(MS) My 3 Best Ideas to Fill a Live or Virtual Event

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Welcome to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. My name is Russell Brunson, and I'm what you call a serial entrepreneur, but with a twist. You see, 50% of my time, I'm the CEO of ClickFunnels, helping over 100,000 brands to grow their companies with funnels, and the other 50% of my time, I'm actually in the trenches using ClickFunnels to grow the startups I believe in. During this podcast, I'll take you behind the scenes and show you how we are bootstrapping ClickFunnels and my other businesses from startup to 9 figures and beyond. Welcome to the show.

What's up, good morning everybody. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. We are officially, as of this moment, 21 days away from Funnel Hacking Live. We are preparing, we're working, we're getting everything done and having a ton of fun. Man, I'm not gonna lie, it is a lot of work. Every year I forget until we get here, I'm like, oh yeah, a lot goes into it. And it's funny too, 'cause if it was just Funnel Hacking Live, it would actually be pretty easy. But it's like Funnel Hacking Live plus we're working on all the new ClickFunnels 2.0 updates, which we call ClickFunnels 3.0 now. The new updates are amazing. Plus, like, I've been rebuilding the whole dashboard, which has taken me, it's like 70 videos I've had to record for that. Trying to get that done before Funnel Hacking Live. New onboarding process, trying to get done before Funnel Hacking Live. Plus, on top of that, my wife went to Portugal for 10 days, so she's gone, so I'm playing full-time dad as well. I'm not gonna lie, it's chaotic. It's amazing, all the things. So I'm pumped to be able to hang out with everybody here soon. So if you don't have your tickets yet, now is the time. Go to funnelhackinglive.com. But I actually wanted to talk today about, Just a thought because a lot of you guys are running events or thinking about running events. And last week I had a new program I have called Decade a Day. It's something I'm doing with all my Inner Circle members where they come in for a day and I do about 20 of them come in at a time and then we'd spend a day and I consult everyone for 15 minutes and it's really fun. And it was funny 'cause last one we had 3 or 4 people who were doing events or had questions about events. And so just wanna share some of those insights with you 'cause I thought they were interesting. The question was just like, you know, how do you, like one person's like, I have an event in 3 months, I'm trying to get 1,000 tickets sold. How many have you sold so far? Like none. I'm like, oh, step 1, plan further out. But anyway, so I was trying to give ideas and obviously there's the core things, which is like announce that you're having an event. That gets people to go sign up, right? Announce speakers, gets some people to sign up. But the one thing you'll find about events, I always tell people of all the things we sell, events are the hardest because everything else people will buy, it's like an impulse. Like, oh, I want that thing and they go buy it. With an event, they may want it, but they go like, oh, do the dates work? Can I get time off? Can I get flights, hotels? Who's gonna watch my kids? There's like 800 other mini-decisions that go into making a decision of going to an event. And so there's a lot more you're combating when you're doing stuff. So of all the things we sell, by far, selling tickets to a live event are the hardest. We've done a pretty good job of it. I mean, we get 5,000+ people every year at Funnel Hacking Live, which is, like this insurmountable task that always feels like not physically possible, and every year somehow we do it. So I said, we're down to 21 days. So one thing to note is that a third of your tickets will be sold during the last like 2 weeks, which is the worst, 'cause I don't know about you, but the whole year you're stressing out 'cause no one's buying tickets, no one's buying tickets, then a third of them come in the last 2 or 3 weeks and you're like, gosh dang it, why didn't you guys buy them earlier? So that means for all of you guys who are sitting on the fence waiting, You're almost out of time, it's time to go get those tickets. Make Russell sleep better at night by getting your tickets now. Quit waiting. Anyway, so, but the other thing I was telling him is the only way to get big pops of sales, 'cause again, with Funnel Hacking Live, it's like every day we get 10, 20 sales, and it's just this consistent stream of tickets coming in. There's never like, we sold 500 tickets tonight, you know? And so the only way to get big increases in sales are either, to raise the price or to take something away. And this is the big secret, okay? Raise the price or take something away. So raising the price, obviously raise the price, but once you do that, you raise it once or twice and people stop buying tickets. So that's usually the last thing in the campaign is raising the prices, which for us will probably happen next week, which means if you don't have your ticket yet, hurry, we're raising prices. Funnelhackinglive.com. And then the second side is taking something away. So if you notice over the campaign of a year selling Funnel Hacking Live tickets, we're always taking things away. For example, at the beginning of the year, as soon as the last year's event's over, I'm like, hey, if you want the replays, you gotta get your ticket to Funnel Hacking Live, and so that gets our first surge of sales right after the last event. It's like, you want the replays, you gotta buy the tickets for next year. And then we have a countdown, like, these go away if you don't buy it by this date, so we take it away, and that gets people to buy it. And then throughout the year, when we introduce speakers, we have speakers bring on speaker bonuses, and the only reason we bring on speaker bonuses, because speaker bonuses don't in and of themselves sell a lot of tickets,, but the taking away of speaker bonuses does. So I get to a point where we have a campaign where we're like, oh, speaker bonuses are expiring, and we take those away, and then we see a huge increase in sales. We'll see 300, 400 sales in the weekend when we're taking the speaker bonuses away, right? So we're always introducing something in the campaign and then taking it away, introducing something and taking it away, and that's like how we drive sales. So there's two of the biggest things we do for selling tickets to live events, and then one other thing that I I think is really kind of fun is just figuring out different hooks and different ways, like different funny things, like playing off of the questions people have in their head, like why they're not coming, right? And so we just created an ad, this actually just got done today, I think we're gonna be promoting it today, so some of you guys may have seen this depending on when this podcast goes live, but one of the guys on my team had this idea, and they're genius writers and ideas and stuff, so it's actually a video, I'm gonna play the audio for you, but it's actually a video, So I wish you could see it, 'cause it's even more funny if you can see it, but the question's like, what are the concerns? Why are people not buying tickets yet? So we're always trying to figure out what's the concern and how can we address it? And so this one, the idea was like, well, people have a lot of concerns. We're like, well, what if we made a video and a promotion about our excuse department, you know? And told people like, hey, no matter what excuse you have, we'll take care of it. Russell will literally send a video to somebody to get you out of a wedding or out of a funeral or out of a whatever you have. And so we put together this campaign and I'm literally gonna be doing this, I don't know, I'll probably end up making 20, 30, 40 videos, I'm not sure yet, for people who take us up on a ticket offer during this campaign. But we're gonna run this for a week right now. And again, it's a week until our ticket prices are going up anyway, so it's kind of like this little window and it's just like trying to resolve concerns. So it'll be a fun, playful thing, like you'll have a chance, hear the ad here in a second, but the goal is to address the fact they have an excuse. It gives us another reason to message them, to remind them of the event, and it's kind of a fun idea just to get people talking and then hopefully get rid of some of their excuses. So right now I'm gonna actually play the audio of this ad so you can hear it, and I'll come back afterwards and we can discuss a little bit more.

