Market, Scale, Grow: Facebook Ad Marketing Strategy for Teacherpreneurs

198 | Summit Success Series: Backwards Planning The Marketing Plan For Your Summit

• Jenzaia • Episode 198

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Are you planning on hosting a summit this summer? Come join me as I walk through a comprehensive timeline to follow when planning an online summit.  By working backward from your kickoff date, you can ensure maximum success with your marketing strategy!


In this episode, we chat about...
✨ The most important steps to take from 3+ months out to the day before your summit

✨ How to incorporate the three essential summit marketing facets into your timeline
✨ How to create a three-phase paid advertising strategy to maximize your registrations and VIP ticket sales.

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Speaker 1:

Hello, hello, I am Jen Zaya. I'm your host. This is a Saturday strategy session and we are talking about the timeline for your summit. So if you are hosting a summit, then we're going to work our way backwards to figure out how we can ensure that you are set up for the best success. If you're new around here, I'm a Facebook ad strategist. I help teacher, business owners and mompreneurs run Facebook ads to grow their email lists with lead magnets and through live events such as summits. I really love working with summit hosts to run their events, and so this is something that I do quite frequently and I really enjoy. So we're going to jump in. But first, if you didn't listen to last week's episode, I talked about the three different facets of a marketing plan, and I want you to go back and listen to that first so that you have a bit of a better idea of what I'm talking about when I say organic marketing and affiliate marketing, and then, of course, the paid marketing piece. Those are the three facets. I'm going to be referring to them and, yeah, if you want that extra detail, then last week's episode is the episode for you. So the first piece of information that you need is your kickoff date? When are you starting the summit?

Speaker 1:

Some summits have a kickoff date where there's some sort of event or big speaker kind of moment or just a social activity on, like the Friday night, but there's no actual breakout rooms, none of the smaller speakers are happening, none of the presentations are happening on that first night. It's just kind of like a welcome call get to know the host, make everyone feel welcome. Sometimes there's a Q&A, sometimes the host does a presentation but there's no presentations from any of the other speakers. Other times the kickoff day would be the first day of the summit and there are speakers that are happening. So I find that the first one, where there's a kickoff day without speakers, is pretty common if it's a two-day summit over a weekend. So they would do a Friday night kickoff and then Saturday all-day speakers, sunday all-day speakers. And then I find the second option, where there's not a kickoff day per se, more common when it's a bit of a longer event that runs in the week. So let's just say it's a five-day summit that starts on Monday and goes until Friday. There wouldn't be like a kickoff there. There probably would be a kickoff event where the host does something, but it's going to be in the morning, followed by a whole day of speakers and, honestly, it doesn't really matter which way your event is happening. You just need to know your kickoff date, because everything runs around when the summit is starting.

Speaker 1:

So let's talk through organic content first, then we would talk about affiliates and then we'll talk about paid marketing. So your organic marketing is actually starting months and months and months ahead. I would say at least three months before your summit starts. You want to be ensuring that you're showing up regularly through email, long form content, social media. Wherever it is that you're deciding that you want to show up. You're there regularly, which means at least once a week for something like email and long form content, and then three or four times a week for social media. You also are going to be wanting to build your email list at this time. So, organically, you're going to do that by posting on social media, maybe using Pinterest, getting your lead magnet out there, talking about it in your long form content, really giving people a reason to get on your email list, so that they are there three months before the summit, which gives them plenty of time to warm up to you, really get to know you and feel like they're part of a community and want to go to the summit. That's really important. You want people who want to be at the summit About two months before you're really going to up the amount of summit related content if it's not a main focus of yours already.

Speaker 1:

So your summit may be your main focus already, but it could be one of your like sub pillars and so if it were more of a sub pillar of yours, then you might want to beef up the amount of content that you're putting out based on that specific content pillar about two months out, so that once you start registrations then people are already in that mindset and thinking about you as the expert on that content. About six weeks out, I would be hosting some sort of live event, a mini event, a mini event, so something like a webinar, a workshop, um, like something smaller, and it doesn't need to have a launch or a sales period attached to it. So I know webinars typically are sales events, but you could just host more of an informational, teaching kind of webinar. I've seen vision board parties done. I've seen planning sessions, some sort of event that gets your people out Huge value and makes people feel more connected to you and, again, trusting you as the expert. A really big piece here in the weeks and months leading up to your summit is you want to be the expert that people are turning to for your topic. Four or five weeks out. That's when you're going to really start talking about the summit, the talking about when it's coming. Save the date, get on a wait list, some sort of early bird talking about an early bird either benefit or bonus or something like that and your content at this point, four weeks out, is going to be highly, highly targeted, all about the summit, so that again, people know that you're're the expert, you're the one to turn to. I just thought of it. I probably should have said it earlier.

