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

BYS 17 | Promoting Your Summit Without Paid Ads

• Jenzaia • Episode 17

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Think you need paid ads to pack a virtual summit? 

Let’s flip that script (coming from a FB ad strategist!). 

Today, we'll map out a no-ads growth plan that’s driven by trust, smart partnerships, and a visible, human presence!

You absolutely can fill seats and create momentum without touching a single ad dashboard (unless you want to!).

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Email Me → support@jenzaiadimartile.com

SPEAKER_00:

This is Before Your Summit episode number 17. I'm your host Gensana and today we're talking marketing your summit without any paid ads. As a Facebook ad strategist, this is a little bit hard for me. No, actually, it's not at all. These three tips and strategies that I am going to dive into today, I recommend that everybody sets up and does with or without ads. The ads are going to amplify these other three things, so they definitely need to come first. And you can have a very, very successful summit without paid ads. So this is what I recommend you do. Number one. Actually, I'll tell you all three of them first, and then we can talk about each one of them in detail. So the first one is your organic audience and a social media blitz. Number two is the affiliate marketing, and number three is a podcast tour. The only one that's optional, I would say, is the podcast tour, but we'll get there when we get there. So let's dive in with the organic audience and media, social media blitz. I would say that a blitz is when you're going high concentration, lots of energy, big push across all of your platforms that you are a regular on. You're gonna have content that is directly related to the summit, but this organic audience piece goes beyond the blitz. So if we back up three to six months before you're starting to push the summit, you really need to have an engaged audience. And so you're going to build and engage your audience consistently between summits or between live events, regularly growing your email list in whatever way feels the most authentic and genuine for you, whether that's running ads or doing collaborations, being part of bundles, whatever makes the most sense for you and your business. You're regularly growing your email list and creating long-form content, whether it's a blog, podcast, video content, to engage and nurture your audience. You want to be showing up, you want to be a trusted voice in your niche. You really want to have those relationships built with positivity, but long before you start talking about your summit. Then when it comes to your blitz, which again is that concentrated, high energy, lots of focus on all of your platforms, people already are going to you, they're already trusting you, they're already consuming your content. And that's when you're giving sneak peeks to the event. You're going to be doing lots of sharing about the speakers, about the events. You're going to do little reels, face-to-video chats where you're telling people why they should come and why they're excited. This is just your live promo piece that you're going to be doing. You want to, if it makes sense, and again, if it feels authentic and genuine to you, be going live and using stories as often as possible during the blitz, but also outside of the blitz, because that's one of the ways that you really get to build connection with people when they see your face, they hear your voice, you're really a human being for them. That's really important. And during the blitz, it's also important that you're engaging with comments and you're sharing other people's posts or you're resharing their reshare, and you're really just making the most of the engagement. The next strategy is your affiliate marketing. And specifically, when we're talking about a summit, affiliate marketing, there's two different pieces. The first one is your speakers who are promoting the event to their audiences. This works really, really well when your speakers are business owners that have their own audience. If you have speakers that don't have their own audiences, you need to get a bit creative about this. But that's the first layer. The second layer is having sponsors or business partners or other partnerships that would have aligned audiences. So if we go back to the first one, the speakers, if your speakers don't have their own audiences, you might be relying more on sponsors or other partnerships to help with the affiliate marketing. But you really want to have people that have audiences already that are aligned with your goal that can help to promote the event to their audiences. In my opinion, this is a non-negotiable. It's really, really important that you're not the only one talking about the event, that as many people as possible are talking about and promoting the event. And the best ways to make this effective, number one, is clearly communicating how promoting the event benefits not only the summit, but the individual speakers, partners, or sponsors. How everybody sharing about it and communicating it is beneficial because some people might not realize the impact that it can make when the speakers are genuinely excited and hyping up the event as much as possible. Also, creating um commission opportunities or bonuses of the affiliate payout is really, really important. That way, if somebody purchases the upgraded pass, then the affiliate will make some money. And that really encourages people to be promoting these events, and especially if they have an aligned audience, they're going to be promoting it, they're going to see better results themselves, and then it all just works for everybody. You can even consider having tiered bonuses. So I was recently a speaker in a summit