And, really, again, today, what we want to do is share what we see to be the best practices, also just give you ideas for future events, and also just, you know, one of the things that a lot of advisers come to me and say is, I can throw a great client appreciation event, and I love to do it, but I would love to use more events to get new leads, and we struggle with that. Right? We have the same email list with the same people. How do we get new people?
So I really am gonna hone in a lot on tips for that today, so hopefully you’ll find that, helpful as well.
Brian just said go to Canary Wharf in the city of London.
Yes. I have been to both and loving it. Anyone else have London tips for me? Send them my way.
I’m here for the summer with my three kids and my mom who’s helping me with them. So love all the London tips, and I’ve been here about five weeks. We’ve we’ve done a lot, but there’s so much to see. Alright.
So I’m gonna go ahead and share my screen.
And I would actually also love to know, from anybody who who can help with this, how did you hear about today’s event? Was it an email? Was it a social media post?
Did you just go to FMG’s website and see it? That would actually be really helpful for us to know as well, as we’re looking at how did you all hear about our event. So please tell us.
And that is great. Okay.
Email. Lots of email. I love that. Email is still the number one way that you will find and you’ll get the highest attendance.
So I’m not surprised. That looks like over ninety percent of people said email. We did have some LinkedIn, and I’m gonna show you how you can post about your event on social media to get some, traction as well. But I just wanted to share a little success story to start.
This is Isaac Priestley.
He is the CEO of Corded Wealth, and he has really prioritized hosting events as a lead generation tool. He’s very consistent with them. He’s been doing it for years. And in the last twenty four months, he’s had over a thousand people register for his events with a forty percent attendance rate.
And afterwards, after these events are hosted, he has about eight to ten percent of those who do attend reaching out to learn more about working with him.
And he has generated nine new client households and eleven million in AUM.
He does spend a little bit of ads to promote the events on LinkedIn, and I’m gonna show you how you can use LinkedIn, as events tool to set up an events page and invite people to your event using LinkedIn. It the way I’m gonna show it to you is not using ads, so it’s just, organically doing it. However, you do have the option within LinkedIn to pay a little money to boost it. So that is an option.
But whether you do it, you know, with an ad or not, you set it up the same way. So I will, show you that. And if you wanna learn more about it, I have a link to a podcast that he was on where he really went more into detail about using these webinars, to generate all of this AUM and how he does it in his whole process. So, you’ll all get the slide deck afterwards, and you can listen to that if you wanna dig in a little bit more.
But I would love to know, for those of you who are on this call right now, have any of you gotten new leads from an event, whether it’s a webinar or in person? Which one was it? And did it lead to new business? And any specific, you know, numbers you can share, yes.
We hosted this event. We got three clients. Because I think for those of us listening, and we wanna know what is most successful. Was it a webinar?
Was it in person?
I think webinars are great because you they allow you to be more consistent. You can do it every month. You can repurpose the the content. But we’re really seeing, I personally think, a huge shift of people being interested in in person events and experiences because of AI, and I think that’s only going to increase.
So for those of you who maybe came in from a LinkedIn post, you might have seen I posted about this, and I’m gonna show it to you. Has if anybody here has seen Google has this new v o three tool where you can make videos by just prompting the tool with a couple words, and it will create the most realistic looking videos.
Very, very hard to tell other than her eyes in this one, which I could edit to change, that it’s fake. And I just think that as we, you know, really keep shifting more and more to having this AI world where it’s harder and harder to tell what is real and is what is not real, we are going to see more and more people cling to and gravitate towards in person events. So we’re gonna talk a lot about in person events as well.
And they also just really allow for community building and those kinda off the cuff conversations and those authentic moments that you just can’t get online. So going to show that, a little bit here as well. I’m seeing a lot of people asking about LinkedIn, and can you use LinkedIn to invite people to in person events? Yes. You can. So I’m gonna show you how to do that too.
And thank you all for the stories you’re sharing. Jules said, I was just talking about our summer barbecue. We got over six million in new business from referrals and prospects from our summer barbecue event. That’s amazing. Claire said I had an adviser host a bourbon tasting.
Nice interaction with the couple at the bar, invited them to join, and now they’re good prospects.
Love that. So, you know, not every event works for prospecting, says Jewel, which is a hundred percent true, and we’ll talk about which ones work really well as well. So before we talk really deep, though, into, like, client versus prospect events, how to promote everything, let’s just talk about specifically when you’re inviting people, what makes somebody want to say, yes. I want to go to that specific event.
Right? Because there is some psychology behind this, and what I find is that when I look at the invitations for a lot of events that are being sent out, not everybody is tapping into this. So there’s really a few steps to make sure that you are harnessing this as much as you can. The first thing is that if you’re hosting any kind of educational event, okay, you want to focus on current pain points that you’re going to solve and whatever it is you’re talking about, and the more specific you can be, the better.
