Before Your Summit: Paid Ads & Marketing Strategy to Maximize Your Virtual Summit

BYS 3 | Marketing Your Summit: An 8-Week Timeline

• Jenzaia • Episode 3

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The success of your virtual summit hinges on a strategic marketing approach that builds momentum at exactly the right times. As a Facebook ad strategist who's guided countless summit hosts to sold-out events, I'm pulling back the curtain on the precise marketing timeline that turns an ordinary summit into a registration powerhouse.

In this episode, we'll break down the eight-week marketing timeline for your upcoming summit, working backwards from the event to ensure a strategic approach and successful outcome. Reverse engineering your marketing plan allows you to build momentum, nurture your audience, and drive registrations effectively.


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Speaker 1:

Hello, this is episode three of Before your Summit. I'm your host, jenzea. I am a Facebook ad strategist and a lover of summits, and today we're going to be breaking down, week by week, your marketing timeline for your upcoming summit. So, as a teacher, I learned early in my career probably actually when I was still in teacher's college about reverse engineering your units by starting with the assessment and then planning out all of your lessons based on what you would be assessing, so that by the time you work through your unit, when you got to the assessment time, not only did you already know what the assessment was, you already knew that you had taught everything you need to because you had planned with that in mind. And so when I'm helping clients to plan out their marketing for any event, but specifically summits, I always like to work backwards and reverse engineer our success. So when I was creating this, I have a PDF download. It's in the show notes, you can find it there, or you can go to genzeademartelcom for slash eight week plan that's the number eight, and then week plan in letters and you can see you can download this PDF of exactly what I'm talking about going through the eight weeks from list growth to summit announcement, to our pre-launch registration and the actual summit itself.

Speaker 1:

And when I was creating this, I worked backwards. Now I'm going to go more in a chronological order. I'm going to start with when you're eight or more weeks out from your summit and then we're going to work week by week back from that. But, um, when I started I was like, okay, well, summit week is week zero and then registration is going to happen the week before and pre-launch is going to happen this week. So I worked backwards and I always think it's really, really, really important for you to do that as well. And so, before we dive into the week-to week plan, when you are working on your summit marketing plan, start with your summit week. Figure out when your registration should start, figure out when your pre-launch should start, figure out when your wait list is going to start whether that's with the pre-launch or separately to really figure out and make sure that you have enough time to really market it well. So let's get started. In this plan it says eight plus weeks, but at the very bottom there is two boxes that say the title of that section is more or less time to your summit. Here's how you can modify the eight week plan accordingly, and so on one side it says more time if you have 10 or more weeks to your summit, and then the other side says less time, so you don't have eight weeks, you only have six weeks, or you don't have eight weeks, you only have four weeks. What are some of the changes that you can make to this marketing plan to still have a really highly successful and impactful strategy going into the summit? But I really like to have at least eight weeks to work with. So week eight plus.

Speaker 1:

Our milestone here that we are working on is to be creating all of your marketing assets. I totally lied, why no? Your milestone here is to increase your visibility, consistency and intentionality in your organic marketing and paid marketing, if you also have that. So you're going to be really focused on being consistent and intentional with your emails you want to be sending one out every single week and also consistent and intentional with your long-form content, so that's either a podcast, a blog or video content. You want to be putting out long-form content every single week and then repurposing that on social media so that you're being very visible and that people are consuming your content. You're growing your email list. You also want to find ways to increase your visibility. Some of these could be lead generation ads or nurture ads, where you're driving traffic to your long form content. You can be collaborating with others through going live with someone else. You can participate in someone else's summit, you can be a speaker in groups in like a private membership or something like that. You can do podcast interviews.

Speaker 1:

Right now is is a really, really great time to just focus on increasing your visibility, getting your face out there, getting people to know your name, getting people to talk about you, and you really want to do your best to be just showing up in as many places as possible so that you can intentionally and consistently grow your your visibility. You may also, at this time, want to be running lead generation ads. I did say that already but this is a really good way to grow your email list with new people. Some of my clients like to start a new opt-in at this time so we're about two months out from the summit Starting a new opt-in with a topic related to the summit so that, ideally, people who opt in to this freebie are going to be the perfect people to register and participate in the summit. Using lead generation ads is a really good way to get that free opt-in in front of more people.

Speaker 1:

And the best part about this is you have enough time. With eight or more weeks to go until your summit, you have enough time to bring them into your world, have them consuming your emails, get them consuming your content more consistently and really get them warmed up and nurtured to who you are. Build that relationship so that when the summit comes, they're not new, they're not a stranger to you. They feel like they know you, they feel like they want to be part of your world more. So that's a really great part of the puzzle, like a really important piece of the puzzle is having this time to warm up and nurture your audience before you start talking about the summit, before you have any of that going on At eight weeks or more and I actually love this to happen like at 10 or 12 weeks before the summit.

