Overview:

Suzi organized two successful online summits for women entrepreneurs over two years, bringing in high-profile speakers like Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki. The summits were free to attend and included video sessions, workbooks, and playlists. Marketing involved landing pages, social proof, and outreach to Suzi's contacts. Over 85% of attendees were new leads. Recordings were repurposed as podcast episodes extending their reach. Relationships with speakers provided ongoing opportunities.

Lessons included being more strategic about converting leads to paid offerings. While successful, Suzi notes the importance of thorough planning and production for such a major undertaking.

Automatically-Generated Transcription:

We've got Suzi as a a second presenter.

Suzi's gonna be gearing her latest results in leveraging online summits to attract new customers.

Suzi's actually attracted top names to her summits, including, I'm sure you recognize some of them.

Jeff Godden, guy Kazaki and Robert Cini presented them and she's been doing them well before Covid.

However, given live events are so difficult to hold right now, there's probably never been a better time to run a summit.

And, uh, you know, a bit of background about Suzi.

They started in the spare room of her Sydney apartment in 1994 and they started the boutique events company that represented speakers and authors from the s a here in Australia Power events.

Some of you've probably heard of it and know some of the speakers that she presented.

She's grown multimillion dollar or multiple multimillion dollar businesses in the events publishing and education niches with teams in Australia, New Zealand, and the us.

So, without further ado, I'll hold it up, hand it over to to Suzi.

And I'll also make you a co-presenter, Suzi, so you can do that.

Please Do.

And I can share my not as good as David's slides.

Nobody can Sit with David's slides.

Let me see if this is gonna do it.

Can you see that?

Yep.

Oh, so what happens is now, oh, the view changes and I can't see you guys.

Okay.

All right.

So I'm Suzi.

I had 13 years experience in live events before the internet was a big thing, but I have been online since 90, 19 98.

So very early on in webinars and online content, early classes, podcasting, online courses, things like that.

But a summit was a brand new kind of format for us, but it brought together a lot of the things that we had experienced with.

And so last year, 2019, I have to be able to do two things at once.

I usually have someone advance my slides when I do presentations.

Here we go.

We decided to do a summit at the beginning of last year.

It, so a summit, in case anyone hasn't been to them, usually is centered around a topic.

Our topic was business growth for women entrepreneurs, 'cause that is our ideal client.

And it was about bringing together world-class speakers, bestselling authors, celebrity entrepreneurs.

And the theme was the mastering the inner and out game of business for maximum profits and ultimate happiness.

And so this inner and out game is very in line with what we teach.

That being successful in business is not just about what you're doing and the skills you have.

It's all about who you're being as well and your mindset.

So we took this to market early 2019.

We repeated in 2020 with a different lineup.

I'll take you through that.

But basically it was held over a series of days.

It was a five day program, you could register, it was free and you could get access for a limited time.

So the doors open on the Monday and they were due to close on the Friday afternoon.

And each day we released a number of different sessions.

So if you joined before the Monday, you got the whole week.

If you joined on the Tuesday, then you know you could catch up and watch for the rest of the week.

It was like going to a conference, but it was online.

And that meant we could have people from all over Australia.

And we had actually had a lot of international people as well.

The sessions were all prerecorded.

And a couple of things we didn't do that you might've seen on other summits, we did not offer to sell the recordings to people who couldn't make it.

And there were no pitchy pitchy presentation.

So none of the presenters came pitching anything in an overt way.

We had one goal for the whole thing and it was to build our audience and to generate leads.

And that was the goal.

We started off with a goal of 1500 people and then when we got to the 1500, we set another goal.

And I'll take you through some of those stats.

I'm not a big numbers person, but I've brought some stats 'cause I know a lot of people in this group are, you know, big on the numbers as we, I guess all should be some simple numbers.

We had 5,000 attendees in 20, uh, registrations rather in 2019, this was our all-star cast.

There were people as got mentioned, like Seth Godin, guy Kawasaki, Stu McLaren, Robert Aldini, Dan Pink Porterfield, Mike Malowitz, Jay B, there's some of the names you'll know.

And then there'll be some people you don't know because there was a mix of people who were known and they were kind of our headliners.

