126: Why You Don't Need a Huge Audience to Host a Successful Virtual Summit

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Welcome to the Course Creators MBA podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Destiny Kopp, and I help business owners increase their revenue with digital products and evergreen sales funnels. Today we're in our podcast series talking all about virtual summits. If you've been following me for a while, you you know that I'm a big fan of virtual summits. I've hosted several of them in the past and used them as our main business building strategy in our hobby school brand. So I wanted to bring some virtual summit experts together and walk you through the strategies behind virtual summits and when you may want to use them in your business. Before we jump into today's episodes, don't forget to sign up for our free class the three part framework to triple your monthly revenue with a virtual Summit. While building your list for free, I have put the link to sign up in the podcast show notes, so don't forget to grab it there. Let's jump right into our show.

And today I have with me Krista Miller with Summit in a Box. And we are continuing our series on virtual summits. And today we're going to be answering all of your frequently asked questions. And Krista, I have some myself that might not be on the list here that we've kind of talked about, but why don't we jump right in? And one of the questions that I've been asked all the time is related to should I host a summit when I might not have very many people on my email list or I don't have very many people following me on social media? Am I big enough? Right? Am I, am I a big enough deal to host a virtual summit? Will people actually want to come speak in my summit?

Oh my gosh, yes. This is like one of the biggest things that held me back from hosting my first summit is I was like, speakers are literally going to laugh at me when I pitch them. They're gonna be like, who the heck are you to host a summit? I believed that fully for so long and now I know. The truth of it is that that's silly. Waiting to host a summit until you have an audience is totally backwards because a summit will bring you that audience. Now, if you're starting from scratch, are you going to go land like Amy Porterfield as a speaker? Probably not. But the good news is you do not have to to see incredible results with your summit. Something else I want you to keep in mind here is that your speakers aren't going to know how big your audience is. I've pitched over 120 speakers at this point, I have never once been asked what the size of my audience was. There was one time where someone asked how big the summit was the last time we hosted it, because she knew we'd hosted it several times before. I've never had anyone come out and ask the size of the audience. What they're going to be paying attention to is, do I want to get in front of the audience? This summit is set up to create, to serve. Like, is this the audience I want to be in front of? That's your biggest selling point. They'll also look at the topic of your summit. Like, do I resonate with this? You know, is this a topic I'm interested in, want to be associated with? And they'll also pay attention to, like, how organized and put together you look like you are when you pitch them. Like, for example, I've been sent pitches like, hey, like, on Facebook, someone will send me a message, hey, I'm hosting a summit about this. Do you want to be a part of it? Like, well, as of right now, no, because you're telling me nothing about it. So if you go in with a pitch that shows that it's for an audience they want to be a part of, it's a topic they're excited about, and you have your ducks in a row and you know what you're doing, that's the key to land these speakers, at least for me. Like, I'm never going to respond to be like, whoa, how big is your email list? Is this worth my time? No. If it's a summit, I want. Want, like, an audience I want to be in front of, I'm going to say yes to that. So you do not need an audience to host a summit. A summit will bring you the audience.

I think that's a good point. And as I, as I was thinking about people that we've pitched, and I know I've pitched over 100 people, too, in the various summits that we've done. I don't think I've ever been asked that either.

Yeah, right. People, like, they don't. They just pay attention to other things. They want to. They want to see that you're like a legit business owner and you know what you're doing. But, like, the exact audience size is a very small factor.

I do agree with you. They are paying attention to how well you, you know, do you have your act together? Right? Do you. Do you have. Are you providing the right information or enough information about. For. For them to make a educated decision on whether or not they want to participate. Okay, so moving on, the next question that we have for you is when is the right time to host a summit? Whether it's the time of year or the right time in our business.

Yeah. So for this, like, a lot of people think there are certain requirements they have to meet to host a summit. Like the big audience we just talked about, I need to wait till I have this many people, until I've sold this many of this thing, until I have many, like, friends in the industry. Really none of that matters. The biggest qualifiers I look at for like, if you're ready to host a summit are have you successfully, like, do you have something that sells? I don't care if you sold like two beta versions of your course to an email list of like 50 people that tells me that you have an offer that sells, you know, messaging that works with your people, you have a problem that they need solved to tie into your summit. That's really like, that's all I need to know. You know, if you can sell an offer, the odds are you can get messaging right for a summit. So you don't have to worry about any other factors there to like, judge your worthiness or if you're a big enough deal to host a summit. As far as, like, knowing when it's right. As for the time of year, there's a few things I like to look at here. First, I like to start by looking at when is not a good time for my audience. So for me, I kind of target. My audience is pretty wide. But like course creators, membership sign owners, a lot of different types of online business owners for them. Like, I know that October is an absolutely nuts launch month. I think, like, everyone's coming back from a summer away, kids are back in school, and everyone like whips together a launch as quickly as possible. And it ends up that everyone's launching in October. They don't want to, to wait till November or December when the holidays hit. So October is when it is. So I know for me, October is a bad time for me to personally host a summit because there's going to be so many other launches and events going on. I also know that like December is a terrible, like a late December at least is a bad time for my audience because everyone's kind of checked out for the holidays, right? Maybe if you are hosting a summit for like, for people who travel, maybe it's. It's a travel summit and all of your audience is like traveling in the summer. You probably don't want to host a summit in the summer. If you target like brick and mortar business owners, you probably don't want to do an event in November and December when they are like hustling hard, trying to keep up with demand for their products for the holidays. Right? So look at when it's not a good time for your audience and then also consider when it's not a great time, like for you. When do you have other things going on in your life or business? Are you planning other launches? Do you have a like super full client schedule? Pay attention to those things and then give yourself plenty of time to host it. And I know that kind of like ties into another question we have, but like, you don't want to rush the process. So look far enough out where you're not going to like hate yourself for doing it when it's not a terrible time for your audience and it's a good time for you as well.

