’m very conscious of the time, and they must get asked lots, but I just said, “Hi. This is what I’m doing. This what I’m trying to build. I just would like you to answer this one question. What is the one thing that marketers should be doing in 2019?”

I didn’t really expect that much response, but within an hour of me sending an email to Seth Godin, he responded.

Amanda Webb:

Wow.

Paul Ince:

Wow. Because you send off these things and think, “Well, it will just go into spam, or whatever. They must get hundreds.” But he responded within an hour and gave me this contribution. And then I also got a response from Brian Solis, another one of my heroes, and a number of other people. But it was really interesting, actually, who responded and who didn’t, who said, “I’m really sorry. I’m really too busy, or this isn’t my thing,” to those people who just didn’t respond at all. It has changed my mind about people.

Amanda Webb:

Wow. I’m not going to ask who didn’t respond because-

Paul Ince:

No, best not.

Amanda Webb:

… it wouldn’t be nice. But that’s pretty impressive. The goal was to collect email addresses, so how did you do with the campaign, which is still running?

Paul Ince:

Yeah, it’s still running, so once we’d got these contributions from the likes of Seth and Brian and everybody else, I went into a bit of a flap, to be honest, because I thought we were just going to tidy up a bit and convert and produce something that looked okay, and suddenly, it felt like it had a lot more value.

So, we went and sent it off to a proper designer, checked with Dean Johnson, Active Right Brain, brilliant guy, really nice stuff. Turns out he does lots of stuff like BMW and stuff so that was pretty cool. So, lovely piece, and it looks really nice. That’s also important, I think, for it to look nice.

So we had it designed and then we created a landing page. The landing page was a very deliberate design to walk people through what the report is, what the key findings are, and it had Download Now at several points throughout that page so that people would be driven towards getting this report.

We showed the inside of the report to show how lovely it was. We included the names of the people that contributed, all of those things designed for people to go, “Yes, I want it.”

Amanda Webb:

So, it’s like a sales page, essentially.

Paul Ince:

Yes, totally was a sales page. We even took advice on the colour of the buttons because our branding is red and white and black, and we started to put our buttons in red, and looked very nice.

But, actually, the advice was, put it in a completely horrid, obtuse colour that’s just going to jar on the page and make it stand out, so we did that. And, yes, so we’ve had about 250 odd downloads of the report.

Amanda Webb:

Fabulous.

Paul Ince:

Yeah, which from an expectation of not really anything, is great. We’re getting ticket sales from it, which is fantastic. What happens when they download it? There is an email sequence which we then send out to say, “Let us know what you think.” Again, we’re very much encouraging the conversation. So, let us know what you think, and then, eventually, we start to say, “Well, look, we would like you to come to the event, so here’s how you can do that.” But I had lots of really good feedback, actually, lots of people sharing it online, and that’s helped further.

Amanda Webb:

And I think that makes … that’s what makes a difference, isn’t it, between having a basically maybe … I was going to say rubbish, but it’s not rubbish. There are lots of little checklists and things that can be really helpful to people, but if you have something that big and valuable, people will want to tell other people about it. I think that’s one of the advantages of putting all that extra effort in. Don’t you?

Paul Ince:

Oh, undoubtedly. I mean, yeah, I agree. I mean, we’ve got checklists and things, as well, which are useful for particular campaigns.

We’re asking people to part with their hard earned cash for an event, to get here, to pay for accommodation and travel, and all those things that go along with going to an event. So, it is an investment, and so I respect that and I want to give people as much value from this as possible. And I want people to talk about it.

One of the best things for anyone thinking about doing something similar is if you can get contribution from people, obviously, it’s in their interest to then share it to their audiences.

I think we look at the traffic to the landing page and to our website, which, of course, we’ve installed pixels on, so we’re capturing other audiences, as well, and so we can re-market to them. That’s getting the message out about the event in a way that’s really about the report, but all of the people who contributed, it’s in their interest to share it. They want to show that they’re involved in this, and that has undoubtedly helped.