So this is just a screenshot of an email we sent out about this event. This is our email copy. Right? So So it’s are you planning a summer event but seeing low attendance rates?
Right? So there’s the pain point. We know that advisors wanna host events, but they often see low attendance rates. We, and then there’s a social proof point.
I’ve heard from so many advisers. They’re either getting the same faces at every event or struggling to break single digit RSVPs.
So for you all, right, it might be, are you struggling with x? We’ve worked with so many clients who why. Right? You wanna start with the problem or the pain point in your invitation copy, in your social posts, in your landing page, and then have some sort of social proof about why you’re the expert or the person who can talk about it with them, before you go into the next step. So this is really crucial for setting it up to grab attention.
And we know the more we focus on those pain points, the current things that people are struggling with, the better outcome we will have.
So, again, this is really, really focused on if you’re hosting more of an educational event or seminar. This is not a client appreciation event. This is if you’re doing it hopefully more for lead generation.
And then you’re explicitly going to explain the benefits of attending. What is someone going to get out of it? Right? I always like to say the number one way to have success with marketing is to use the what’s in it for me mindset because nobody really cares what you can do.
They care what you can do for them. Right? So after that section of, you know, talking about those pain points, we go into exactly what you will get if you come to this event. So not just like, we’re gonna teach you about what everything you need to know about Social Security.
That too broad, too bland, and people don’t see themselves in the questions. So you might say things like, do you have these questions about Social Security? List out the top five questions clients have. You’ll get answers to these questions. Right?
That is how you really want to do it. So if you’re not sure exactly how to list the benefits, I think that’s the best way is, you know, you’ll get answers to these questions and list out the types of questions that clients typically have about whatever that is. Matthew’s asking, can we get a copy of these slides? Absolutely.
You will. So, again, start with the pain point, have the social proof, and then go into the benefits of attending. And then if you can, end with something that’s really gonna whet their appetite and make them see the value without even having to attend. So in this email, if you kept scrolling down, we have and here’s a sneak peek of four event tips to make your event a success.
Much more where that comes from. You can watch this quick video of me talking about those four event tips. For you all, if you don’t wanna record a video, it could be a checklist that you’re gonna give out at the event. It could be a blog post you’ve written or a guide, something that just, again, again, goes into more detail than you have room for in the email itself to do that, again, proof point that you know what you’re talking about, that they’re going to get something out of it.
So if we are, again, doing something educational, this is how it would look. Now what if you’re doing something that’s more fun, like a baseball night. Right?
You might start by saying something like, summer is here, and can you envision anything better than a night at the ballpark? How about a night at the ballpark where you don’t have to buy the tickets? Right? And then you talk about how you’re you wanna thank everybody for being a client.
You’re gonna give them the tickets. And as you scroll through, especially for people who’ve never come to one of your events before, a client event, Having photos or videos of previous events is such a great way. So they see people having fun. They see that it’s low pressure.
That so you’re still following the same format.
You’re just instead of focusing on, the educational component, you’re talking about the fun that they’re gonna have and showing that in some way. So photos or videos of previous events would work really, really well there. Keep all the good questions coming, by the way.
Love seeing them all, and I promise we’ll get to as many as I can. So here’s an example from an advisory firm that we work with, TFG.
They had this image that they created in Canva that they use on their social media posts, on their website, on their landing page that they built in FMG.
And they have a picture of their two speakers, and they talk about the specific topics that people will have. You can see it’s an in person event at the Hyatt Regency.
You have the other, folks, the financial companies that are behind it. And what I really like here is the way that they say things like, owner readiness is crucial. Many business owners struggle with questions like, will I have enough money? What is my business worth?
And what is the best way to sell? If I was gonna rewrite this for them, I would actually put those three questions right at the top. Instead of just saying topics will include, I would have, you’ll get answers to questions like and have that. However, just doing it this way, this firm got two new clients from this, event.
So the way that it worked, the story that they told us was they have a list of prospects that they are using FMG’s emails or through our do it for me program to send emails every single week to prospects. Right? So they’re talking about, in this particular case, it’s a list of business owner prospects. So they’re sending them emails about anything business owners might be interested in when it comes to succession planning, tax strategy, things like that.
And then they invited everybody on that prospect list to this event.
And so they’re already been dripping educational content on them through FMG.
They’ve, you know, built up that trust and that relationship. They invite them to this. The people come, and then they end up with two new clients with, you know, millions of dollars, being moved over. So such a great example, though, of how you can have a list of prospects that you’re already dripping on and then hosting an in person event where you’re actually delivering all that same information you’ve been emailing them, but just in person is when it really takes it to the next level. Have any of you had a situation like that where you had a list of prospects and you’re sending them emails, dripping on them for a while, and then you hosted an event where you finally met them in person or maybe met them in person for the second time and that’s what led to the conversion?
