How To Make The Most Out Of Your Speaking Engagements

This article is not about how to do a great presentation, it’s about building a relationship with your audience after your speaking engagement.

Have you ever experienced this problem?

Your audience gets pumped by your presentation, people in the audience say they loved your presentation, you exchange business cards, they go home and after a few days your presentation is forgotten.  No calls, no inquiries.

This article will show you how to prevent that from happening.

It all comes down to planning and determining what you are trying to accomplish. Is your goal to:

• • Raise awareness about your products, services or company?
  • Get more people to consider your products or services?
  • Get more speaking engagements?
  • Promote yourself?
  • Grow your email list?
  • Generate more consultations?

When my clients are about to do speaking engagements we go over the following questions:

• What actions do you want the audience to take as a result of your presentation?
• How are you going to engage with them AFTER your presentation.
• Can you use this event to build your marketing assets to establish yourself as an authority?
  • Are you able to get video or audio recordings of the event and images of your speaking engagement to establish yourself as an authority and share with your existing followers.

As well, in preparation for their speaking engagement, I do the following:

• • Have the client insert their image, contact information & URL to their giveaway/ lead magnet on every slide of their presentation.
  • Determine how we can get the most contacts in their email list so they can keep building a relationship with these contacts AFTER the presentation.
  • Figure out the most frictionless way to collect contact information, such as by:
    • Having the organizer share the website URL with people who registered for the event at a particular moment in the presentation.
    • Creating an easily typed link.
      • Use a shortlink(e.g. bit.ly) or
      • Buy a website url that can be easily typed. This allows your website visitors to be redirected to the appropriate landing page.
        • For example: Let’s say you are doing a TED Talk and your presentation topic is about productivity. Instead of having the audience type “cgdigitalmarketing.com/freedownload” I can ask them to type in “cgdm.com/free” which will take them to “cgdigitalmarketing.com/freedownload?utm_source=CES&utm_medium=presentation&utm_content=productivity” to fill out the contact information. The portion of the url after the ? can be used for tracking and reporting in Google Analytics to determine how many people in the audience actually visited your landing page as a result of your presentation.
    • Creating a QR Code that the audience can scan with their mobile phones and they will automatically be taken to the landing page on your website.

• • • Creating a FB Messenger code that allows the audience to start a conversation with your FB Messenger Bot.

• • Make sure the content is a great match for the audience.
  • Create a promotion or giveaway (lead magnet) that entices their audience to give their contact information
  • Design a landing page that visitors can easily fill out.
  • Create an email sequence / email drip campaign that their  audience will want to read and find highly relevant in order to keep my client top of mind days after the event.
  • Determine what offers to insert in the email sequence.
  • Have push notifications set up on your website or landing page so that when you publish new content the visitors who subscribed get notified.
  • Have the necessary tracking pixels (Facebook, Google Analytics) set up to determine how many people visited your website as a result of your presentation & how many filled out their contact information. Another benefit is that you can target these warm leads with relevant ads via Facebook, Google, etc.

With the emails collected, you can now:

• Keep engaging them with highly relevant content.
• Make subscribers aware of any upcoming promotions, events, products, etc.
• Upload the contact list to Facebook and advertise to them.
• Create a lookalike audience based on the emails you collected and advertise to to a bigger audience.
• Upload the contacts to LinkedIn and connect with them.
• Depending on your niche, you can do a lot more …….