Are Virtual Summits Still Relevant?

0:00All right. So we are now going to talk about if virtual summits are still relevant. So Neil, you actually, as of this recording, I don't know if you just finished your virtual summit. This is going to come out in October. So do you want to talk about what you did and what a virtual summit is? Yeah, sure. So a virtual summit is like an online event, online conference. We threw one. You're talking about more than 20 ,000 registrants. I think it was like closer to 25 to 30 ,000 registrants, which was quite a bit of people online that are showing up to learn about marketing. And what we found is it's a great way to build your community, foster it, and even generate revenue.

0:39I'm not talking about just like ticket sales from a virtual summit, but I'm talking about selling your products, your services. So we have an ad agency called NP Digital during the virtual summit. We'll talk about case studies and what we're doing for our customers and how people can work with us and all this kind of stuff drives revenue in the long run as well. All right. And Neil, on the 20 ,000 people, what percent do you expect to attend? At least half usually attend. Oh, wow. That's a super high attendance rate. Right. So yeah, not all the sessions, but at least half show up. That's typically we see half to 60%.

1:11That's pretty amazing because usually for a webinar, it's like, you know, 25 to 30 % or so. Why do you think it's a higher attendance rate? Because it's over multiple days. And what we'll do is we'll send out email blasts to the registrants of the virtual summit, reminding them of certain sessions. So that really boosts our numbers. That's the trick. You're promoting it harder. We're promoting it harder, but we're promoting it harder to people who have already registered during the event. And that's the big thing. See, when we didn't do that, we were getting closer to somewhere around like 32, 33 % showing up and just a lot wouldn't.

1:46But the moment we started sending emails saying like, Hey, Eric, Neil's about to speak on this new topic on how to succeed in the marketing world when everyone's using AI and is, you know, and the marketing is looking alike, right? So when we tease stuff and say like, Hey, he's going to be going live in, you know, three hours, make sure you attend or send them text reminders, like things like that. It really boost show up rates. Got it. And you're doing email plus SMS, I'm assuming. SMS. I don't know if we do. I know we do SMS for webinars, depending on the webinar, but the virtual summit, I don't know if we did SMS.

2:22And the reason I say, I don't know, it could just be to a select group of audience. Believe it or not, SMS in countries outside of the United States are much, much more expensive. So like if we want to do SMS to like people in India, it costs us much more money. And also, so for your summit, because the last time I did a summit has to be like almost 10 years ago, I think something like that, maybe eight years ago. So your summit, who is speaking? Because it's not just you, how many speakers do you have? And what kind of speakers you have coming? Yeah. So in total, we probably have over like 12, 13 different speakers, somewhere around there.

2:57And we bring in people from different corporations like Google and FedEx and just large corporations that can give insights on what people can do and what big corporations are doing and how you can take stuff from their playbook and apply it to your business, whether it's small or large. Got it. And I'm assuming, I mean, look, on the 20K, you have like 10 ,000 people that attend, but also at the same time, you're building a deeper relationship with these speakers. And also this is going to get you leads too, because, you know, let's say you do a session and two, 3000 people watch it. You could just send the slides afterwards to whoever watched or all the people say, Hey, like, just in case you missed it, here are your slides.

3:31By the way, if you want to chat with the team, you know, here's the link to chat with the team. Exactly. And we found it to work really well. And to go back to like, who's speaking CMO of Google Italy, CMO of American Express, Vice President of Digital Marketing and Streaming of Sony Music. We had the Digital Marketing Leader of Coca-Cola, Vice President of Loyalty and Partnerships at Marriott, BBVA, Big Bank. We had someone from there. I mentioned FedEx. This was the Managing Director of Marketing, Head of Growth for ESPN, Senior Brand Director at Unilever. But yeah, we had former CEO of Loro Piana.

4:08We literally had a mixture of everyone speaking. Do you get a deal for the CEO of Laurel Piana? Do I get a deal as in for cheaper discounts for buying Laurel Piana? No, I don't think so. Oh man. All right. Well, okay. I want to make this practical for everyone too, right? Because not everyone has a big email list like yours. And so if they wanted to do a summit, like what's a practical way for them to get started? And I'm assuming if they wanted to promote it, there's like an organic and an inorganic way. Yeah. So a lot of people do like Facebook ads. That's a great way to drive a lot of registrants to a summit.

4:42We don't. What we found to be the most effective strategy when you don't have a list is you partner with other people who have done summits and you say, hey, you promote my summit, I'll promote your summit. And you deal with a lot of people and your numbers will inflate really quickly. Another strategy is when you get speakers, you ask them to promote it on their social media to their email list. Those two ways drive in quite a bit of registrants and revenue. But also like you want to make it really easy for the speakers to promote it too. So you You want to give them the copy. They can edit it.

5:12You want to give them images and everything for social media. We're like, here's some design graphics and it looks good. So then that way they're more likely to publish it. Totally. And so I think summits are one, they're more acceptable because of 2020. And I also think they're underutilized as well. Just like I think webinars are still underutilized. It's just, you know, as long as you can provide interesting stuff that helps people, why wouldn't people want to check it out? Especially if the speakers are interesting as well. Anything else, Neil? No, that's it. You should do Summit. Easy revenue.

5:42You'll make profit. It's a good business. It's not as good as a standalone business, but it's good to add in to help. It's good for your business. Yep. Yep. All right. That's it for today, everyone. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Five stars, please. And we'll see you tomorrow.