where we got 30% for being a speaker, but if we put something in the all access pass, then it was bumped up to 50%. And that was a really encouraging reason for me to put something into the all access pass, right? You want to also make sure that affiliates are done through a reputable source, something like Thrivecart that has really good affiliate tracking and payout, so that you aren't tracking it yourself. You're not relying on someone checking a box on a Google form or something like that. That these people, their affiliate payouts are tracked directly to them using cookies, using really good systems. Uh, that makes everybody feel better about the entire process from those affiliates, your partners, your speakers, to also the people who are signing up. When I sign on to Thrivecart now, or like when I'm my personally am buying an all access pass for a summit, when I can see the affiliate's name on the checkout page, I don't know when Thrivecart added that, but it's not always been there. You can now see the affiliate's name on the checkout page, and I love that because I know that my money that I'm putting into this event is going to support the person I want it to support. And so that makes everybody feel better. It also is less hassle for you. Thrivecart or whichever platform you choose to use is going to track it and you don't have to do as much work. Now you can manually pay out. I know some of my clients who run summits love manually paying out so they can say, like, oh, I'm transferring$3,000 to this person and it feels really, really good for me. So you can manually pay out, or you can have Thrivecard or whichever platform do it for you. Um, but as long as the tracking is done automatically, it's one last thing that you have to worry about and hassle with, and it can just take the stress off your plate completely. And then the last thing that I highly recommend if you're having affiliate marketing is that you have really simple plug and play assets for people that they can use. Email copy, graphics, social media posts. You're gonna want to have both long form and short form copy so that people can use what they want, whether it's for a social media post or an email or whatever you have you. You also want graphics in a variety of different shapes so that people can use them in different social media places. Like the recommended graphic for Instagram is different than Facebook, which is different from TikTok, which is different from LinkedIn, which is different from X, right? Like all of you want to have as many different varieties as possible. I was also recently in a summit where we were provided a Chat GPT custom prompt to help create the social media templates or uh like copy for us. And I was really excited to try it, but it required more work than I wanted to do in the end. It wasn't as easy as when there's a Google Doc and I can just copy and paste it and then make the changes, or I can even put that copy into Chat GPT and have ChatGPT and I like talk through some changes I want to make. So I liked the idea of having the custom prompt, but it did create more work than I was happy with in the end, and I would have preferred a Google Doc. So just take that into consideration if you're thinking about doing a Chat GPT prompt of how much work is being put on the affiliate. Yes, it probably came out more my voice and more my style in the end and was probably better written for my audience. Um, but I would have preferred to not have to do that work, so yeah, that's a little aside. But whatever you can do to make it as easy as possible for your affiliates, the more likely they are to uh participate. Also, having regular check-ins, so like weekly emails or regularly scheduled emails so that people know exactly what to expect. And I do recommend email as the best mode of contacting people. A couple years ago, many of the summits I was part of, there was like a Facebook group for the speakers only, and I often missed communication because I don't go on Facebook very often. And because of my part, like as a Facebook ad strategist, I have access to people's Facebook pages, and I have a lot of notifications that come from their Facebook pages that have nothing to do with me, nothing to do with my business, nothing to do with the ads. And so my personal messages or notifications will sometimes get lost in all of those notifications. And so I was finding that I was missing a lot of communication when it was done solely in Facebook groups. And so I just want you to keep that in mind too, is if you are communicating with speakers, the best pro the probably the best way to do it is via email. I have no idea you you may have different feedback from your speakers, but um, time and time again, that is what I've found, not just with myself, but with other people, is that the preferred preferred method of communication between the summit host and speakers is via email. So just keep that in mind. Okay, and then my last idea for you this is optional, is to go on a podcast tour. Podcast tours are great because they can get you more visibility really, really quickly with engaged listeners, aligned audiences in the niche that you're looking for. There's already a level of trust that's built in between the podcast host and their audience. And when they invite a guest on, that trust is placed on the guest as well. And so it can be really great to find podcasts and to go on kind of like a five to ten podcast tour. So you're gonna be a guest on five to ten different podcasts. I also have done both where I've had guests on my podcast and I've been guests on other people's podcasts. I find that to increase my visibility and to grow my own business, being the guest is more beneficial than having guests on my podcast, but both can work in your favor. So whichever one is easier for you and makes more