Speaker 1:

This is very, very, very specific for an online summit. If you're hosting an in-person event, you need to start selling tickets for that in-person event nine to twelve months ahead of time to ensure that it sells out. Because of the higher costs that are involved of renting a space, feeding people, gift bags, like all of those pieces of the puzzle you need to start selling tickets significantly beforehand. It also gives people a chance to book travel and accommodations and make sure that they are able to actually make it to the event, whereas an online event, we don't open up registration until two weeks before, so usually about 10 to 14 days. I've definitely worked with people who open registration 21 days, so that's three weeks out, and that's perfectly okay. Some people like to start promoting it themselves about three weeks out, and that's perfectly okay. Some people like to start promoting it themselves about three weeks out and then having their affiliate start promoting two weeks out. That's totally an option as well.

Speaker 1:

I would want everyone yourself, affiliates, your ads, everything running at least two weeks before the event. In those two weeks you're going to be talking about it constantly. I would say at least 75 to 80% of your content on social media emails, any long form content, is very, very summit focused. You can also, somewhere between like that four to six week mark, increase the amount of content you're putting out, specifically emails, sending out two emails a week to really get people like again, you're showing up in their inbox, showing up as that expert, really staying front of mind to those people, to your audience, the people who are already on your list. In that one to two weeks before the summit, you want to be showing up basically in people's inbox every single day, especially those people who haven't registered.

Speaker 1:

Anytime that you're showing up that frequently in someone's email, I highly recommend that you have a link at the very top of your email and if you don't want to do it there, then the bottom is okay too. But somewhere in your email that says sick of hearing about ABC Summit, click here to be removed from the summit emails. You'll still be continue and then like have a little blurb that says like you'll still continue to receive the weekly, regular weekly emails, but you won't hear anything about this. This specific summit, um, like the summit happening on march 25th or whatever it is, be very specific so that you could put them back in to the summit promotion email sequence the next time it rolls around, and then they'd have to opt out again. But I do highly recommend having that button so that if people like uh, jenze is so awesome, but she's showing up every day and it's just too much, and they can opt out without completely being removed from your email list. And if you don't want to be sending out emails every single day, then at least in the three days before making sure that you're hitting the people who have not registered yet, I always recommend that my clients tag people in the system as, like summit 2025. And if you're going to have more than one summit, summit March 2025 so that you have a very specific tag attached to every single summit and you can very clearly say, okay, well, this person went to my 2022 summit and my 2023 summit and my 2025 summit or whatever it might be Following the summit, sorry pause During the summit itself.

Speaker 1:

You want to send out an email every morning reminding people that the summit's happening, how they can register if they haven't registered, and a summary or an overview of the speakers that day so that they are reminded of it if they are already registered and, if they're not registered, that they can maybe see oh, look at who's presenting today. I really want to see that person's presentation that topic's of great interest to me, and then they can sign up. Following the summit. You're likely going into some sort of open cart and so you're going to be emailing and promoting that. You also have the option to turn your summit ever evergreen. The way you would do this is just basically take out any mention of dates, any mention of it being live, and making sure that it is clear that these are pre-recorded sessions. I do also recommend that if you're turning it to evergreen, it becomes a low ticket offer that people have to pay, even if it's just like $17 or $27. But after the summit has wrapped up, if they would like access to the content and they didn't sign up before, then it would be a paid purchase. But if you want, you can have it free after the summit as well. Maybe they get 24 hour access or whatever you feel like is right. And if you are going to be setting it up as an evergreen, then you would want some sort of email sequence attached to that and you can occasionally also bring it into your long form content social media posts to promote the summit again. So that is a pretty big overview of three months out, all the way to post summit, how you would organically be promoting.

Speaker 1:

The second facet of your promotion is your affiliates. These are typically going to be presenters, people who are creating presentations for your summit, people who are sponsoring the summit. They may or may not also be doing a presentation, but they can definitely sponsor it and you can also offer for participants to be affiliates or just like pretty much anyone can be an affiliate. Basically, all it means is that they're promoting it on your behalf and any ticket sales so there's for summits. My recommendation is that it's a free registration with a ticket, a vip upgrade on the back end, so someone who's an affiliate. If they promote the summit and then there's somebody who signs up using their link and buys a ticket, then they would get a percentage of that money whether it's 40 or 50 or 60 percent really depends on the host and what they choose to do and what they choose to do but a percentage of the sale is returned to the affiliate and that is like a financial incentive to get your presenters or other affiliates to be promoting it on your behalf.

