Financial Seminar Marketing

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Prospecting With Seminars-Still a Winning Formula

If you’ve developed the opinion that seminars don’t work for building your business, read this article.

Seminars don’t work when they are done incorrectly. Make a few changes, and you can have 70 people, every month, attend to hear your wisdom. Over the next few weeks, I will discuss a separate seminar tip in each edition. The combined use of these tips will successfully fill up the seminar room and fill your calendar with appointments.

The first issue is matching your message to the market. It’s a simple idea that many professionals skip over, assuming they know the audience. For example, let’s assume you want to market a seminar to people age 60 and over. To develop a winning invitation, you need to know how these people think. You cannot assume that your market thinks like you do. If you’re 40 years old, you probably want to know about opportunities to make money. But people over 60 (in most cases) are not motivated to make more money. They care about preserving capital. Their biggest concern is fear of losing principal (their “hot button”). So is it any wonder that your opportunity-oriented seminar titled, “How to Maximize Profits with the Right Mutual Funds,” doesn’t get much of a response?

You could triple your attendance with the right title, such as “Six Ways Retirees Ruin Their Finances.” This title appeals directly to their fear and will pull in the attendance (I have very successfully tested this title over a dozen times). Whichever target market you choose, you really need to know their most significant emotional concern. If you can title a seminar addressing that concern, you’re halfway home. If you’re not sure, don’t make assumptions.

For example, do business owners care most about more profit (which would be an easy assumption to make)? Or is their greatest concern having more free time with the kids? Until you really know the answer, your marketing cannot be very effective because you don’t know your market’s hot button. To learn what motivates your market, you need to speak with several members of your audience, one to one. If you find several hot buttons, I will tell you how to use them all next month.