I would love to know. So tell us in the chat. Has that ever a similar situation, ever happened to you.
Okay. So let’s talk about specific event ideas that make a really easy yes, and we’ve actually are super excited because we put together for all of you who registered our summer events toolkit.
So you’re all gonna get this, and as you can see, there’s actual links to each one of them. So for these different events, you are able to get an entire kit that is gonna show you a checklist, a timeline of, like, how far in advance do I need to start emailing people or inviting people, What do I need to do to set up the event? If it’s an in person event that might require food, we have information about, like, catering.
If you need to think about leave behinds, we’ve got that in there for you. So you’re all gonna get that, and, hopefully, it will make it really, really easy to throw one of these events, whether it’s the summer or in the fall, going forward in the future. So we put a lot of time in this. I hope you all are able to use it.
But the first thing that we wanted to think you and an idea for is any kind of an event where you can really engage the larger family of the client. Right? So these are just some headlines. I’m sure many of you have seen these in the news before where so many studies have shown that when money is passing hands in families, often the people who it’s getting passed to do not retain the same adviser because they don’t have a relationship with that person. And so a lot this first event idea or in some of these other event ideas are really focused on how can we stay connected to not just the main client, but their larger family. And McKinsey actually found that for ultra high net worth families, they want to be introducing their children or their grandchildren, to the adviser and having the adviser establish relationship basically starting at eighteen years old. They want the adviser to be engaging with them, whether it’s an email, whether it’s an in person meeting.
And so, obviously, everybody doesn’t have the capacity to do tons of one on one meetings, but what are some ways that you can do that? So this, first idea is about current scams and how to recognize them. Have any of you gotten a text message like this, either that you have an overdue, toll? That toll is a big one.
Right? Like, hey. You have an unpaid toll, or you have an outstanding ticket. I think a lot of people have gotten enough of the toll one that we don’t believe that one, but this was a new one I just got, saying that I had a outstanding traffic ticket.
And when you first look at it, right, it looks pretty legit. I mean, they’ve got the state administrative code. They’ve got this government website, And there’s so many people. Okay.
Everybody in the chat is saying yes to the fake tolls. One hundred percent. So but sadly, there’s a lot of people that do not know that this is a thing still. Or maybe they they know about the tolls one, but they don’t know about this version here where you think it looks like it’s coming from the Department of Motor Vehicles.
There’s this other situation that happened. I have this this article here from CNN where did anybody hear this story? This gentleman, in China was contacted by what he thought was the c team of his company and told to transfer twenty five million dollars to this account. And he didn’t believe it, and he’s like, no.
And he responded back, like, you know, I’m not gonna transfer any money unless we have an in person meeting. But little did he know that the people he was emailing back had kinda hacked into the email system and were emailing from the CEO’s email. And when he said we need to have a meeting, they were like, okay. Great.
Let’s hop on a video call. And they had a deep fake AI avatar meet with him. So it looked like the CEO, it sounded like his voice, and this poor worker ended up transferring twenty five million dollars because he thought he just had a video meeting with the CEO.
So I think, again, we’re just seeing gonna see more and more of this with AI. And so having an event where it really teaches people how to spot a scam, things like how to have an AI safe word, or, I’m sorry, just a safe word in case, you know, you get a phone call from somebody that sounds like a family member or looks like a family member.
These, especially right now, I think are, a, would get amazing attendance because everybody is dealing with it, and we don’t really know how to spot it. And, also, it just repositions you as somebody who is able to say, you know, I’m not just talking about investment management. I’m not just talking about financial planning. It’s your whole financial life, including scams that might target your finances.
So this is just an example of a landing page one of our clients at FMG set up about cybersecurity made simple.
And they basically are saying, you know, we’re we want you to be able to recognize scams before it’s too late. How can you safeguard your identity?
And they’re with LPL, so they had the cybersecurity analyst from LPL help them host it. They are hosting this one via Zoom, but this would be a great in person one as well.
But, again, depending on your angle of who you work with, if you’re working with retirees or pre retirees, it might be a specific workshop about scams targeting seniors, and then you can invite their adult children so that they’re able to also speak to their parents or be aware of what their parents might face.
We’ve had a lot of firms who’ve reached out reached out to the local FBI office in their area and asked if they would work with them to host one. And it doesn’t work for every location, obviously, but a lot of them have said yes.
So that’s always an idea.
