Live events are the #1 way for life coaches, wellness experts and fitness trainers to build authority with their audience. Here’s how to produce your first event in 5 easy steps.
Live events are big ticket items in any entrepreneur’s sales funnel, but they are especially important for life/wellness coaches and fitness professionals.
Hosting a live event allows your audience to meet you in person, experience your message firsthand, and get excited about the products, services, and programs you offer.
While live events may not be able to accommodate as many people as a worldwide webinar, they allow you to connect with your audience in a personalized, substantial way while letting you charge much higher prices than you could for an online offering.
Here’s a 5-step process for conceiving, creating, and promoting your first live event as a life coach, trainer, or fitness entrepreneur:
- Dig into customer data
Before you start brainstorming topics for your event, it’s important to look at the data you already have.
- What questions do your clients need answered?
- What problems are they having right now?
- How can you provide the most value to them?
The answers to these questions should help inform the topic of your event.
Client demographics also need to be looked at in order to decide the best date, time, location, and price of your event.
If the bulk of your clients are parents, you may not want to hold live events during the beginning or end of the school year.
If your clients are yoga junkies, schedule live events in tandem with the big yoga conference in your city or state, when your audience will already be in the vicinity.
When choosing a topic and location for your even, look at the hard numbers and what you absolutely know about your clients. Avoid guessing, and if you don’t know the answer, find out!
- Form strategic partnerships
The second step in producing live events is forming strategic partnerships with other life coaches and wellness professionals. Doing so will increase the event’s appeal for your audience by offering more value than you could possibly provide on your own.
You may want to hire additional speakers, partner on a breakout session, or have a fellow wellness professional offer a Q&A with your audience.
When reaching out to potential partners, consider their availability, specify how the event will benefit them, and find the most mutually beneficial way of dealing with money.
You might want to pay them a flat rate for attending your event, or split a portion of ticket sales with them. Decide what you’re comfortable with before approaching others, and don’t be afraid to say ‘no’ if it’s not a good fit.
- Promote across platforms
It’s never too early to get started and it’s practically impossible to do too much when promoting your event!
Webinars, affiliate marketing, online marketing and direct mailings can all be used when promoting live events. Use a combination of all of these tactics to sell tickets to your event in the months, weeks, and days leading up to it.
You can….
- Appear as a podcast guest and offer listeners discounted tickets to your event
- Engage affiliate marketers to promote your event online
- Create social media ad campaigns to target past and current clients
- Send a direct mailing to targeted prospects who live nearby the event venue
Event promotion should be integrative, and should combine online and offline marketing tactics for maximum effect.
- Hire top talent
Producing live events take a lot of work because there are a lot of moving parts. If you’re a life coach and this is your first event, chances are you’ll be speaking and running the event in order to build your authority and connect with your audience.
Depending on the size of your event, it may be helpful to hire several production assistants to help with check-in, ticket sales, marketing, and all of the unforeseen challenges that are inevitable when producing a live event.
Doing so will allow you to focus on your presentation or speech and on building relationships with your tribe (not worrying about someone’s missing name tag!).
- Get participant feedback
Remember those friendly production assistants you hired in step 4? Their job’s not over yet.
Have a system in place to survey the audience at the end of your event. Get feedback on what they liked, what they didn’t, and what they’d like to see happen next year.
Make it easy and effortless for each audience member to give their opinion by offering a strong incentive for doing so, such as discounted tickets to your next live event.
Finally, take a deep breath and relax – you’ve just held your first live event, and before you know it, it’ll be time to start promoting for next year!
BONUS: MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A DEFINITE PLAN TO CAPTURE LEADS, TURN THOSE LEADS INTO CUSTOMERS AND THEN PROVIDE THEM WITH EXCELLENT SERVICE.