Speaker 1:

So you want to ensure that presenters are aware that they can be an affiliate as soon as possible, potentially even in those initial conversations you're having before people are officially speakers and you want to get them signed up as affiliates as quickly as possible. You also are going to want to provide them with swipe files. So these are emails and social media captions as well as images that they can very easily use, encourage them to tweak it and change it so it matches their voice and their brand and the email sounds like it's actually coming from your presenter and not just a templated form that they're sending out, but you still want to provide them with the swipe file to make it as easy as possible for them to create these emails and the social media posts. More and more I'm seeing hosts requiring affiliates and requiring presenters to send out a certain number of emails and promote it on social media a certain number of times. So you may choose to do that, and whether it's a formal, contracted agreement or if it's just like agreement by like interactions, whether through email or that conversation you're having on zoom, is your choice. If it's more of that formal agreement or an informal one. But you may choose to have a specific requirement that you're asking presenters to do if they want to be an affiliate, and sometimes it's not even if you want to be an affiliate, it's just in general. If you're going to be presenting, the expectation is you are sharing this this number of times. If you don't provide the images and or this and not or and the swipe files, the copy that you, that people can use, it is going to be significantly harder for them to share and the higher ask it is, the more challenging it is for someone to do something, the less likely they are to do it. So you want to make this as easy as possible for your participants or, sorry, for your presenters, for the and any other affiliates, for them to share with their audience. And just a reminder to the presenters that it benefits them as much as it benefits you because of the financial piece that they're getting, but also the more people that are at the summit, the more people who register for the summit, the more exposure that they get, and them sharing with their audience and ensuring that everyone is sharing with their audiences will help. I don't know why I'm struggling with this so much, but ensuring all of your presenters share with their audiences will ensure that everyone has a more successful summit experience.

Speaker 1:

So you want to make sure that they're signed up as affiliates as soon as possible. You want to be doing that two, three months out. You want to make sure that they have those swipe files as soon as possible so that they're able to create those emails. You don't know who wants to work ahead, and if you're expecting them to send out two emails and you don't provide them with anything to send out until a week before the summit, then that's putting a lot of pressure on them to now send out two emails in one week, and they may not be comfortable doing that with their audience. They may want to send out one email a week before the summit and the second email would be like two weeks before the summit. Right, I probably should have said those in the opposite order, but sending out two emails a week apart from the summit. So you want to make sure that you have that available to them as quickly as possible and providing images with them in it and the topic that they're presenting on, as quickly as possible. Your affiliates should be able to promote the event at least two weeks before. I wouldn't want them to be promoting it any more than three weeks ahead, and definitely by two weeks. If you don't give them at least that 10 to 14 days to be promoting the event, then that really isn't enough time to get the word out as much as you would want anything more than three weeks. The people who sign up for the event, the attendees, are going to forget maybe not every single one of them, but many of them will be forgetting about this and so you want to be in that zone of far enough out that people can organize themselves and figure it out, but not so far out that they're going to forget about it and not care about it anymore, and so your affiliates are going to want to promote it all the way until that kickoff day. And then I have participated in summits where especially ones that are turned evergreen that sometimes the presenters will continue to promote the summit afterwards once it's turned evergreen, and then they would continue to have that financial benefit from continuing to get the word out.

Speaker 1:

The last facet of your marketing plan would be your paid ads. You're going to want to start the ads again two weeks out, maybe starting testing three weeks out. If you want to be testing images and ad copy and headlines, I personally use a three-day testing protocol where I test the headlines on one day, the images on one day, the ad copy on one day, and that is in the backwards order that I actually do it. So copy is first, images is second and headlines are last, but each day I test a different piece of the ads so that after three days we have a really good picture of yes, it's going to work, no, it's going like no. We need to rejigig any live event, especially one that's as big as a summit.

Speaker 1:

If you're running ads, you want to have more creative, more ad copy, more headlines ready to go in case things don't go well. Two weeks is not a very big promotion time and if it's taking a day or two days turnaround to get new images, to get new ad copy, to record new videos, whatever it is you might need to do, you're not going to be able to do that turnaround fast enough and you're going to lose precious time, and so you always want to have more things ready to go than you need. It's better to not use them but to have them than to need them and not have them. So about two weeks before is when you would start running the ads to get people on to the like into the registration into the summit. You're going to be wanting to run a mix of warm and cold audiences and to be getting that word out as it gets closer. You definitely want to have a 48 hour notice ad, a 24 hour notice ad, like last chance sign up and you can actually keep running the registration ads into the summit.

Speaker 1:

This depends on how long the summit is. If it's two days, so over a weekend, you probably want to keep running them on Saturday, but by Sunday it's a little bit late. If it's a five-day event, you could keep running them until day three, maybe even day four, but you want to make sure that people have sufficient time that they're able to watch the videos. So if your free pass only're able to watch the videos, so if your free pass only allows people to see the video on the day that it's released for 24 hours, then you want to take that in consideration. That people want, are going to need, to get the most possible out of it with the free pass. Maybe they have access to the videos for a week after. Maybe there's unlimited access to the videos with the free pass. Like it will all depend on what kind of access you're giving to those videos. With the free pass, I typically recommend running the continuing to run the ads until the middle of the summit, wherever that might be day three if it's a five-day summit, day one if it's a two-day summit, making like figuring that out and just making sure you don't want to run the ads all the way to the end of the summit or even beyond the summit unless, legitimately, there is still free registration available.

