The art of ‘speaking from the stage’ is almost as old as the world itself. Whilst the team at MOBIT do not profess to be speaking experts, we have hundreds of clients that are. We have walked their journeys with them over the last few years and enabled them to engage their audience before and after each live event, capture leads, nurture these relationships, and grow a profitable business as a speaker. This is article 1 of a 5 part series...
Introduction
Like anything, preparation is critical to the success of any marketing campaign. When speaking at a live event, you will no doubt have your very own way of preparing for the event itself. This guide is certainly not intended to coach you on that specific skill set but rather, outline in systematic fashion, how you can maximize your time at these events to attract customers for your follow-on programs.
Now these programs may be simple as selling a series of books, joining your membership program, elite VIP forum, or attending one of your workshops, or more in-depth video tutorial programs that you sell as a subscription service.
Regardless of the flavor and type of your ‘add on sales and services’, this series (1 of 5 articles) has been put together to help you gain as many leads as possible from your speaking events so as to maximize the revenue return from each single booking.
The MOBIT team, along with our unique mobile messaging and marketing solution have worked with hundreds of ‘speakers’ from around the world, and whilst we will not share the individual secrets of how their marketing programs are constructed, we have put together a ‘framework’ and guide from thousands of consulting hours that when followed, will significantly amplify the revenue rewards from your speaking engagements and have people standing in line to book you for their next event.
1.Preparation
Congratulations, you have just secured a booking to speak at an event next month. This could be as small an opportunity as speaking for 15 minutes before the lunch break or as significant as a keynote address. Regardless, the event is the event and the opportunity to maximize your return from this engagement is the same.
Now as I mentioned in the introduction, this guide and certainly myself are not here to coach the fine art of ‘speaking’ or ‘presenting’. Masters of this genre, the likes of Matt Church from Thought Leaders and many others have dedicated their lives in the quest to help people establish themselves as world-class speakers. The preparation for your speaking event then is up to you.
How to maximize your time, financial return from this event, and then grow your profitable speaking business is what you will learn from this guide.
Your Audience
Every event is unique of course. From small groups through to the thousands of attendees at an annual conference, it is important that you have a sound understanding of the make-up of your audience.
Your first task is to understand the make-up of this audience and gather as much information about the event topic. Outlined below is a 'shopping list' of what you need. Write these simple prep questions down on a notepad, and then write your answers below each question.
- What is the purpose of your event?
- Why have your audience invested money or their time to attend this event and your presentation?
- Within your presentation topic, what are the three (3) key points you would like your audience to remember and take away with them?
- What programs, promotions, info packs or sales items do you have that you would like to pitch to your audience? NOTE: Things to consider are; free reports, membership program, eBooks, join your blog, sign up to your newsletter etc...
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In some cases, ‘selling from the stage’ is frowned upon by most event companies. Whilst this was all the rage some years back, most professional speakers see this as ‘low rent’ tactics anyway. There is however a very professional and subtle way to capture almost everyone’s details in the audience that will be interested in following up with you. More on that a little later in this series.
For this step in your preparation, think about a word (something short and memorable) that imparts either your topic or your own brand to the audience. E.g. If you are speaking about ‘the effect of great culture within companies’ then your word could be CULTURE. Nice and easy to remember and simple to spell! Write three words down that some to mind.