You wanna go to Funnel Hacking Live to get inspired by some of the world's greatest marketers and meet thousands of like-minded people. But you're not sure what's gonna come up during the dates between September 27th and the 30th. Or maybe you already committed to something really stupid, like camping. But don't fear, because here at ClickFunnels, we came up with our greatest hack yet. Introducing the ClickFunnels Official Get Out of Obligations Service. So here's how it works. All you gotta do is buy a ticket to Funnel Hacking Live anywhere between these dates. Then email your conflict to fhoexcuses@gmail.com. And then me and my team of excuse experts here will make you a custom video recording to get you out of even your most inflexible commitments. So here's a small sample of our work. Hey, what's up, Todd? I'm sorry, Gina's not gonna be able to make it to your date because she's got a date with destiny at this year's Funnel Hacking Live. I'm so sorry.

Don't give up.

Maybe next year. Hey Steph, just wanted to let you know that Mike's aunt's second cousin's mom's brother-in-law's favorite software company is having their birthday on September 27th, the same day as yours. So I'm not gonna be able to make it, but I wanna wish you a happy birthday. I hope you enjoy the bounce house. Hey, sorry Mike, Susan's got diarrhea. So remember, there's no excuse for missing Funnel Hacking Live, because here at ClickFunnels, we already have an excuse for you.

Alright, so that's the end of the ad. Again, it's just kind of a funny thing to play off of like the reasons why people are thinking about coming or not coming. What's the excuse? And so instead of just like trying to dance around it, we just dove right into it.

So just ideas for hooks.

And so we're always looking for those kind of things. So there's a campaign for all excuses, but if I was doing, you know, events, we're looking for other excuses like, oh, I can't come because It costs too much, or I can't come because of this, because of this, and we find those things, identify them, and then we create ads, videos, webinars to address those concerns and hopefully knock down those dominoes so that people get to Funnel Hacking Live. So anyway, there's some strategies, some ideas for our event peeps, and hopefully it gives you guys, first off, if you're running events, some ideas. Second off, if you're thinking about coming to Funnel Hacking Live, you realize, oh my gosh, this is Russell's 5,000th time warning us, prices are about to go up, we're about to sell out, the event's happening in less than 3 weeks, and make sure you get your tickets and get there because it's gonna be so much fun. This year's gonna be insane, I can't even wait. I got a really big announcement this year which is gonna freak some people out, but you have to be there to even find out, so that's all I can say. I'm gonna get in trouble. Alright, I appreciate you guys all for listening, thanks so much, and I will see you guys at Funnel Hacking Live. If you don't have a ticket yet, go to www.funnelhackinglive.com. Thanks everybody, talk soon.