Then there were people who might be known in our audience, but not generally.

And then there were people that were strategically placed there because I wanted to introduce them because we have an affiliation or we were gonna be doing something else with these people.

So that was that lineup.

And there was 16 speakers.

In 2020, we actually had 12 speakers.

And again, some big names, Gabby Bernstein, Kim Kiyosaki, who is part of the Rich Dad brand, who else might, you know him?

Marie Folio, Ike Mitz, again the author of Grit and a couple of other people.

So nice, big juicy names and enough headliners to get attention and get results.

As far as the marketing, it was pretty simple.

We had some landing pages in Lead pages, a video from me, the headliners sort of near the top of the page.

And then a little further down the descriptions of their sessions.

Now, because the marketing was happening before the podcast, the podcast, the interviews were being recorded and we didn't know exactly what they were gonna say.

This was very much created from our, our team, just saying, what would be a compelling headline?

What do we know about this person?

What is Suzi gonna be asking them about?

Because it was sort of happening in tandem.

We had to go out to market and do the recording and preparing of interviews behind the scenes.

While it was free, we wanted people to really feel like it was a juicy offering.

And so like any good offer, we offered some bonuses.

And so we had a summit workbook, which had profiles from the speak each of the speakers and workshop type pages for people to fill things out, fill in the gaps, take you know, top takeaways, top tips, what I'm gonna implement.

Very, very, very hands-on, kind of handy.

The second thing there, which I'll talk more about in a minute, was a playlist.

So if you couldn't make all the sessions, we would create for you a selection of items that we thought were best suited to you and your business.

And I'll tell you how we did that in just a moment.

And then we had a Facebook community.

So the first year we just sent everyone to our page, which was great for our page stats.

And the page numbers grew and we could retarget.

The second year, we decided that we would put them in a group because we knew that we were gonna convert this group to an ongoing free group for the her business community that we would use to nurture people before we made them paid offers.

So did it slightly differently.

And there's advantages and you know, of pages over groups and groups over pages, depending on what your strategy is.

We had the usual sort of things like a pop-up on the page to make sure we captured as many people as possible.

But we also used the tool proof, which shows you, you know, Mary in Gunda guy just purchased this, you know, so lots of social proof.

And obviously the second year we had some great testimonials that we could use on the page.

But even in the first year, we would grab anything.

So excited to see Seth Godin.

Can't wait to hear Marie.

For Leo, this sounds amazing.

I've invited my 10 friends.

You know, we used as much social proof as we could, really putting in place all of child Dini's influence principles, which some of you will be really familiar with.

We did Facebook ads, that was our main driver.

And it was again, by design that we were gonna pay for traffic, we were gonna pay for these leads.

And so we had all sorts of different assets.

We tried gifts, we tried stills, we tried videos of me.

We led with the headliners, interestingly, because we're a business called her business and we are designed to support women business owners.

But we had men speakers.

Some women took offense to this, which was really interesting and a little bit upsetting that they thought, why would you have, why would you lead with Seth Godin?

It's like, well, if you know anything about marketing, you know why I am leading with Seth Godin in my marketing.

But, and plus I totally believe that mentors are mentors, right?

Whether they're men or women authors, great authors are men and women.

Actually.

It's often easier to find a good business book written by a man, unfortunately than it is by a woman.

And so, because these were world-class speakers, bestselling authors, we had a mix of both.

But the main thing was paid strategy was how we led.

Also had organic strategy with our own lists, strategic alliances and organic social.

The goal was to build awareness of who we were and what we were offering in the summit by affiliation with these big names.

And these names were chosen because they could deliver on this idea of the inner and outer game of business.

They were also chosen because by some six degrees of separation, there were people that I could make contact with and who would say yes to this invitation.

And of course, not everyone we invited came along.

But as you can see from the lineup, we had excellent, excellent, excellent, really a high hitting kind of group.

While women, as I said, we're our target market, we did have male speakers and we, we really know our ideal client.

We've been doing this for 25 years.

We know that their audiences are our audiences.

People like Seth Godin has been a mentor for years, read a lot of his books, promoted his books, have bought hundreds of his books and given, given them to our members.

So it was all very congruent with who we were and names that they would've heard recommended to them before we made it really easy to support the summit.