If you have certain systems systems that you recommend to clients on how to store sensitive documents, having a safe password, that makes a fantastic leave behind, or something you can email to them and encourage them to email with their or share with their network. Right? So when we think about client referrals, of course, someone can just refer you. But if you are saying, here’s this amazing resource I put together, feel free to share it with any friends or family, that is something that, you know, is very shareable and works really, really well to get in front of new faces as as well. Mark Davies just said, we have done a scam event along with the Shred It as a financial security day. Love that idea for an in person event. And Amy said we use our local FBI office to hold elder fraud seminars for us.
Amazing. Amy, did you just contact them out of the blue? And, do you have, do you do it in person at their office and you’re the guest speaker, or do they come to you?
Tell us more about that because I think a lot of people are interested in that. Nick is saying, what do you think an average price per person is good for an event? For event like this, I would not charge for it. I don’t know about you, Amy, or others who’ve hosted them. This would be free for clients and encourage clients to bring other people who might wanna work with you.
I would not charge for an event like this. For other kinds, it it might be different depending on the event and the overhead. Amy said that that they do it for free, and that they have the FBI agent come to them to present to their clients and prospects. Jewel also said we’ve had the FBI do a couple of seminars with us. We reached out to the local office and get the right agent depending on the topic. So, you know, I I think for a lot of these FBI agents as well, right, like, they’re often trying to be more proactive instead of reactive.
They deal with a lot of times people once it’s already happened. So if they can get the word out behooves them as well. So I think if you just ask, you’d be surprised, at being able to get a yes. So event idea, that was event idea number one. The second one, and this one is all the details again in that, guide that I mentioned, is to host a family picture day with a professional photographer. So switching gears a little from more educational true value that you can provide to something that’s more feel good, get you in front of, you know, your clients, and even, again, more members of the family.
Has anyone here done this? Hired a photographer and hosted a picture event. So the one I have as an example here, this adviser does it, for Christmas photoshoots at the beginning of December. However, as a mom of three, I do think it’s great if you can do it earlier in the year because we all want to get our Christmas card photos done so that we can mail them all out. Everybody does these photo cards now. So I think the earlier you can do it, the better in the fall.
Oh, Allison said we’re doing this in October. Amazing.
So the idea here is sending out an email and saying, hey. We know, you know, with the holidays coming up, so many people wanna get, you know, family photos or the take could be maybe it’s in the beginning of the summer, and you say, you know, are you desperately in need of updated family photos with your whole gang? We would love to help you with that as a thank you to our clients. We’ve hired this local photographer. She’s coming to this park. Here’s the sign up genius.
Pick a twenty minute slot. We’ve paid her photographer fee, and you all will get one free photo, and then you can buy any additional photos that you want. Right? However you wanna set it up.
But by encouraging clients to have multiple generations there and you’re getting the email addresses of everybody, then you can put all those new family members on different lists. Right? You’re meeting them in person. Maybe you’re meeting, one couple with kids that are in their thirties, and you’re working with their parents, and you learn a few things about what they like and don’t like, and you can add them to your CRM in different groups. Maybe they’re, you know, there’s cousins or grandparents, whoever it is. It’s just such a great way to meet multiple generations of the families.
One tip I will say is to make sure that you have stain free snacks and water on hand. So not having drinks that someone’s gonna accidentally spill all over their clothes right before a picture or stain their teeth.
And for little kids, sticky fingers and dirty hands. You know, we don’t wanna serve fudge brownies. We wanna have, like, animal cookies. So think about that when you’re thinking about what to serve.
Christopher Hall just asked a great question. How many or I’m sorry. How many events do most offices do per year? I have found working with hundreds and even thousands of advisers in a year that it really does vary, depending on we’ve got a lot of firms that they’re doing a webinar every single month and a in person client appreciation event twice a year and a prospecting in person event once a quarter. So they were, like, rapid fire, and then we have other people who maybe do one client appreciation event a year, and that’s it. So it really, really does depend.
I think if you’re gonna host monthly events that are webinars, that is a lot easier to do than if you’re gonna do an in person event multiple times a year. You really have to have someone on your staff to play point for that. Let’s look at what everyone’s saying. Gina said our office does about two to five events.
Jewel said we average eight in person events of all kinds per year, some community events and some climate. Wow, Jewel. Maybe you should be leading this webinar. That’s amazing.
Are you the point person for that? And, what do you use to collect your registrations for all of those different events? We’d love to know.
How can you do in person events when you have clients spread out all over the country?
Great question, Alan. Does anybody else have tips for that? There is a firm I can think of. They have three main hubs, one in California, one in New York, and one in Florida, and they host a wine event in all three locations. So they have three different events in those three locations.
So let’s see if anybody else has any other tips. Tom says he offers health webinar events remotely.
Chelsea said she does virtual events for out of state clients’ cooking nights.
Oh, that’s interesting. So you have somebody come on screen. Everybody can be there, and they teach them do they send them in the mail, like, a box with the ingredients? Because we actually had a virtual event we did with our FMG marketing team where they sent you all the ingredients in a box to make different kinds of cocktails, and then there was a mixologist who taught us how to put them together. It was really, really fun.