Amanda Webb:

And just you said you had around 250 downloads so far. Two questions about that because just I know if they’re in my head, they’ll be in someone else’s head. Was there any ad spend on that?

Paul Ince:

Yes, so we did put an ad out. I would say, just thinking about it, I think we spent about 200 pounds on ads over a period of a few weeks just to kick that off. Again, we did … What was interesting about the ads is that we picked different types of audiences. We did website re-marketing, so anyone that’s been to the event website. We also did look-alikes, and we also built audiences of fans of Brian and Seth because they were the ones where you could actually specify them as an interest, so we did that.

On Twitter, when you advertise on Twitter, you can target followers of certain accounts, so that was easier. But, yeah, so we spent around 200 pounds in all, and that was, I think, perfectly fine. A full price ticked, the event is 267 pounds, so you only need a few to make it worth it, really.

Amanda Webb:

My other question was did you use double opt-in? And I’m not trying to catch you out here. I’m asking because I know that since GDPR, there seems to be just nobody does it. When there’s a double opt-in, it’s really hard to get people to click again.

Paul Ince:

I’m just trying to think. I don’t think that we have got double opt-in.

Amanda Webb:

And I think, you see, that’s the thing. Everyone’s enabled double opt-in since GDPR, and actually there’s other ways to be GDPR compliant without it. That’s good to know as well.

Paul Ince:

Yeah, I mean, we were very specific on the sign up form when people clicked the button to download in saying, in having multiple options there in terms of what they want to consent to. There’s no … I run an agency, as well. There’s absolutely no risk. It’s very, very separate the event and the marketing that goes on with that, so there’s no risk to that, even tough the marketing event is run by the business itself.

Amanda Webb:

Yeah, I just wanted to, because I’ve been having … I know I’ve been working with a lot of clients who put double opt-in in place because of GDPR. Then you’re spending the money to get the leads, and they’re not getting the leads because they’ve got double opt-in. Whereas people will check the box when they go to download, which is the other way of doing it.

I was just interested in that because that does seem to severely limit the number of people you get to sign up for stuff.

Paul Ince:

I think it’s another hurdle, isn’t it?

Amanda Webb:

Yeah.

Paul Ince:

And I agree with you, there are ways in which you can be GDPR compliant. I’m not an expert, but my interpretation is really about mainly consent but also respect. What are people expecting you to do? And can you be trusted to just deliver on that? I mean, they wouldn’t expect us to be suddenly be talking about selling our social media services. It asked them if they’re happy to receive emails about the event, and if they want to, and yeah, we would only do it on that. What’s interesting, we haven’t actually done any additional marketing to those people yet.

Amanda Webb:

Right. Okay. And are you going to? Is that in the plan?

Paul Ince:

Well, yes, absolutely I intend to because I’d like to sell out.

Amanda Webb:

Yeah. Okay. So it’s too early, really, to see what sort of impact that will have on your sales, but you’ve made some sales as a result of it already, which is great.

Paul Ince:

Yeah. We are ahead of where we were this time last year, so that’s always a good indicator to me as what’s different about our marketing efforts this year to last year.

Our main difference, this year we have put much more of a structured campaign plan in place, so each month there is something else that people can get. So, actually, as we’re recording this, this month we’re running a campaign to download, sorry, to gain access to an online course that one of our speakers is giving. There’s something for them. And, again, really this is about thinking about our community. What’s their need? What’s their want? We want them to trust us to deliver some things for them, so that, actually, it would be nice to come to the event because they get to meet somebody else.

Amanda Webb:

See, I’m trying to remember now did I download the report first, or did I buy my ticket first? But I know that the downloading the report wasn’t why I did it. It was because I met you at Social Media Marketing World, and I was, “I like this guy.” So, come out and see me and Paul for MarketEd Live.

Tell us where we can find you online, and then tell us where we can get tickets.

Paul Ince:

Okay, so I’m knows as BizPaul absolutely everywhere, like even my children call me that, so that’s top brand awareness there, so look me up on BizPaul. The event is marketed.live. That’s the website, marketed.live, and it’s on the 30th of September in Nottingham, so that’s where you need to be.

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