Well, and let's jump right into that question. How long do you need to plan a summit?

Yes, I like to see you take at least 90 days to plan a summit. And even as someone who has hosted like, what, eight summits of my own, I have all of the templates. I have a team to help. I still give myself 90 days. We have people come into our programs, we're like, oh no, I can do it faster than that. But the thing is, it's not all about you in this timeframe. You need time to like, figure out who you're going to pitch and then pitch them and wait to hear back. Once you do hear back, you need to give them time to create their presentations and give them time. Like give them time to do that, like four plus weeks to create their presentations. So you're waiting again. Then you need to allow time for a two to three week promotion period. So like you're waiting again and during this time you're not like actually sitting back and waiting. There are things to do. But I always like to point out that 90 day timeline isn't just about you hustling hard to offer a good experience for your speakers. You need to give them plenty of time too. And there's a lot of things that go into a summit that, that are more things that are below the surface. Like you're not going to watch someone else's summit or even speak at someone else's summit and see all of the things going on to make the event work. There's actually a lot more to it than you might realize. So give yourself 90 days. You will not regret it and you won't regret giving yourself more time than that too. So you can kind of take it slow and enjoy the process as well.

And I can attest to that. You definitely need to give your speakers four weeks and at least to put together their presentations. Sometimes we think they have them in their back pocket. They don't. You know, they need time to, you know, put it together, record it, and make sure that they're comfortable with it and to set up their own sales funnels. Right. Because they want to make sure that their free gift and everything that they're giving your audience as part of the summit, that it's working and everything's set up appropriately. So I definitely agree with you on that. Let's jump right in and talk about tech because I know people have questions, questions about tech and what's required. And, you know, some of us are a little bit intimidated by this, quite frankly.

Yeah. And I'm always like, excited to be able to tell you that you don't need any specific kind of tech to host a summit. You don't need any of those 10, $20,000 event platforms. You don't need one of the cheap event platforms. If you have a website for your business, if you're selling like a course, a membership, anything like that, you probably have most of what you need. You can host the main pages for your summit on whatever website platform you use. We have clients using WordPress, Kajabi, Shopify, Squarespace. Like anything, any platform out there is totally fine. And the rest of it is also very flexible. So again, if you're selling a course and you're on like teachable or using a WordPress WordPress plugin, or you're on Kajabi, like any of those things are going to work to host a summit. You don't need anything special. Sometimes that means you need to do some integrations. Like you might need zapier to communicate between a few things. And if, if you don't have one of those pieces of tech, it's a good excuse to. Good excuse to get it. So maybe you're not selling a course yet and you were going to have to go through the work of figuring out where you can do that anyways. Kind of keep that in mind as you're figuring out what you want to use for your summit. Like, ThriveCart is one of my very favorite platforms for, like, if you don't already have a CART platform, if you don't already have a course platform. Now that they have their like, learning management system. That's a great all in one Place to like be able to do most of what you need for the sales and all access pass side of a summit all in one place for a one time fee. But yeah, the good news is you don't need anything special and I love that.

And I will say that for hobby school, we're using LeadPages and ThriveCart.

Nice.

With the ThriveCart Learn and ConvertKit. I've also used Kajabi with ConvertKit. So, you know, I agree with you. It's really probably most people probably already have these tools out there that they're using to host these summits.

Yep. Yeah, totally agree. And if I was going to start from scratch, I would probably also go with Kajabi. And a lot of mine have been on WordPress with ConvertKit and then like just WordPress plugins without anything extra added on. So super flexible.

So tell us a little bit about some summit hosting mistakes. And I know that I've made some of these myself, but what do you see people doing wrong when they're just getting started?

