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

BYS 4 | Three Powerful Ad Strategies That Drive Summit Success

• Jenzaia • Episode 4

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Facebook ad strategies can dramatically grow your summit attendance without wasting money when you focus on the right approaches at the right times. 

While summit registration ads should receive the bulk of your budget, there are three additional strategies that can dramatically amplify your results.  In this episode, I'll also share a bonus tip PLUS one of the most common mistakes I see summit hosts make.


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Speaker 1:

This is Before your Summit, episode number four. Hey, I'm your host, jenzea. I am a Facebook ad strategist and a summit lover. Today, we are going to be talking about something I know all too well Facebook ad strategies, specifically ones designed for summits, and how you can use them to grow your summit without wasting money. That's always the goal right Running ads without wasting money. We're going to talk about the most important ad that you'll run for your summit, which is not one of my strategies. We're going to talk about those three strategies that you may not have considered, plus a bonus and also the biggest mistake you can probably make. So, without further ado, let's dive in with the absolute number one most important ad that you're going to run for your summit. Drum roll, please. Felt so silly doing that, banging on my keyboard. Anyway, the most important ad you're going to run is your registration ads. 90 to 100 of your budget is likely going to be going to registration ads, which will get more people signed up for your summit. That is your goal overall. You just want your to have as many people as possible registered, and so, if you take nothing else away from this registration ads, that's where you want to be spending the bulk of your marketing budget. If you've never run ads before, or if you have run ads but this is your first time running them for your summit, if it's a new summit, anything registration ads, registration ads registration ads these are typically going to be simple opt-in ads, so you're going to run a lead generation ad to get someone to opt in, assuming that your summit is a free summit. If you go back to episode two, I talked about paid versus free summits. Most of the time I would recommend a free summit with an all access pass upgrade. So your registration ads are going to be lead generation ads with the goal of getting someone signed up. Instead of just a yay, you're registered, thank you page, you're going to have a sales page that sells the all access pass as a tripwire. And yes, now three ad strategies. You may not have considered where you may want to put some of your budget to increase the success of your summit. So the first one is list building ads before your summit even begins. So, starting at like 8 to 12 weeks before the summit, you may want to run list building ads to grow your email list full of the right people.

Speaker 1:

I talked about this in last week's episode of creating an opt-in something specific for your summit. It doesn't have to be, but if you want to, you can absolutely create that new opt-in. Otherwise, any free download or video training that your audience loves can be used as an opt-in. Otherwise, any free download or video training that your audience loves can be used as an opt-in to get new people onto your email list. I like to run these at least two to three months before the summit so that those people have time to learn who you are, build a relationship with you, read your emails, start to to trust you know that you're the expert in your field before the summit, and so when you announce your summit, they're very, very excited and they're ready to dive in deeper with you.

Speaker 1:

The second strategy is using speaker specific ads. Their face, their authority, their expertise will work on your side. Some of the ways that I've seen this really, really working in the last year are face-to-camera videos by the host. So you are, like the ultimate expert in your summit, the number one key speaker, and so speaking directly to the camera is a really, really great way to showcase that, to invite people in and to use your face and your authority to get more people. I also have been really loving and seeing lots of success with podcasting images that have the faces of all of the presenters on them. So whether they're little circles or it kind of looks like you're standing in a group picture, but it really is just all of your, your pictures, kind of like smooshed together into one group. I've been loving those and we've been seeing a lot of success with them recently. So I highly recommend that you create an image that has all of the speakers faces together.

Speaker 1:

And then the last one is clips of the presentations. So if they're pre-recorded, then you can grab like three second clips of the presentation and put them together in almost like a sneak peek so people can see the presenters actually speaking. Now, when we've done them, there's no, you can't hear the audio, it's, there's music overlay, so you're not giving away any of the presentation information. But I also have seen longer clips being used 10 to 15 seconds from different presentations, so that you are giving the audio, giving a sneak peek of all of the different presentations that people are going to see. And I really like when we've done this of creating like three or four or five, depending on how many days, and doing like a day one set of clips a day two set of clips a day three set of clips, and so you can use them together as one bigger promotion video for the entire summit, or you can use them as smaller clips of like promote day one, promote day two, promote day three.

Speaker 1:

But all of these just helps to increase the relationships, increase your trustability, increase your authority in the realm of your summit topic so that people see you as the expert, and they also are going to see these faces and names of people that they already know and trust, and it's going to just build the trust and the desire to be part of the summit. So so running speaker-specific ads has been extremely successful. I would say that these are typically going to be part of your registration ads and so you're going to run these speaker-specific ads throughout the registration period. A couple years ago I would have said very simple get your free ticket. Ads were working really well, and now I think that those faces really people need to trust, especially if they've never heard of you, the host, before. They need to see the face of the person that they do trust. That's going to bring them into the summit.