Firstly, it was really innovative.

It was the I just online gathering of female entrepreneurs.

So we could go out with that message, which was a really strong hook.

But we also made it really easy for people to support.

And people really did support.

Our members supported it by putting it in their newsletters with social shares, sending emails out, cheering us on.

I shared my goal with them of 1500.

And then when we hit 2000, I said, Hey, wouldn't it be amazing if we could help 5,000 women?

And they just rallied behind us and it was just amazing to watch and the speakers supported.

But here's the thing, they were not obligated to.

In fact, right out of the gate I said, there is, there's no hooks.

We're doing this interview, we're gonna promote your book or your course or whatever your message.

You are not obligated at all to share it.

Now, did we supply them with some assets so that they could share it?

Absolutely.

But we did not harass them.

That was really not it.

They weren't there to be affiliates or alliances.

We were already leaning off their name and I felt like that was a good exchange.

But they did support it, right?

And we gave them assets with their photos.

Here's the thing, they were so excited by the rest of the lineup that they were really to support, really happy to support it, especially the sec, like second tier kind of speakers to be on the same building as those high level.

They were really willing to support it, which was great.

Plus I did a lot of personal outreach, you know, to my own contacts and my own network to support past alliances that we'd work with.

Like this post here, went out to a chamber of commerce in Melbourne who I had been involved with.

So we just asked everybody to support this.

Like no holds bad.

And because it was for them, an interesting lineup, a good list of speakers to be affiliated with, they got right behind it.

We created a Facebook group, as I said, and this became really the hub for people.

Because remember, it's a, it's an event.

They're watching prerecorded sessions, they're on their own at home or at their desk, wherever they are watching, there's no feedback, there's no chat function, there's none of that.

So we made the Facebook group the place where they could congregate.

So that is where we asked them to implement, to tell us what they learned, what were their key takeaways to comment.

And they did.

Every morning at 8:00 AM we would send out an email with that day's speakers so they knew who the lineup was, but they didn't know who was coming out when.

And so the first year we had 16 speakers, so we released 3, 3, 3, 4, 3, right?

That's how it went.

And so every morning like these were your latest speakers.

And every day at 2:00 PM I would do a Facebook Live in the group where I had keyed up a member who had watched one of each of the three sessions who would come on and do their debrief.

So I got to hero my members, which I absolutely love to do and that makes them even bigger champions, but I also just wanna support them.

And so they would come on, they would talk about what they enjoyed about this session, what their key takeaways were and how they were gonna implement that in their own business.

And so we did this every day.

And then others who had watched would also comment, I would take a million screenshots, send that back to the speaker.

So there was this light, lovely upward spiral and loop in that.

I can see your question, Ken and I will come on back to that.

So we called these implementation sessions.

And so the idea was, and because we are a business organization that mentors and trains women who have a business already, how to grow and scale by implementing systems, better marketing plans, sales and marketing technology, et cetera, we are very, very practical.

And so implementation for me was as important as the fact that they had register or even showed up and watched.

And so these sessions were really about, I wanted them to get traction.

That is just who I am.

That's really important to me.

So even though the goal was lead generation, I really wanted these women to have some takeaways and get some results.

And so this workbook, as I said, was something we referred back to every single day.

Okay, head on over to page 35.

Today we're talking about Marie Folio's presentation here.

What were your key takeaways?

Go ahead and put that down.

What action steps are you going to take?

And members loved getting involved, right?

So they loved being on the Facebook Lives, they loved communicating and they became big champions.

Now, we first year did a lot of international marketing because we knew that with the speakers we had a lot of their audience was in the US and at the time we thought we were gonna be releasing a course shortly after that we would be able to then use that international audience as buyers.

However, that didn't eventuate in that year.

So this year we changed it and we came became a whole lot more AU centric.

And so we had fewer men, fewer internationals this year by design.

But what we really wanted to know was who were these people?

Because again, we didn't know anything about them other than they had signed up.

Did they have their own business?

Were they men or were they women?

Were they interested in the inner game of business and more the personal development side or the outer game of business?

So we decided that we would segment them.

And the way we did that was by offering this playlist, Hey, you can't watch all the sessions.