They sent everything but the alcohol. So we had to, like, have the gin or the vodka ready, but all the other fun ingredients, they sent us in a box. So that was really, really cool.
Tequila or wine tasting online event.
Oh, Jewel said she has twenty years of event planning experience and uses FMG, all of the events in FMG. Amazing. So I’m gonna show you how to do that in our FMG event tool here in just a second. So if anyone has specific questions or if they’re using FMG or not and you wanna see something specific about that, let us let us know. You guys are amazing.
Bruce said we did an online cooking event for clients. We made dumplings ahead of Lunar New Year, and it was fun having everyone on screen cooking together. I think anytime you could do those events where they send you the kit in the box ahead of time and then everybody joins, and you have an expert teaching, I mean, so, so, so fun, and people love that. If you are hosting any in person events, where you have multiple generations of families, there is a great leave behind we have for all of you in the FMG downloadables.
So this is our family financial, downloadable called Family Wealth Conversations, and it’s just a great PDF you can print out. And it talks about, you know, with your family, what are some of your main values that you wanna focus on? Do you have a family mission statement?
You know, what’s kind of financial lessons maybe grandparents can share with kids about big mistakes they’ve made? Or, you know, you can see over here just, like, describe a time that you felt fortunate. Describe a time that persistence and effort paid off. So it’s such a great way for your family members to share stories, to talk about what wealth means to them, what legacy looks like.
And this, again, is in the FMG downloadable section in our content library. I’ll show you that here. And it’s such a great leave behind if you’re having any kind of event, you know, where you’re inviting families to be there, whether it’s at the baseball game or, you know, a photographer event. What I suggest doing is printing off some and handing them out, and then it’s such a great excuse to say to everybody, hey. Write your email down, and we’ll email this to you too because we know you don’t just want the paper copy. And you can print out as many as you want.
So let me just switch gears here for a second.
And okay.
Oh, I’m gonna pull up the FMG tool.
And then stay tuned, and we’re gonna talk next about promoting your event and how to use LinkedIn to find and invite new people. But if you come into FMG, in the, dashboard, this is what you’ll see. Right? So you’re in the content library.
You’ll see all these different things. If you wanna find that download, by the way, about family wealth conversations, you click this little downloadable section. You could see we have over two hundred different downloadables, that you can peruse. Some of them are things you can add to your website.
Others are things like that family wealth conversation. So some of them are Instagram, different posts. So that’s where you can find all the downloads, but let’s just look at the events tab. So we have some premade events, that people will use, advisers on our platform will use right out of out of the gate, but we also allow you to make your own events.
Right? So you can come up here, click create new event. I made one for today talking about scams because it’s on my brain, financial scam seniors should should know about. So you can put your description here in the list.
If you want to have a certain image that you’re showing up at the top, you could update the image, remove. What’s the start and end time, what time zone are you in. And then if it’s going to be virtual versus in person, if it’s in person, you’re gonna put the location here. If it’s not in person and it’s gonna be virtual, you’re gonna put a link to, you know, the Zoom or whatever virtual platform that you’re using.
And you can also decide whether you want guests to be allowed to register, which in a lot of cases, if we’re trying to generate leads, yes, we want people to bring a guest.
And you could also limit the number of sign ups. So if it is in person and you only have, you know, twenty slots available, once you hit that max, it will stop it, which I do love.
And then you can also include details for the people once they’ve registered. So this could be something like, you know, thanks. We can’t wait to see you on the, twenty ninth. And then more information you should know for the event. You can list out whatever other info they need once they’ve already registered. So that is a another nice feature just for people, right, specifically that, are coming.
Then there’s this whole, oh, right here. Use custom registration link. So there’s a a register button on every page. And if you want to have a specific link excuse me.
That would be, you know, putting your Zoom link here. So if this is not in person and they’re going to actually it’s gonna be a Zoom webinar, things like that, that’s where you would put that link. So you might wanna say, okay. Well, what does this page look like?
You can click this preview button, and it’s gonna take you to what it looks like. So you can see I have my website branding. I have my logo. I have all the different pages of my website, the date and the time, all listed right here.
And once I’m ready to go live, there will be a little button to say register, and then I can either have the Zoom link or just collect the registrations directly on this page, if it’s in person. So you can really, really design this however you want. If you had a Canva image that you made, you could put that there. If you have photos from previous events, whatever you want to do to really make it, you know, look great and make it specific, for you.
But let’s say you think, you know, I’d really love to deliver an educational webinar, but I don’t really know what to talk about. We have these premade premade events as well that you can use. So the tax strategies presentation is a popular one, the state of the markets.