Speaker 1:

But you still do have time to hire support if you need it. Some people you might want to consider would be a launch manager, if you need it. Some people you might want to consider would be a launch manager. You might want to consider having a Facebook ad strategist. You may be looking to get an OBM or a VA to support you. There's tons of different roles. Service providers are going to want time to onboard into your business to get to know you, your brand, have those deep conversations about your messaging and your voice so that they can best support you. And typically they're going to want to onboard you at least eight weeks before your maybe not onboard, but like have you booked into their schedule at least eight weeks before your summit because it is a really huge undertaking.

Speaker 1:

And then for affiliate marketing, this is the time you're not. There isn't really any affiliate marketing that started yet. So affiliate marketing is when other people are promoting something on your behalf. So you don't want your speakers or your sponsors to start promoting anything yet, but you are going to be working on creating your promo kits for those speakers and sponsors. The difference between a speaker and a sponsor a speaker is somebody who's going to be presenting at your summit and a sponsor is somebody who is financially supporting the summit. They may or may not also be a speaker, but both speakers and sponsors you should be providing them with a promo kit that includes swipe files, graphics, email copy, social media copy, so that they don't need to do all of the heavy lifting. They absolutely can. If they want to, they can rewrite those posts. They can come up with new words and new copy to fit their copy and to fit their brand and to make it fit with their style. But you should still be providing that for them and then also for affiliate marketing.

Speaker 1:

If you don't already have a platform that allows people to create their own affiliate link, you need to be researching that and figuring that out now, because you want to give your speakers and your sponsors enough time to sign up as an affiliate and make sure that their link's working before the promo really starts. So that's all that happens from like anywhere from eight to 12 weeks before, but really in that like eight week phase, I call that the build phase, by the way, you're building your audience, you're building your visibility, you're building in preparation for the summit. The next phase is our hype phase. This starts at six weeks, and so this is when I recommend that you start to either tease or fully announce your summit. So somewhere in that five to six week range, that's when you're going to want to make that announcement and open your early bird or wait list the difference in my mind between an early bird promo and a wait list is a wait list You're getting people excited. You're having them sign up so that they're the first ones that find out when registration actually starts.

Speaker 1:

An early bird promotion promotion you're actually giving them something for signing up before others. So early bird promotion would be like get on the wait list and save ten dollars off of your all access pass, or get on the wait. Get on the wait wait list and then your early bird promotion would be you get first access to those VIP passes. So if there's only 20 passes available, the early bird people would get access to them before the general public. A waitlist they're isn't typically any like benefit associated to it, except for they will be told they will get a specific email specifically sent. Like you showed interest in this, here's your email, now that things are ready, early bird has some sort of discount promotion benefit associated with it.

Speaker 1:

So whether you have an early bird promo or just a wait list, in that, five to six weeks before your summit is going live is when you would want to open that. So you're going to in that, starting at six weeks, you're going to increase from one email a week to two. You're still going to continue to send out a nurture email. Typically, I like that to be based on your content and your long form content. You're still just putting out one piece per week. One email is going to be nurturing, based on that content piece and then one is your announcement email, so letting your entire email list know, hey, the summit's coming. Sign up for the wait list to be the first one to know, or sign up for the early bird so you can save $10, whatever it is that you're going to do.

Speaker 1:

And then social media you're going to continue posting like four, five times a week. You can always post more if that works for you. But again, thinking about the visibility, you want to make sure you are emailing your list, you want to make sure you are creating that long-form content and you want to make sure that you're showing up building relationships on social media in those weeks leading up to the summit, because that is what's going to make the huge difference between the successful registration with a warm audience and a less successful registration period with a very cold, ghosted audience at around the six-week mark for your paid marketing. This is when you're really going to start the brainstorming process, coming up with the ideas for the ad copy, for the images, what you want to really put out to the world, and you can start creating those ads. You need to have at least three to five versions of your ad copy, three to five headlines, three to five images or videos. That gives you plenty to test, to try out and to share with your audience.

