Make a fortune when you correct these mistakes in seminar marketing

Copyright (c) 2006 Larry Klein

You can make a fortune using seminars as a marketing tool.
Smart financial advisors, attorneys, CPAs, real estate
agents, mortgage brokers and other professionals and
business owners use seminar marketing to pack a room of
potential new clients and turn them into business. Rather
than prospecting one person at a time, you have a room of
50 people.

First, do your research and know what your market wants.
Call potential attendees and ask them: What's the biggest
challenge in your business? If there would be one thing you
could change about your financial situation, what would it
be? What aspect of your life is most out of balance? Or
send a survey or do a teleconference but you must gather
this information.

Too many professionals and business owners dive into
seminar marketing and choose a topic based on their
perceptions rather than asking their market. Okay, now that
you have your topic, you must convert it into a message
that packs the seminar room.

The next mistake in seminar marketing is not putting enough
effort or applying enough expertise to the seminar
invitation. AS THE MINISTERS SAY, YOU CAN'T SAVE SOULS IN
AN EMPTY CHURCH. So if your attendance is poor, you've lost
money and missed an opportunity to help potential attendees
with your wisdom, product or service.

Your seminar invitation must be a super compelling,
motivational piece that would sell ice to eskimos. You've
got two choices-either develop the skills to write great
copy or hire a copywriter to write your seminar invitation.
To develop the skills, study books like Cash Copy by
Jeffrey Lant, Magic Words that Bring You Riches by Ted
Nicholas or any books by John Caples. Alternatively, hire
a copywriter and simply pay them to do it. A good
copywriter is about the best seminar marketing investment
you can make.

Just to give you an example of the difference that copy
makes, which seminar would you rather attend:

"What's the Stock Market Doing This Year" Or "Five Ways
these Wealthy Investors Make Consistent Profits in the
Stock Market"

Is it any surprise that the second title will gain far
greater seminar attendance?

Now you know what your target market wants and you've
created a seminar invitation with compelling language.
Attendees show up and they love the presentation. So what?
How will you turn this successful seminar event into
business? Just because you give a great and enlightening
presentation does not mean anyone will call you. That's
our third common mistake: failure to have a mechanism to
convert attendees into clients.

The seminar must end with an invitation to meet with you
(or a colleague). Even though your presentation was great
and showed your attendees several great ideas, you still
need the final killer offer so that they make a commitment
to meet with you before they leave. You must have such a
process before they leave because if you think you can call
later and set appointments, forget it. Your prospects will
have cooled off.

Your final killer offer ties back to what you learned when
you did your initial research. Let's say you're an estate
planning attorney and you learned that a common and
frequent concern was that your audience is worried that
their heirs will spend their inheritance foolishly. In that
case, your final offer sounds like this:

"You've learned a great deal about how to plan an estate
well and I'd like to show you how to put these techniques
to work in your situation. So I have set aside some free
consultation times for which I normally charge $300. But
for those of you who were nice enough to put up with me
today, I can offer you those consultation hours for free.
At that meeting I will answers any questions that you have
about your estate plan and additionally, I will show you
three ways to keep heirs from spending their inheritance
and how to protect those assets from their creditors.
Since I have fewer consultation slots available than people
are here today, please check off a time and date right
now….."

Now, you have created a hungry audience for your scarce
time and to get information that's important to them. From
a crowd of say 50 people, you can get appointments with at
least half and 90% of those will become clients. Now
that's successful seminar marketing.

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Larry Klein CPA/PFS,CFP(r),CRFA(TM) is a national financial
speaker and expert in markteing financial services and
seminar marketing. You can access his entire library of
seminar marketing articles at
http://www.financial-seminar.net