And with any of these, it actually gives you the copy. Right? So we talked about what will you expect, what will you get out of it. We’ve listed that all out for you. We give you the slide deck, that has all the images, the prompts, what you’ll talk about. So if you’d like to get started hosting some webinars and more educational events, but you don’t really know where to start, these, premade ones are a great place to start.
Okay. Let me go back to our page here and see what kind of, questions that we’ve gotten. And, oh, I did just wanna mention.
So in our do it for me program as well, which is a premium tier service that we offer where you’re paired with a concierge on our team that actually goes into our system and will help you deploy your contents, you know, do your social media posts, and you get exclusive content. We also, every single month, have a event or different marketing tip. And when you click on this, it will give you everything you need for that event. So in this case, it’s host a focus on what matters, social event, an evening to celebrate family, capture memories.
And so in this one, it’s telling you, that you’re gonna take family portraits. You’re gonna do a time capsule activity, which our CMO, Susan Theater, did this with her daughters, ten or fifteen years ago, and they just opened it up and had so much fun. So if you, you know, know clients are gonna be there with grandkids or parents of young chill children, it’s such a fun idea to have them create a time capsule that, you know, they can open up years later. But, again, in this program, we are giving you exactly what to say in your email, what exactly to offer every family member, how it all works, the prompts for the time cast capsule, excuse me, when people arrive, what are some different talking points.
Welcome, everyone. We’re so glad to have you here. One of the values we hold close here at Russell Investments is that it money isn’t just the goal living our lives are. So we’ve really given you everything you need to make this event a success.
You obviously will make it your own, but this is all part of our do it for me program. So depending on, again, how you are working with FMG, we have different levels, whether you want to just use our technology and host events and use our event kit or you want a lot more guidance. You want the emails. You want us to give you everything you need other than showing up at the event and running it for you.
So whether you’re just interested in learning more about our event tools and how our team can support you in your marketing or more about our do it for me program. I’m gonna put up a quick poll. And if you are interested in hearing more about how we can help you with that, just say yes, please, and we will prioritize following up with you right after. If not, just hold tight for one second, and we are gonna talk next about how to promote your event, again, whether you’re using FMG or not, using LinkedIn, social media, and email to get the most attendees.
But, again, if you wanna learn more about working with F and G on your events and your overall marketing, just say yes, please, and we can share more about all the different ways we can support you. Awesome.
And let’s see what questions we’ve got, coming in here.
Oh, Jules so sweet. She said do it for me is a game changer. I suggest looking into it if you’re not yet using it. Thank you so much.
And I think we can close the the poll now, Hannah.
We got another question asking about, are these only available in the do it for me program?
So you’re all gonna get today three of our very detailed instructions on summer events as free takeaways.
But if you’re just an FMG subscriber, you get in if you’re a premium subscriber, you have all the event tools for you, but not the full detailed, checklist and what to say when people arrive and what the email copy should say.
That is for the premium I’m sorry. That’s for the do it for me program. The premium subscribers get the event toolkit that I was showing you on the platform. So, again, we can walk through the differences with you.
Okay. How easy is it to take one of the downloadables and add it to our website? Really, really easy. I’m sorry I don’t have time to show you that today, but, if you contact our support team, Daniel, a hundred percent, they will walk you through that.
And I agree. So many people are saying there are so many great ideas in the comments box. So what I’ll ask my team to do afterwards, just to summarize, is we’ll look through all these again and pull out some of the best ones, and we can turn it into a blog post about great client event ideas and prospect ideas. And we will share it with all of you as well if you guys want it. So that way, you don’t have to comb through the comments. We can just pull out, the best ones for you. Give us a thumbs up if you think that’s a good idea to compile all of your great ideas from the comments.
Okay.
So last event idea I wanna show you, and then we’re gonna talk promotion, quickly is just this antique appraisal event. So I don’t know if any of you have done this before.
I was invited to one, and I was so excited because I had something my grandmother had left behind, that I was always curious about if it was worth anything because it said Tiffany on it. It ended up only being worth fifty dollars, but there was a great story behind it. And I love antique roadshows, so it was so fun. But, basically, just having a, you know, appraiser come in and letting people bring in one or two, antiques or family heirlooms, learning about them and having them appraise is such a fun idea. So that was event idea number three. And, again, we have a ton of information in that giveaway you’re all gonna get of how to invite people to it, what to say when they show up, how to find an appraiser, all that good stuff. So I already shown you how to use FMG’s tool, so now we’re gonna talk about promotion.
For all of you listening in, do you struggle to get good attendance at your events with leads and clients, just clients, just leads, both? Let us know, which one you struggle with. And, if if anybody else is listening in and they used to be in your shoes and now they’ve gotten over that hump, what did you do to really increase attendance?
Okay. Clients always show up, never prospects. Okay. So that is very, a common thing. So first things first is making sure that your event registration page is one that people will want to sign up for.