sense, you should definitely go ahead and do that. But if you can prioritize being the guest, then I highly recommend it. You want to make sure that you are aligning whatever topic you're pitching to the specific audience. I get a lot of pitches for this podcast for real estate agents, wealth investors, um, high, really, really high level business, like take your million-dollar business to$100 million business. And I'm like, you're not listening to me. You're not listening to, you're not actually thinking about who my target audience is. I don't talk anything about real estate, I don't talk anything about businesses. I'm not talking about million to 10 million to 100 million dollar businesses. I mean, if you are listening and that's the business you're running, amazing. But I think that the majority of my listeners are more solopreneurs who are working in like the six-figure to seven-figure range or building up to that range, right? Like, so anyway, when I get pitches that are so disaligned with my audience, I just completely ignore them. I don't even respond anymore because I'm like, you didn't even listen. Or they listen to one episode and they'll be like, I really loved when you said direct quote from the first 30 seconds of my episode and nothing else. I'm like, do you really love that? Because I don't feel like you listen to the rest of the episode. Anyway, make sure that your pitch is aligned with the audience and the niche of the podcast in general, but make sure that you also have a specific expertise and unique angle that hasn't been brought to that podcast, at least recently, right? Because people don't want to be listening to guest after guest after guest talking about the exact same thing. And you also want to be able to weave in at least the topic of your summit seamlessly and naturally. You don't want it to sound like a pitch, you want it to sound like something that is just part of your experience, part of your business, and to have it flow naturally in the conversation, whether it's your summit directly or just the topic of your summit, so you can bring people who be interested in that information, in that topic to your world, so that when the summit does come around, then you will have more people in your audience that are interested. Because this podcast tour doesn't have to happen in the promo period of your summit. In fact, that's probably adding too much to your plate. You're probably wanting to you're probably gonna want to do this like one to three or more months before your your summit is going live. You can also repurpose these um appearances, if you will, into shorter clips for social media, for your emails, so that you can continue to use this content beyond just that one interview. That's always a really great idea. And if you're not interested in going other on other people's podcasts, you could also get increased visibility by being a speaker in other summits. And so, depending on how well aligned your topic is with the summit and how aligned your audience is with the summit, you can get a lot of uh visibility by speaking at a summit. So that's another option is to put in applications to be a speaker at summits. And what I found in the past is the more summits I speak at, the more summits I'm invited to. And so I've gone through seasons where I've been speaking at a summit basically every single month, and I had to apply for like maybe half of them, and usually it was like the first half, and then the invitations started coming in. And then I went through a period where I wasn't speaking, and so I was declining all of the invitations I was getting. And now I'm back to wanting to speak at summits, and I applied to a couple, and then all of a sudden I got two or three invitations to speak at other summits, and so just kind of this like natural the more you're speaking, the more you'll get invited. And so that can be a really great way to increase your visibility as well if you're not interested in being on other people's podcasts. So I hope that these three ways have given you some ideas, some things to think about. If you have a summit coming up that are long-term, like growing your audience, getting more visible through the podcast tour, nurturing your audience with regular long-form content, making sure that you're sending consistent emails every week or every other week, whatever is your natural flow, long before your summit comes up, so that when you do your social media blitz or your organic audience blitz, and you're all of a sudden sending a couple emails a week and you're posting about this summit again and again and again on social media, and your long form content is all about your summit, that people are already warmed up to you and already excited about everything you have to offer because you weren't ghosting them before. You really don't want to be ghosting people. That is just bad practice. And using your affiliates, so making sure as much as possible you have speakers who have aligned audiences, aligned niches that are going to be promoting to people who will be interested in the summit topic and in what you have to offer after the summit. And just working the promotion or the like a visibility strategy, the podcast tour, or being a speaker in other people's summits into the natural rhythm of your business as much as possible. Remember, ads are not necessary, and this is coming from a Facebook ad strategy. You can have a very, very successful summit without them. And then round two, three, four, whenever you feel ready to add ads in, they will amplify what you already have going on. So thank you so much for being here and being a part of this Saturday strategy session. Until next time, 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 Hey at Shenzea. I would love to connect with you there. So send me a DM and let's do this thing.