After last Thursday’s event, Jim and I took the weekend to relax and digest what we learned. The break was nice, but now we’re ready to hit the next event up harder than ever! 😉
Here are some of the things that I learned from our first event:
- The people in the audience seemed to respond really well to the entire program, with almost everyone telling me the course was a great value (including agents who I’d consider to be quite internet savvy!). However, in marketing it to brokers and agents, many felt that the price ($149) and the time (8 hours) were too much.
- The enthusiasm of the sponsors and the ability for us to get exactly the sponsors we wanted was a pleasant surprise.
- The audience really responded well to Jim’s presentation on measuring and tracking ROI. There’s obviously a lot of pent-up demand for this kind of extremely practical, nuts-and-bolts, education.
- The most effective marketing was when brokerages/sponsors recommended that their agents/clients take part.
Based on what we learned, here are the changes we’re making to our next event in Orange County:
- We’re dropping the price to $49 per person!
- This can only be done because of the awesome sponsorships we’ve been able to get from companies like Altos Research, Inman News, Zillow, Top Producer and Diverse Solutions. The willingness of the sponsors to support our effort to spread quality internet marketing education to agents is the ONLY reason we can drop this price so darn low!
- We’re going to squeeze all of our content into 4 hours
- This will let us start at 9am and end at 1pm. To make this work, here is our new schedule:
- 9am to 9:15: Intro (by Dustin)
- 9:15 to 10:15: Creating a performance based website (by Jim)
- 10:15: 10:30: 1st break
- 10:30 to 10:45: Effectively engaging in social networks (see change #3)
- 10:45 to 11:45: Creating local communities with blogs
- 11:45 to noon: 2nd break
- Noon to 1pm: Measuring and tracking your marketing ROI
- The things we have to cut to make this work are lunch (1 hour), my discussion on social networking (from 1.5 hours to only 15 minutes), one break (15 min) and each presentation by 15 minutes.
- This will let us start at 9am and end at 1pm. To make this work, here is our new schedule:
- We will offer all attendees a free, 90-day, follow up course tentatively called Get 4RealzEd with 15 minutes a day
- I’m more convinced than ever that the best way to get people knowledgeable on how to be effective within the various social networks is NOT to lecture on them, but to simply walk agents through a variety of social networks in simple steps.
- At least for the first round, I’m going to keep this simple and send out a daily email with a simple (~15 min) social networking, blogging and/or ROI activity.
- Attendees seemed to really respond well to this idea, so I’m quite excited about it going forward!
- Our next event will be in Orange County on April 17th
- We’ve pushed back the dates on both the Orange County and San Diego events. We’re quite fortunate that some of our sponsors we’ve brought on in the past few weeks have shown an interest in helping us promote these events, so rather than rush things, we want to give them enough time to work their magic!
I really want to thank everyone for helping make the 4RealzEd event in LA such a success. I learned a tremendous amount from the first event and feel more confident than ever that I’m on to something really big! Because we’re still in the early stages of this roadshow (we haven’t even announced any events outside of southern California yet!), I expect we’ll continue to tweak things based on feedback we get from attendees and non-attendees alike, so please feel free to fire away with ideas, tips, critiques, and/or feedback… We’re listening!