So I just showed you in the last example using the FMG dashboard where to add everything in. And earlier on, we talked about starting with the pain points, giving social proof, and then telling them what they’re going to get out of it. So that’s really important, but it also is important to make it visually appealing. So if you have no photos, your conversion rate of the people saying yes is usually a lot lower.
So whether you wanna just add photos from a previous event or you have pictures of your speakers or you go into Canva and you use some different images, Canva is a free tool to create images that we have an integration with at FMG in our platform. All of those things will really, really, really help. And the other thing is how you email. So remember at the beginning of this, I asked, how did you hear about this?
And most people said it was from email. So what we find is that the best, you know, to get optimal email or, I’m sorry, optimal attendance is to send three emails.
So the first email a week before, then the day before, then the hour before. Now this is for webinars. This is what we do for webinars. If it’s an in person event, you probably wanna send the first email four to six weeks out because, obviously, people need to plan to be there in person.
The idea, though, is that sending just one email invitation out is not going to be enough, and, optimally, you want to send three. So once somebody registered, you can take them off the list and not keep emailing them to remind them.
But you you can’t just do it once. It needs to be more than once because sometimes people see it, they don’t sign up right away, then they forget about it. Right? So this is really the optimal is to have at least three.
And I’ve shared this tip before, but a really, interesting kind of behavioral psychology way to get more people to sign up for anything is to send out the first email and then send a follow-up email, maybe a day, couple days, week later, depending on your cadence, where you say, we’re getting so many people asking if they can bring friends or family to this event, and we absolutely wanna accommodate as many people as we can so you can all bring, and then choose a number, three or four people. Right? This makes it sound really exclusive. Like, we have limited seats, but we’re going to allow you.
You can each pick a certain number of people. And for the people who hadn’t even really thought about bringing friends or family, they’ll see see it as a benefit. Right? So this is a great kind of behavioral psychology tool to use, to help get even more people to think about bringing a friend or a family.
And if you don’t have a big email list already, which raise your hand if that’s you. Like, you don’t have a lot of prospects on your lead list, what can you do? So there’s a few different things. You could partner with somebody who’s an estate planning attorney or a CPA or a Medicare expert and co present, cohost, and have them invite their list, you invite your list, so you tap into each other.
So that’s one idea. Another is to use LinkedIn to invite people, and that’s what I’m gonna show you next. So let’s pull up LinkedIn. And by the way, if we’re not connected on LinkedIn, it’s Samantha c Russell.
I’d love to connect with you all, and feel free to, send me a request, follow along. I try to share a tip almost every day that will help you market better.
So we’ve set up an event here, and you can all do this as well. So if you have a, your business page, right, you’re going to go to your business page, and then you can see here under, create.
You can say, what is it that you wanna create? I wanna create a new event, so I’m gonna click that. And it’s gonna allow me to upload a cover image so I can use Canva here. Is it an online event? Is it in person?
If it’s an external link. Right? So we’re gonna collect registrants via Zoom. That’s where we would click that.
What is it called?
And then with the start date, the start time. So we’re gonna put all the information in there. Once we’ve got that, I’m gonna discard that because I already have my event set up. It will be in our events tab.
So oh, there we go. Right there. We’re gonna click events on the up on the left hand side. We can see all of our past events and our upcoming events.
So what I love about this is once we’ve got our event set up, we can invite panelists so people can see exactly who’s the panelist. We can invite other attendees to come. And then under here, under share, we can actually directly on LinkedIn invite people even if we don’t have their email address. Right?
So we’re gonna click invite, and now it’s gonna pull up everybody who is connections, you know, following us, all of that, great all of those great folks. We can also, you know, filter. So let’s say you’re really trying to work with physicians of different hospitals in your area. So you have a lot of physicians following your page or following you or that you’re connected with.
Under current company, you can choose those specific hospitals and only filter by that. So for us, obviously, we have a lot of financial advisers. If I just choose LPL, I’ll see all the LPL advisers here in this list. So, again, that’s one way to filter.
You can also filter by, locations. So if you want to let me reset that.
It doesn’t wanna cooperate everybody, so we’ll start over.
You can also look at locations. So do I just wanna look at the people, that are in California or New York, right, things like that, or maybe what schools that they went to or what industry that they’re in. So you can really, really tailor. And then once you’ve chosen the specific people, you can either bulk invite.
Right? So I can click all of them, and it’s gonna show me that I’m gonna invite all one hundred people, or I can select specific people. And when we say we’re inviting them, all it’s going to do is on LinkedIn, it’s going to send them a message saying you’ve been invited to Samantha Russell’s event. Make your event an easy yes.
So it it’s not sending them an email. It’s going to invite them via LinkedIn.