How about we create a playlist for you, very much playing off of Spotify or something that's curated just for you.

And so we got them to answer a series of questions.

We used bucket.io, which is a survey software to have them answer a few questions about themselves.

And then we created different categories of playlists based on did they own a business, did they not?

Were they interested in the inner game or the outer game?

And because we knew what the content was of the summit, we could create some really cool playlists.

And we did, you know, here are the top four and if you have little extra time, here's some others that we recommend because they're kind of the best of the best.

And people lapped this up.

They, firstly, the moment they submitted their playlist, like when do I get my playlist?

And then they would talk about their playlist and how they had prioritized that because they weren't gonna be able to watch everything.

And they knew that it was going away at the end of the week.

So we would send them an email with their top choices.

Now this was a big project, big, big, big, big project.

And so it's definitely not for everyone.

We use teamwork to map out the project with key milestones.

We probably started planning about just over two months out, which would be the minimum I would recommend for this size project.

Because remember you've got, you know, firstly you check it's like herding cats to try and get the speakers, get them to reply, get their pa, did they get the email?

No, they didn't get the email.

Let's send the email again.

Can I get your bio?

Can I get your photo?

What are you, what are we gonna talk about?

I need that book cover, right?

It's just this circle that my team was going in.

But there were like 1500 to 2000 tasks involved on everything from interviews, writing the scripts, video recording, lower thirds, production slides, landing pages, delivery systems, emails, reminders, social advertising, you know, all those things.

And so we had set some key milestones.

We broke it up into like any good project, get broken up into, you know, all the various areas with accountabilities.

We, we were a team of eight, I think we were at the time across three different time zones and everybody played a part.

And it was pretty intense for the time we did it.

Everything was built out and we had regular meetings to stay on top of that.

We also used some other channels, like we had multiple, like we had a projects channel in Slack and then other channels for all the different areas of it.

We used Loom to train the staff on different aspects, zoom for our daily lives, speaker engagement emails, tagging them on social.

As I said, we created an asset kit for them with some swipe file copy and some images that they could use if they wanted to.

Some of them used them, some of them did their own thing, some of them didn't do anything.

And that was absolutely fine.

'cause like I said, there was no obligation.

And then for members, we gave them assets, we tagged them, we showed them what to, we gave them paragraphs of what they could put in their newsletter if they wanted to.

So we really planned for them to be able to get results for us.

So first year, 5 0 1 6, 8 registrations, two of those were already on our list.

And then you can see Facebook was really the core place.

Leads came out somewhere between two and $3 each, which was really, really good.

Some from strategic alliances, quite a lot from organic.

And that is because people were sharing.

And some from our website of the new to database leads, 80.5% were absolutely new to the database.

So we really did get our goal of generating leads.

You can see if you can read that, that the numbers built.

So from five weeks out, so we started registrations around the 25th of January and the event was 25 February and went for that week.

So that's a total of five weeks and the biggest number of registrations came in the week.

So it really had this sort of snowball kind of effect.

What else did I have here for you?

The content.

So at the end of five days, the content disappeared unless you were a member of the Her business network.

And so that meant a lot of people would no longer get access to it.

But what we did was we repurposed it.

So we created the sessions as videos inside of our library for our members.

But also I have a podcast called Her Business.

So a few weeks after the summit was done, we repurposed every single one of the videos as a show on the podcast.

So they go to live on, they're optimized for SS e o, they continue to be some of our best listened to podcast episodes because you know of the name.

Because as we know, um, apple Podcast is a search engine.

And so, you know, people find the episode with Robert Aldini or Kim Kiosaki or whomever.

And in the, and we have seen sales into our other programs, even though this wasn't our first goal and lead generation was those people are now in a nurture sequence and are being offered membership, a coaching program, our mastermind program.

And we are still, like just a couple of weeks ago we did a small wait list open for our membership and we saw people from the 2019 join.

Now as far as what we could, I'll tell you the benefits and I'll tell you what we could do better.

Benefits were authority for us being aligned with these amazing people.

Even though over the years, you know, we have done different webinars and series with different authors.

It had been quite a long time since we'd been aligned with this sort of number of big names in a short period of time.