Speaker 1:

And then for affiliate marketing, again, affiliates are not starting to market yet but around the six week mark you're going to start checking to make sure that everything that needs to be submitted whether it's pre-recorded sessions or all access, past material or other things have been submitted. You're going to want people to sign up for those social sessions, whether they're live panels or speed networking or yoga, like what they're going to show up for. How they can help out with that. You might decide to share the promo kit at this point to make sure that they have the link, that they can access it, that they can have any questions answered, and you definitely, definitely want to open that affiliate platform that we talked about at the eight week mark platform that we talked about at the eight week mark, definitely want to open that so that they can register for their links and make sure that there's no tech glitches and that they have an affiliate link when it is time for them to start promoting. That's going to come out pretty soon. Okay, now we're on to week three and four. We're still in that hype phase Weeks three and four. We're still in that height phase weeks three and four.

Speaker 1:

Your goal is to promote, promote, promote. You are going to be working on growing that wait list, or the early bird promo list, as big as you possibly can. You want to get everyone onto that list so that everyone is really excited, everyone's really pumped, and you really want to make sure that, yeah, you're just growing that. Now. If you are starting your marketing plan and you only have four weeks to go, you might not have time to get a wait list in place, but you still want to spend all of this time teasing different aspects of the summit, showing like, highlighting speakers, so that people can start to get excited about who's gonna be presenting sneak peeks into session topics. If you can do that, just to make sure that you are really getting people as excited as possible, whether or not you have that wait list. Again, if you have more than four weeks, like if you've been working on this since week eight and you're down to week four. You had plenty of time to get a waitlist. But if you kind of were like slacking or you didn't think of it or whatever it might be, and you only have four weeks go and you can't pull together a waitlist, that's okay. But you still still still need to be hyping up and getting people excited about the summit, even though registration hasn't started yet In this period. So we're getting to the end of the hype phase.

Speaker 1:

We're increasing the number of emails that we're sending out. We want to be still putting out one piece of long form content each week and an email that goes with that content. So one nurture email week four. One nurture email week three. And then you're going to be increasing the number of promo or announcement emails and making sure that you are week four. I say you number of promo or announcement emails and making sure that you are week four. I say you should send out two promotion emails. And week three you're going to send out three promotion emails so that you know your email list knows that's coming and you're not just going to talk about it in the same way every single time when in the future. I haven't outlined it yet, but I know it's something that will be very valuable, talking about emails leading up to a summit and having kind of like just examples of those emails that you want to be writing. Some of them will be testimonial emails, some of them will be question and answers, sneak peeks, list of topics, right, so you're not just always going at it from the same angle. It's not going to be a copy and paste, like we send out the same email seven times. So it gives a bit of variety, gives a little bit excitement and will also your email should be designed in a way that different people are going to be interested, intrigued and drawn in by your different emails.

Speaker 1:

Now week four paid advertisement. This is your week for reviewing, revising, catching up, making sure you have everything that you need, making sure that there's no typos, making sure that the brand colors are there, making sure that these images are what you're going to be using. The ad copy is error-free. These images are what you're going to be using. The ad copy is error-free, really just like making sure you have everything you need to run the ads. And it is a catch-up week because there's so many other things going on that if your ad copy. If your images aren't quite ready yet, you can catch up and get them done.

Speaker 1:

Week four and then same with affiliate marketing. Again, we're not promoting yet. They may want to have their own wait list. They may want to be pushing and drawing their your attention to like sorry they may. Your speakers and sponsors might want to encourage their audiences to go sign up for the wait list. They might be previewing it or teasing that this summit is coming, but there's no official promotion starting yet. You definitely want to be on top of anyone who hasn't sent you material though. So if you're missing presentations, you're missing AAP bonuses, whatever you're missing, you really want to be on top of it.

Speaker 1:

Week three like I said, we've increased the number of emails. We're increasing our social promos, social media posts. Sorry, sometimes, depending on the length of our promo period, our registration period, sometimes we will actually start the ads in week three. We want to get those ads set up and check at least 24 hours before they're set to start running, to make sure that we have the links right, to make sure that our audiences are right, make sure that the images and copy are showing up how we want them to, and then we do run a three-day testing phase now. This might be today, like in week three, or it might be the very beginning of week two, just depending on how long the registration period is. So we'll talk about that again in week two with the speakers and the affiliates for that marketing. In week three, you want to make sure that they have everything they need, so send them links for the promo kit again. That's the email copy, social media posts, graphics, everything that they're going to need to easily promote the summit. You probably also want to have some sort of group, like a facebook group or a what's up chat or whatever it might be a way that they can easily contact you with questions that they have and making sure that they are ready for when the registration period opens.

Speaker 1:

Now let's chat about our launch phase, which is going to happen one to two weeks ahead of the summit. So if the summit week is week zero, registration or launch is going to be week one and week two, because typically you're going to have your registration period be open for 10 to 14 days prior to the summit, and so that's what I was talking about. Testing is, you might want to have your testing phase start at like 17 days before and do three days of testing into the 14 days of, like, full registration, or you may just want your testing to be part of those 14 days. Totally depends on totally depends on you. So in week two, sometime in week two whether it's the middle of week two or the very beginning of week two you're're going to start promoting, and as soon as you start promoting you are moving up to weekly or sorry, daily emails promoting the summit.