Speaker 1:

So that's my second strategy for you, and the last strategy is to increase your budget in the final 72 hours, like 48 to 72 hours, because these people are the most likely to actually sign up, because the summit is coming, there's a bit of urgency, sign up now or miss out. And they can also say like, okay, in 72 hours, I know exactly what I'm doing. If they see your registration ad 14 days out, they might be like, oh, that's kind of far away, like I don't know if I'm gonna be able to go or not, right, but when it's only 48 72 hours ahead of time, they're more likely to sign up and actually show up. Typically, we see a few of my hosts have done a really great job of tracking these metrics of the percentage of people who sign up based on what day they sorry, the percentage of people who show up based on the day that they sign up, which is very fascinating data. And both times that I've seen this happen, the closer to the summit the person signed up, the more likely they were to show up, and so increasing your ad budget in that final 48 hours, 72 hours, is a really great way to just blow up the registrations that you're getting and also, with this, using last chance ads or time-based urgency ads. So changing the ad copy, even if it's just the hook, or changing the image, that really adds that time urgency piece can be very powerful. Because if we have lots of time to do something we're like, oh, I can do that later, but if we know time is running out, we have to do it now or we won't ever be able to do it again, then we as humans are more likely to do it. So use that to your advantage. It is genuine urgency. I never recommend anyone uses false urgency. Genuine urgency. The summit is starting in 24 hours. Sign up now or miss out. Totally legit urgency. Also, this is great too. You might offer the summit longer, like afterwards, as like evergreen content, but the urgency of you'll never get this live experience again right Like, join us for this live experience happening this weekend, right now. So yeah, those are the three strategies. Number one list building ads two to three months before your summit, using speaker-specific ads as a main part of your registration ad strategy, and then increasing the budget and using the time urgency to your advantage.

Speaker 1:

Now I did say I would have a bonus tip and that is to retarget your warm audience with those last chance ads with all access pass ads, using those warm audiences, retargeting them. So somebody who's visited their registration page but didn't sign up, show them more urgency, like I saw that you were checking it out, sign up now, uh. Or somebody who did sign up but didn't buy the all access pass, retarget those people. Like you already signed up for the XYZ summit. Now upgrade your experience to get the full package with the all access pass, something like that. So that will be taking your registration ads to the next level is layering in the retargeting of those warm audiences. It is retargeting ad, which means they need to have done a trigger action before they start seeing the ads. So we don't show the you've already signed up for the summit ads to someone who hasn't already signed up. The trigger action is they signed up but they didn't purchase the all access pass. You also need to. So anytime there's retargeting ads, they've done something and you want them to take the next step. So just remember that with retargeting ads.

Speaker 1:

Now, the biggest mistake that I see people making with all ads summit related or not is boosting posts. This can be really successful if you are using it strategically and you know the goal of the boosted post, which is an engagement ad, to get more likes, comments, shares. When you boost a post, it is an engagement ad. You are not creating an ad that is designed to get people to sign up for something. You're not creating an ad that's designed to get people to purchase something. There are ad objectives and you can create different types of ad objectives. When you hit the boost a post button, the objective is engagement, so that's really, really important. Now there is definitely a time and a place to use those ads. It's a really great way to increase your visibility, to spread your nurture content to new audiences, to get more people warmed up and to get to know you. And if your goal really is to increase your engagement on a social post, boosting a post is a really great option. But typically when I'm working with summit hosts, their goal is to get more registrations and to sell more all access passes.

Speaker 1:

Boosting a post is not designed, and that doesn't mean it can't work. Doesn't mean I've never seen an example of boosting a post resulting in more opt-ins. I have, but most of the time it doesn't work, and so most of the time I would not recommend boosting the post. If your goal is more registrations for your summit. Well, actually I would never recommend it. Just because it works occasionally doesn't mean I would recommend, like oh, you should try it, see if you're the exception. You're probably not the exception, you're the rule. What movie is that from? You're not the exception, you're the rule.

Speaker 1:

Even if you are the exception, I don't want you to try and find out right, like I would rather you set up the ad properly, because you can use a post in an ad. So if you go into the ads manager, you can create a lead generation ad as your objective and then pull the posts that you want to use. So it's similar to boosting a post, but you actually get the objective that you want to use. And so if there's a social media post that did really well and you're like, okay, I really want to use this to amplify my summit, to get more registrations, perfect, you absolutely can, but do it the right way, which is going into the ads manager, creating the post yourself with the lead generation objective and then pulling that post with the lead generation objective and then pulling that post. So those are my tips and strategies for you. If you want to know more about when to start and layer in each of these strategies.

Speaker 1:

I went into a lot more detail about marketing timelines for you in the last episode and you can also grab a PDF of that plan If you go to jenseademartelcom forward slash eight week plan. That's eight like the number eight, the numeral, not, don't spell it out. So eight week plan and you can grab that PDF of that eight week plan. So you have exactly how you can layer in your organic marketing, your paid marketing and affiliate marketing throughout that eight weeks prior to your summit to have the most impactful summit.

Speaker 1:

I hope that you found this episode really, really helpful. Next week we will have four more episodes for you that's my goal and then we're going to go down to like a boring one episode a week. But as the launch of this new podcast, I thought I would do four episodes this week, four episodes next week. Yay, excitement, tons to binge. We're going to dive into ad budget break ad budget breakdown so another place that I've worked with tons of summit hosts with different budgets, anywhere from like $500 to $5,000 and really being able to break down what you should be spending, where you should be spending it, what types of ads you're spending it on. So I hope you will be back next week that you've hit the subscribe button and you'll be back next week to learn more about ad budgetdowns.