It reenergized the database, it brought the dead back, it built loyalty with our existing customers and we got all this great new content that we could repurpose.

So not only did we create the videos for our library and the audio for our podcast, but we also took little snippets of the video and made these one to two minute clips that we are using to now drive people to the podcast episode as well.

These little nuggets of content.

So that repurposing content has been really, really valuable.

We also either rekindled relationships or created relationships.

And some of these relationships like Robert Chaldini I've known since 1995 with my events business.

He was the first speaker I ever bought out to Australia.

So it's a longstanding relationship.

You know, guy Kawasaki, Dan Pink, I've known him for years.

Seth Godin I met, you know, over 15 years ago, longer, actually more than 20 years ago.

So some of these were longstanding relationships and some of them were, as I said, by degrees of separation in saying, Hey, I'm trying to get in touch with this person.

Who knows?

Or I'm looking for an author on this topic.

Does anyone know anyone?

One of the mistakes that I think we made was that we could have really been more strategic about pivoting people into a paid product.

I did wanna sell the recordings, but next year we may design something off the back of it that need, it needs to be a good fit.

'cause remember they're coming for a summit.

They're not coming because they want to be part of the her business network or they wanna be a coach or to be certified for anything.

They're coming because of the big names.

So one thing that we wanna do is embed me more in the process while they see me on every single interview and they see that I can interview and I've got lots of experience and I ask the questions that are totally designed with the viewer in mind.

They need to see me equally as an authority and someone who can help them ongoingly.

So next year I will be one of the keynotes and position as one of the keynotes and also just play a slightly different role and also be a little more deliberate about what do I want them to do next?

Now I've got the leads.

That's awesome.

First goal check.

What do I want 'em to do next?

And there's so much value that my team and I can bring ongoingly, but if they only come because of Seth Godin and they, you know, then they're out.

And so we've gotta lead, but they're not engaged with what we're doing next.

So open to any ideas around that.

Who is it for?

So, uh, is the first thing you wanna do if you wanna do this sort of thing, especially if you're in any sort of niche, you really wanna be clear on the ideal client.

For us, it was definitely women who were growing and scaling a business.

What is it for?

Is it for leads?

Which has been our goal for the last two years.

Is it for sales?

What is it?

What resources do you have?

This is a big project.

It engaged my whole team for two months.

What skills do you already have?

I've interviewed people for the last 20 years.

So interviewing for me comes naturally.

We have in-house video production capabilities.

We have been online and delivering online events for a long time.

We know our, shes around social media.

So we had a whole lot of skills already under our belt lead time.

Give yourselves loads of time.

So we are already working now on the 2021 project only from the point of view of, hey, who are some of the names we might wanna have?

In fact, I've been making notes all year as I meet people I think, oh, they might be good for that.

But as far as the project come one November, the project will be fully scoped and we'll be in the process of even trying to get some interviews recorded before Christmas, which is always such a highfalutin idea.

'cause suddenly, you know, November, December, January seemed to disappear and just start small.

I just recently mentored this woman here to create her first summit, which just wrapped up last week.

Her name is Amanda Farmer.

She is a lawyer here in Sydney.

She's a young woman as you can see, and her niche is strata law.

And so she created this online summit for strata property owners.

So very specific who very specific ideal client called it Shared space, which is kind of cool.

And she got over a thousand people.

So she is so excited because what it's done, it's aligned her with people in that industry.

She's already got private law work, which is not really her goal.

She actually has a membership for strata property owners and managers.

And so that's kind of her backend program.

But she said to me this morning, it's opened up doors to lots of private work.

The speakers are wanting to do more work with her.

How can they align with her?

She very cleverly brought in someone from council who deals with strata law and Strata properties.

So she's got a new affiliation there.

So you can leverage this in so many ways.

And so for any of you who have a niche that you feel that you could do this type of thing on, you don't have to have 16 speakers.

You certainly don't wanna have a many more than that.

But you know, you could do it with a smaller selection of speakers and start, start small.

But I really love it.

It's a great game for me.

I have a lot of fun with it and you know, it's doing what I love, which is sharing education and amazing resources with women business owners so that they can grow more successful businesses.

That is me.