Speaker 1:

It is really important, if you didn't already have this in place, that you have some sort of link or button at the top, ideally at the top, but if not, if you like can't bring yourself to put it right at the top of your emails, at the bottom is fine too. I like to have it right at the top. I like it when other people have it right at the top. That says something along the lines of if you don't want to hear anything more about XYZ summit, click here to be removed from the summit promotion list. Promotion list.

Speaker 1:

You will still receive all other like regular content, newsletters or whatever it might be that is appropriate for like what you're sending out. So you're still going to receive our weekly emails, but I won't reach out to you again about the summit. I highly recommend that you have something there that allows people to opt out of your summit emails, especially once you're sending them every single day and you are going to be ideally sending emails every one to two days for the next three weeks during the registration period. So, two weeks of registration period and also during the summit. Ideally you're going to be sending out emails one to two times every one to two days. Okay, during this time, during registration phase, you can still put out long form content. I highly recommend that you do it if you are able to maintain that consistency. But if you choose to take a pause for these three weeks, then that's absolutely okay as well. And then, similar to your emails as soon as registration starts, you're going to kick your social media posts up into high gear and you're going to be posting one to two times a day until the summit is done for For your ads.

Speaker 1:

You want to start your ads when the registration period begins and you're going to want to be running registration ads. So your main goal is to get people registered for the summit. Again, I personally like a free summit ticket with the AAP upgrade, the all access pass upgrade, and so you're going to be driving traffic to that registration page, getting as many people registered as possible through the ads and then also through your organic means that we just finished talking about. If you're going to be running retargeting ads to the all access pass which I love doing you're going to start those three to seven days after the registration period has begun. You want to make sure that there's at least like bare bare bare minimum a hundred people already registered for the summit who haven't upgraded, because that is what meta needs to create an audience is at least a hundred people. I like to wait until it's a little bit bigger than that. Giving the summit, like the registration period, three to seven days, allows and ensures that there's enough people who have gone through the registration phase and have registered and haven't update, upgraded yet.

Speaker 1:

Your budget you're gonna want to be very strategic about your budget. Typically we start with a lower budget, but then we have to scale it fast and scale it hard and increase that budget really quickly, because you only have 10 to 14 days. You can do that two different ways. You can scale it vertically, which means adding more money to those same ads. There is a bit of a limit on how much and how quickly you can scale vertically. So the other option is to scale horizontally, where you're adding additional ads to what you're already promoting and you can start new ads with any budget that you want, and so that's a really great way adding new audiences, new creative, new images to really grow that budget.

Speaker 1:

And then in the final 48 hours before the summit starts, many people really like to have an urgency push in their ads and to have a specific ad that says like last chance, final 24 hours, some sort of really obvious call to action like now is the time, register or miss out affiliate marketing. This is when affiliate marketing really shines. As soon as registration opens, affiliate marketing or like the affiliate promotion also begins and you really want to have your affiliates be promoting your summit as much as possible. So making sure that throughout the 10 to 14 days of the registration period, you're sending out links to the summit promotion kit a couple of times, like three or four times. You can also send out individualized emails to different people encouraging them to use those resources to make sure that they're promoting um. And then I know a lot of people love to run incentive competitions or contests, so things like first person to get 20 links today, like like link clicks today, or sell one all access, pass and get 20 people registered using your affiliate link and then you can be entered to win a $50 Amazon gift card, something like that. So if you want to come up with like, each day there's a different contest, or throughout the entire promotion period there's a contest going on, that's a really great way to help incentivize your speakers and your other affiliates to be promoting on your behalf. And then just remember to be supporting your affiliates by setting up different ways that they can collaborate. So it could be a reel that everyone participates in together, or it could be IG lives that you're hosting. You can have them guests on your podcast. Whatever it might be. However, you can support your speakers. Um, they're going to appreciate it and they're really going to be able to do a better job if they feel supported.

Speaker 1:

So these two weeks week one, like this week, one week ah, I'm really struggling here. One week to go until the summit and then two weeks to go until the summit. Those two weeks you are promoting, promoting, promoting. It's your final push. It's everything you've worked for. You really want to get the word out and really just all of your energy is going to be pouring into getting registrations. It's everything that you've worked for. And then the final phase is your summit phase. This is the week that the summit's happening and obviously you're going to be spending that entire week facilitating the summit. You're going to be engaging with the speakers, engaging with the participants in the group. You're going to want to be sending out emails to recap the summit, talking about the highlights, really engaging your email list in what happened in the summit that day, posting on social media about it. This is a chance for you to like create some FOMO with people who haven't registered, of like hey, if you'd registered, you would have been able to see Susie Q talk about ABC or whatever. It is Right.