Speaker 1:

Let's go backwards a little bit more into what you'll be doing before the two weeks. So if you're doing this yourself, your timeline might be a little bit different. But if you're working with a Facebook ad strategist or an ads agency, likely they're going to want to have all the assets approved, like ready to go and approved at least a week before they're running. So they're going to be working on them weeks like five, six weeks out, and then in week four you're going to want to it will be the approval, so that week three from the kickoff day there could be any updates, changes, final revisions that need to be done and that they can be ready to go and start running two weeks out from the kickoff day. That means that you need to be planning the ads, the timeline, the content at least six weeks before the kickoff day. If you want to also be running ads even before that, if you want to also be running ads even before that, then you can start running list building lead generation ads at any time. Especially if you're going to be running ads to build your email list.

Speaker 1:

Those organic pieces that I talked about at the beginning of this episode are even more important. If you're adding people to your email list with ads, you need to make sure you're doing the best possible job, nurturing them with emails, showing up for them on your social media, because you need to have a real presence or they're going to forget about you, not read your emails and unsubscribe so much faster than people have organically found you. The churn rate, with people added on like through your email list, is definitely higher than organic. You need to be ready for that. But you're still going to definitely benefit from growing your email list with ads 3, 6, 12 months out from your summit. That's something that you probably want to be doing ongoing at all times.

Speaker 1:

So, for the ads because I kind of worked in a backwards, so more of a like forwards running timeline, three or more months out you're going to want to start list building ads, growing your email list, getting people on your list with enough time that you can nurture them, build the relationships and continue to show up for them as the summit gets closer. So at least three months out, you're going to start those list building ads. Six weeks out, you're going to host some sort of mini live event whether it's a webinar or a workshop or some sort of teaching event, a vision board party, something that is highly valuable and not a sales pitch at all so that you can show yourself as an expert At that six mark point. You're also in the process of planning the ad timeline and content. If you are working with somebody to do the ads for you, you should have contacted them like at least two weeks before that. So three, two or three months before your summit you want to figure out who you're working with for your summit. So three to two or three months before you find, figure out who you're going to be hiring to do your ads. Six weeks out out, who you're going to be hiring to do your ads. Six weeks out, we're in the planning phase of the ads. Five weeks out, the ads are being created, the ad copies being written, images are being done so that four weeks out from your summit, the ad assets can be approved. You can say, yes, this looks great. Or hey, we need to do these revisions, so that three weeks out, those revisions can be done and testing can start if necessary.

Speaker 1:

I do recommend testing if it's your first time hosting this summit. Sorry, it's the first time you're running ads for the summit. I don't usually recommend that you run ads the first time you run a summit. Wait until the second time so you've figured out exactly who your audience is, your messaging and how all of the tech pieces work, and then the second time you host the summit, then you can add ads in. If it's the first time you're running ads, you're going to want to do those three days of testing and that would be done in week three from the summit. Two weeks out from the summit, you go full force. Ads are running.

Speaker 1:

These are your registration ads, the ads for the VIP upsell. I do love running those ones. These are retargeting ads. Anyone who registered for the summit but didn't buy the VIP pass already. We want to be showing them ads to encourage them to upgrade to the VIP pass, showing them what they're going to get, why it's so valuable.

Speaker 1:

I don't start those until about two, maybe three days after the list building the registration ads have started, and the reason for that is retargeting ads. Well, any ad needs a large enough audience and typically the first day or two that the registration ads go live, there isn't going to be a large enough audience for the VIP retargeting ads to really do their job. So I like to wait a couple of days, let that audience of people who have registered for the summit build up a little bit and then we go into retargeting. Ads are going to run until the middle of the summit and then typically we would shut the registration ads off in the middle of the summit. The upgrade ads we would keep running through the summit and you can even continue running the upgrade ads after the summit, though I don't recommend selling multiple different things at once.

Speaker 1:

So if you're going into an open cart period after the summit, I would pause the VIP sales, focus on that, that open cart and then once your sales period for whatever you are promoting after the summit once. Once that's done, you can choose to turn those VIP ads back on and get the summit running on more of an evergreen way. So that is the timeline for your organic promotion, affiliate promotion and also paid advertisement. I really hope that this was helpful and that you're able to look at your kickoff date and then you can kind of figure out from there where you need to be. So thank you so much for joining me. I'll be back in your ear next Saturday with a brand new Saturday strategy session. Adios.