So I'll answer this question, Ken, since the presentations were prerecorded, how did you handle questions from the attendees?

Did any of the presenters log in to answer questions?

They did not actually did one there, there were a couple of local presenters who did on the day that their session came out.

I invited them into the group to answer questions.

Otherwise the, I, you know, I was facilitating the discussion.

So the, those implementation sessions, we had a chat thread and it was question and answer, you know, and I would like screenshot it, send it to the speaker, and quite often they would send a thank you note or a wow, that's amazing.

And I would feed that back into the group.

But that was as much as the, the communication was.

Kate, did you analyze attendee viewing engagement during the summit?

We didn't do that during the summit.

We did do it afterwards.

And first day, day one, look we did schedule speakers, said that we had a really strong start and a really strong finish.

But you know, there were so many good speakers every day, had at least one really strong speaker.

And so it started strong and like any of these things, it kind of petered out and there were fewer people on go, you know, as you went towards Thursday.

And then on the Friday picked up again.

And then what we did was we actually surprised them with a bonus weekend catch up just again, just to add more value and give them another couple of days to wrap up before we close the doors.

And so I think, you know, like of the 5,000, I think the highest view on any one video was about a thousand.

So that gives you a sense of that.

But again, we don't know exactly who watched which videos, but to give you a sense, I think the most watched video had about a thousand people of the 5,000 that you view.

But like I said, I don't have, I haven't crunched all the numbers.

Yeah, I hope that helps.

Yeah.

Anyone else?

That's awesome.

I, I, I just wanna say I thought that was really insightful and the big, the big takeaway for that I'm getting from today is the amount of both with your presentation and with David's is the amount of pre-work and the, the the need to be methodical has been really critical with both of these.

Yeah, with both of these.

So that's, yeah, that's, that's, That's awesome.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not something that you can wing and I think and do effectively and really hold your reputation up high.

You know, because these are people that I, I want them to be wowed by the level of production, the level.

I mean, we're representing people and so I never take that lightly.

We need to be a professional outfit.

They need to show up as them their best selves.

And there are a ton of details, but like I said, because we've been producing events for 20 something years, even though a lot of those were offline, you know, we have been doing, you know, we've been doing webinars since 2006, so there's a lot that we knew, but we are also very systemized and we're like, you know, David, like we pride ourselves on systems and procedures to be able to deliver the results we deliver.

So yeah, this isn't something for a quick start.

Like, I'm just gonna throw this together.

I've seen some nightmare summits, but Yeah, Yeah, yeah.

No, no, that the methodic one, I, I forget how many tasks you said, but it was a lot.

It was in the thousands, I think so, yeah.

Yeah.

And it's, uh, that's, that's, that's great.

So is there any other, any other questions before we go into breakouts?

I have a simple one, Suzi.

That was great.

Thank you for the presentation.

What, what would you say is the main difference between running a live event and a summit, an online summit?

Well, it's not all happening in real time, you know, with a live event.

In fact, you know, one, our annual live event, Karen, we're creating as a virtual event, like a full one day.

And it, it, we were talking about it yesterday.

It's different, you know, when you arrive there in the morning, you're unpacking boxes, you're doing the stage, the lighting, that's all happening.

This is all done.

Most of the work is done ahead of time, like the heavy lifting.

Then it's about the marketing and the getting people to watch.

And it, it's quite different to a live event.

There isn't obviously that we are, we are better at it now because all of us are sort of used to zoom.

We are better at it now that, you know, next year we would probably do some online sessions where people could break out and discuss whatever.

But it, it's very, very different 'cause it's very passive, you know, because, and because people, they're not showing up anywhere and so they're opening an email.

They're either watching the session or they're not watching the session.

Whereas when they show up for your live event, you've got them there.

Right.

It's so much easier to pitch the next thing.

It's easier to engage them.

Yeah.

I hope that answers your question.

It does.

And have, had you considered gamifying it to get more people to show, were you doing any of that?

Well, the playlist really helped, but no, we haven't.

But again, I'm up for ideas for when we do this again next year doing that.

Yeah.

And giving people more of a reason, whether it's prizes or rewards and that sort of thing.

So yeah.

I love that idea.

Mm-hmm.

Thank you.