Speaker 1:

So for paid marketing during the week of the summit, typically I encourage my clients to leave the ads running for at least the first 24 to 48 hours of the summit so that those last minute stragglers can trickle in, and then we use the registration numbers or AAP sales to determine when to turn it off. Usually it's somewhere in the mid to end. I almost never run registration ads on the final day of the summit, but sometimes we'll run them up to the second last day of the summit. And then you're going to want to continue to support your affiliates throughout the summit period, encouraging them to talk to their audience. Like you are to send out summit highlights, recaps, favorite sessions, takeaways to their audience through email and through social media, you may want to continually update that summit, like your speaker promo kit, so that they have graphics, ad copy, not ad copy email copies, social media copy that they can grab from to do those recaps.

Speaker 1:

And then the last week that I want to talk about is your post-summit week. This is the week after your summit and the most most important thing I can tell you is do not disappear. You have just spent a lot of time, a lot of energy, potentially a lot of money, to grow your audience, to nurture your audience and to create your summit experience. If you disappear and you ghost your audience, new and warm audience there's, it is felt. Yes, you may need a day or two of rest. Yes, you're probably exhausted and emotionally spent from running the summit, but do not disappear, because if you disappear for a month or even a week, people are going to disappear on you as well. They're going to unsubscribe from your emails, they're going to forget who you are. They're going to forget what you stand for and why you're there, why they started following you in the first place.

Speaker 1:

So, following your summit, do not disappear. Re-establish your consistent and intentional. Re-establish your consistent and intentional content strategy that you were doing before the summit started, which means putting out a long form content every single week and sending out at least one email every single week. In this week after the summit, you also want to send out a thank you email to your participants, a thank you email to your speakers and your sponsors. Email to your participants, a thank you email to your speakers and your sponsors. You may even send out a thank you to your entire email list for being a part of the journey, whether they attended the summit or not. And then I do always recommend that you send some sort of feedback survey to the speakers and one to the participants asking for what they thought was really great, what could be improved. You could even include a space for them to write or record a testimonial for you so that you can use that in the future for other summits.

Speaker 1:

As for paid marketing, you have a couple options. The first one is to open your cart and for a course or a membership or some sort of one-to-one offer. This would be using the summit as your launch mechanism, so kind of like a webinar or a five day challenge. Except you've gone really big and you've done a summit and now you're launching some sort of project product and you have your open cart period so you can run retargeting ads, and you have your open cart period so you can run retargeting ads for the open cart period. The other option and I do recommend that you pick between them we don't want to keep confusing people, we don't want to be fatiguing our audience, so pick one or the other.

Speaker 1:

The second option is to turn the all access pass evergreen and so, instead of it being a live summit that things are happening in real time, you could have it as like a prerecorded experience and have people that can purchase the all access pass to get that extended access to these summit recordings and that can work really, really well. People will often sign up after the fact and be able to binge the content. You can have it as a free opt-in, but I personally prefer after the summit is done there's no longer a free option and that there is now just the paid all access pass available, and it can be available for a month after or forever. Really, that's totally your choice. So, um, or you can do nothing. You don't need to do any sort of paid advertisement there relating to the summit. You could always go back to the ongoing lead generation and ongoing nurture campaigns that are my favorite and just continue to grow your list through those lead gen ads so that the next time you have a summit your list is even bigger and more impactful, and you know it's just that snowball effect.

Speaker 1:

So I know that this was a lot of information. If you didn't already download the PDF, head there now. Genzeademartelcom forward, slash eight, as in the number eight, and then week plan W-E-E-K-P-L-A-N, all lowercase and you can download this eight week. I call it the balance launch plan. I call it the balanced launch plan. It gives you all the information that I just went through, plus more, gives you ways to change and modify the plan if you have even more time to promote your summit or if you have less and you're working on a bit of a crunch, like what the most important things are.

Speaker 1:

What you can let drop, yeah, so I hope that you found this episode helpful. Let drop. Um, yeah, so I hope that you found this, this episode, helpful, and the next episode is three ad strategies that I absolutely love using to grow a summit without wasting money, and so we're really obviously going to be leaning into my ad strategist side, talking about paid ads and really great strategies that you can implement that will make a huge impact. So I will. I hope to see you there on that episode. Thank you.