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

BYS 13 | Why I Fell in Love with Online Summits and You Might Too

• Jenzaia

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In this episode, I share my journey of falling in love with virtual summits and explores the various ways people can engage with them, from hosting to attending. 

After working behind the scenes on approximately 20 summits, presenting at over a dozen, and attending more than 50 as a participant... I truly feel like summits are my happy place!

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Find me on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/heyitsjenzaia/
Email Me → support@jenzaiadimartile.com

Speaker 1:

This is Before your Summit, episode number 13. I'm your host, jen Zaya, and I am a summit lover. Today we're going to talk about where that love of summits has come from. So, if you're new around here, I had a previous podcast called Market Scale Grow. All the episodes are still available. You just need to scroll back. There's, I want to say, over 200 of them. I don't remember now. The first two episodes of that podcast are about my journey and how I got into Facebook ads management and becoming like a Facebook ad strategist. So if you want to hear my transition through business and how I pivoted and what that looked like, definitely scroll back and go listen to those episodes, because today I'm just going to talk about how I fell in love with summits and to do that, I'm actually also going to give a rundown of the ways you can engage with a summit.

Speaker 1:

So, from where I'm standing, there is summit hosts, the person who's actually hosting the summit, and their support team. That could be full time employees or VAs or strategists, like myself. They are employing to work with them, just like myself they are employing to work with them. There's the presenters, sponsors, affiliates who are contributing typically contributing something to the summit with the payback of the affiliate commission. Now, sometimes, like a sponsor may be contributing financially to get the payback of the summit, a speaker is contributing their time and energy, creating a presentation, so there's different ways that that relationship can work. And then there are the summit attendees, and so I have never hosted my own summit, but I've worked behind the scenes of somewhere around the 20 summits mark and helping the host to create a marketing strategy and implement the Facebook ads for their summits. I have also been a presenter at over a dozen summits I should probably sit down and actually count how many it's been, but at least a dozen summits. And I have been an attendee at probably 50 plus summits because I just really enjoy them. I think it's a great way to engage in that content and make new connections. So that's how I've engaged with summits myself. I'm currently in the process of planning my first summit, so soon I can add summit hosts to that list.

Speaker 1:

But the majority of my interactions with summits have been as an attendee, a presenter or the Facebook ad strategist behind the scenes, and that has just given me so many different viewpoints to summits and why they're so great. And so the number one thing I actually accidentally worked behind the scenes of my first one. It was one of my long-term clients and she decided she was hosting a summit and so as part of her ongoing ads management package, I ran the ads for her summit and I think that that was no. I know that that was my first behind the scenes summit experience. I've since hosted, helped her with four summits and each one has been more of a success than the previous one, which is really really cool to see when you have that year-over-year information and data, and I have really really loved watching that growth and seeing how impactful growing an email list can be, especially when it's such a huge influx of a thousand to five thousand people in just a few weeks, from the power of collaborations and the power of ads. I've also really enjoyed seeing what my clients have done post-summit with these new email lists. They've done things like launch courses, create memberships. One of my clients was able to start was getting invited to start doing live PD, so that was really cool. So there's been really great, fantastic positive benefits beyond just the list growth, beyond just the financial repercussions of the summit.

Speaker 1:

As a speaker, I love doing summits because I get to engage with the other speakers and then create these new connections and collaboration opportunities with people working in a similar or related niche, which I think is really great as a speaker, that opportunity. It also is really great for becoming known as an expert in your field by creating that amazing presentation and engaging with the attendees. And then I think I kind of touched on it already but as an attendee you're getting, with just a free ticket, typically you're getting 20 to 40 different presentations on highly valuable information. I also love being an attendee, especially now that I am more focused on supporting people with their summit, because I can see what different attendee experiences are like and I can bring that back to my clients. Say, like I was just in the summit and they had this summit. Like participated in a summit that had a summit hub. It was a google doc, no, a google sheet with each of the presentations and then a space for watched and then notes so you could keep track of it. I was like I love this. This is such a great feature. It's so smart Love it. Definitely going to recommend my clients start implementing something along the lines of this Summit Hub or Summit Tracker. Right, my speaker experiences and my support role experiences.

Speaker 1:

I just fell in love with all the different aspects of summits, and just seeing the power of collaboration, the power of community and the power of real, immersive experiential experiences has made me fall in love with summits every single time that I am part of one, and so it was definitely a natural journey from Facebook ad strategist to supporting these clients with their summits and just knowing how impactful and how powerful a summit can be, to knowing that this is where I want to take my business and this is where I want to go, to knowing that this is where I want to take my business and this is where I want to go. So if you have an opportunity to participate as an attendee at a summit, I highly recommend you do it, and I highly recommend that you are strategic about the presentations that you watch. I also recommend that you are as engaged as you can be in the community, because that is one of the best ways that you can really get the full experience of networking with the other people, creating these new connections with other people, and then, as a speaker, if you have an opportunity to speak at a summit, it is a really, really great way for you to grow your email list. It's a really, really great way for you to collaborate with others. And that's another situation where I highly recommend that you are in the Facebook group or the community, interacting with the participants, so that they become more familiar with you, your name, they can get their questions answered and they really feel fully supported.

Speaker 1:

I know in summits that I've been an attendee at, when you ask a question and then the speaker doesn't answer, it feels kind of like oh well, like do you even care? So, as a speaker, I highly recommend that you get in that group and that you're answering questions. If you have an opportunity to go live, that you do that, so that you can make the most of being a speaker in a summit. Make the most of being a speaker in a summit. And then, yeah, I think that those are my two kind of recommendations for you if you want to attend or participate as a speaker in a summit.

Speaker 1:

And I am, like I said, in the process of planning and prepping my own summit for quarter one of 2026. So we're still pretty far out, but I am also recording like a behind the scenes podcast that will be available once the summit has happened, so you can kind of listen, through my experience of creating a summit, what struggles I've had, what challenges I faced and how I've overcome them and the steps that I've taken, what's I face and how I've overcome them and the steps that I've taken, what's been easy and where I am throughout the journey, and maybe you'll be able to relate with that. So thank you so much for being here. If you are looking for tips and strategies to make your next summit the best one yet, come hang out with me on Instagram. I'm at heyitsjenzea. I would love to connect with you there, so send me a DM and let's do this thing.