Right? Because we don’t have their email necessarily. We’re sending the invite through LinkedIn. Got a great question asking, do you need sales navigator to do this? No.
You do not. You, can do it through the free version. And Claire just gave a great tip, a compliance reminder to make sure you check with your broker dealer if you can use LinkedIn events. Great, great, great reminder.
So let’s say, though, that you just have specific people that you wanna invite. You can also come down here under share, and you see this little, copy link or send in a message? We can click send in a message and just type in the name of a particular person that we want to invite. So let’s say I wanna invite Hannah Moore.
I click that, and you can see here that it says f FMG is hosting make your event an easy yes. Make sure to attend. I can change that to say anything that I want.
You know, whatever it is. And then when I send that message, she is going to get a link or I’m sorry. She’s gonna see the message and, right, it’s got the link here, and so it is just going to take her to this events page where she can sign up. She can say, yes.
I’m attending, all that good stuff. So this is just such a fantastic way, again, to really filter and find people that are your perfect target audience and invite them to your event without having their email address. So if you remember in the very beginning, I talked about my friend Dan with, who uses webinars every single month as a lead gen tool, and he always sets them up on LinkedIn. He’s targeting Microsoft and other tech companies, and so he can go in, search for those particular folks, and then invite them to his event.
Okay.
So hopefully, that helps you think about promotion in a little bit of a different way.
I have tips again about this in the slide deck that you’ll all be sent.
But, again, this is just another example of that quartet wealth, and you can still do this whether it’s in person or a webinar. You just wanna make sure you set up a LinkedIn event for each individual event that you have.
So one other idea that really works well, I just did this for this event, is when you want to, promote something, start by talking about the problem just like we always talk about. So here, I used to host events and never got real leads from them, and still I started doing these four things. Then I talk about what they are, but then at the end, say comment whatever, and I’ll send you the link to join us for our upcoming event where we’re talking about this. So maybe it’s I never used to, or I had so many clients that could never say it for retirement the way they wanted because of these things, but these are the things we worked on with them.
And I’m gonna be teaching it all in this upcoming event, comment retirement, and we’ll send you the link. The reason this works is that the more comments you get on your post, the more people outside of your first degree network have the opportunity to see it, and every single comment is gonna get way more eyeballs. So rather than just posting the link in your post itself, people have to leave a comment to get the link, and that really, really amplifies the promotion.
Does that make sense to everyone, hopefully?
Hopefully, there’s no questions about that.
Okay. We are really at the top of the hour here.
I hope that that was really helpful. I did have some tips in here about what to do after the event, to make sure you get the most out of it. But since we’re not gonna have a ton of time to go over that and they are in the slide deck, so you’ll just, you know, quickly wanna make sure that if you are if there is a video element, you edit the video, and then you wanna add a recap of the event, whether it’s in person or a webinar to your website. So if it’s an in person event, you wanna put photos, you wanna put video.
If it was a webinar, put the replay. And then everybody who came, you’ll send an email saying thanks for coming. Here’s what we talked about. Here’s a link to my calendar if you would like to learn more.
Right? We wanna make sure we have that strong call to action. For everybody who registered but did not attend, you wanna have a separate email that says, here’s what you missed. And give them the top talking points and say, you know, since you weren’t able to come, I’d be happy to go over this one on one with you in person.
Right? So that’s a great way to get that meeting, with somebody who wasn’t able to attend live. And then, of course, if it is you have any photos, any videos from the event in person or virtual, repurpose them, post them on social media, get more bang for your buck to repurpose, that content. So if you would like help to start generating leads with webinars and events, we would love to work with you on this.
You could email our team marketing at f m g, or you can book a twenty minute consult directly through this.
But thank you to all of you who shared so many great ideas in the comments today about how you’re using events.
I hope that you found this helpful. If you did, if you found some value in it, even the tiniest nugget, let us know in the chat because we look for your direct feedback. If you feel like I’ve heard all this before, there was something new, tell us that too. We do not we really, really want a constructive feedback and criticism.
We wanna make it a good use of everyone’s time. So, please give us some feedback, and we will compile all of the great tips that were in the chat. You all did such a great job sharing, and we will turn that into another leave behind for you all of just tips that you’ve all shared. You can bet bet your top dollar that will repurpose that into some social posts and a blog post for all of you.
Okay. Great. Everybody is saying that they found at least one nugget. That’s always our goal to give you something that you can implement right away. So, Jewel, I need to send you a message. I think we need to have you on a future webinar talking about how you manage all these events.
Love what you’re doing. So thank you. Thank you. I hope everybody has a great rest of the week and weekend. And if you go over to our website, you can sign up for our next webinar, which is coming up all about our new AI tools that we just released, to help you market better, and that will be coming up in July. So look for the invite for that. Thanks, everybody.