Yeah. So I would say the first thing kind of ties back to the timeline question we had and that's thinking that they're going to host a summit in like four or five weeks. It just does not work that way. We have had some students come into our program and try it and they are like first to sit right alongside me here and be like, do not, do not do it. It's just not a good experience for anybody and you're not going to see the results you could if you gave the process more time. So rushing the process is definitely a big mistake. Like, I know it's so exciting to get an idea, see everything it could do for your business and just like want to jump right in. But that's just not quite how a summit goes. I would see another big mistake is one that we touched on in one of our last episodes and that's pitching speakers who are not quite the right fit for your summit. So when you're hosting a summit, you have a specific audience and topic in mind and it's really easy then to like just go and pitch the first people that come to mind because that's going to feel comfortable to you. It's not going to feel as scary as, or as intimidating. But if you're not really intentional about who you're pitching, it's just not going to have the benefits for you or for them. If they're promoting to an audience that the summit wasn't specifically made for, they can promote like all they want. But it's not going to actually attract anybody because no one's going to sign up for something that's not created for them. So pitching the wrong speakers is another really big mistake. And one more that I'll bring up. Like, all of these are so big, but the next one is one that I talk a lot about and that is not getting really specific with the audience your summit is for and what your event is about. So a lot of us out there target pretty broad audiences for our business. Like, for me, I would say I target like online business owners, which is a really huge audience. I see. Yeah, I see people targeting creative business owners, moms, professionals. These types of audiences are not going to work for a summit. So a lot of the time you'll find that your summit audience needs to be more specific than your business audience. If you go out and try to host a summit for online business owners, I'm sorry, it's just not going to go well. It's not going to go well. People are not going to be excited to sign up. You're going to have to have super general information. Speakers aren't going to be as excited to promote. But when you get specific, that's where the magic with the summit really happens. I've hosted six summits for brand and web designers for this business. Since I know I can't host a summit for all online business owners, we do different editions of it. So our summit has had course creator edition, membership site edition, speaker edition, Podcasters edition, and even those are pretty broad. But it works a whole lot better. Better than just hosting like a summit about summits for all online business owners. We can get so much more specific with the actual benefits for those people. Like, instead of me just saying grow your audience and make money for us through a summit, I can say to course creators, have your biggest course launch yet through a summit for membership sign owners, we can say add your next 50 to 100 members through a summit. You can get so much more specific. So take the time to really narrow in on your audience and then figure out a summit topic that is specific to them and solves a problem they really, really need solved that you can make actionable through your summit. And not doing that is one of the biggest mistakes I see. That's going to be the difference between like truly 20% conversion rates for your registration page to like 50, 60%. It's the difference between 3% conversions on your All Access pass to 12 15%. Like you can truly like quadruple or more 10x the results of your summit, when you get really specific with those.

Things and sometimes that's hard to do. So you really, you really gotta sit down and kind of think through that and figure out, you know, who exactly am I going to be targeting here? So the next question I have for you is kind of a two part question. And the first question is, should I do a free summit or paid summit where people actually have to pay to attend? And if I do a free summit, how do I monetize it?

Yes. Okay, so let's talk about should I do a free event or a paid one? And we actually just ran our first paid event a couple months ago, so we could test this and have actual numbers to share. I had some guesses as to, like, what I thought the pros and cons were of both. And we were able to kind of confirm that with running a paid event, if your goal is to bring in thousands of new leads, connect with a whole bunch of industry experts, engage those new leads and your existing audience and make a whole bunch of sales and, you know, sell an offer on the back end, whether that's a service, low price membership, premium course, high ticket program, a free event is what you want to do. Okay, that's not to say that paid events don't work or anything, but paid events are not going to give you that influx of leads that a summit does. Paid events are great when you have a large existing audience that you want to host some kind of engaging launch event for, But a paid event is not going to bring you an audience and to kind of like put this in numbers. Back in 2020 is the last time we hosted a summit for this business. We had about 2,000 people on our email list and we were able to get 1500 attendees signed up for a free summit. And we ended up making like a total of 68,000 in sales this year. We just hosted a paid event. Our email list now has about 10,000 people on it. So five times bigger than when we hosted a free event. We brought in less than 70 new email subscribers with that event and we made about the same amount of money. So, like, our audience is five times bigger. And it was not a list building thing. It was like a launch method. So if you're looking to grow your list, grow your visibility in your network, and then see all of those backend benefits that we've been talking about throughout this series, a free summit is the way to go. Does that make sense before I dive into the next part?

Oh, that does. Absolutely, that does. So with the paid event, I just want to make sure I have my numbers here. Right. Because I was kind of writing down as you were talking. It was, it really just brought in, you said 70 new email subscribers versus the 1500 that you had on your other one. That's a huge difference.

It was a very big difference promotion. Like all the conversion rates were down, of course, because it was a paid ticket. It was a low price paid ticket, but it required much more buy in from people. And we still had speakers and affiliates that promoted but their promotion just wasn't nearly as successful as it was with the free event. And the difference I've keyed in on there is when you have a free summit, it is so much easier for people at all different points of their journey to sign up. It could be someone who didn't even know they were interested in the topic of your summit, but they see someone promoting, they're like, oh, that kind of sounds interesting. And it's free, so like I might as well sign up. Right. There's no barrier for them, but when there's a paid ticket, it makes them think much harder. They're only going to sign up for that if it's something they're really interested in learning about right now. And because of that, like conversion rates to anything you're launching through a paid event, they are going to be higher because it's people who are like ready right now to take action. But you have so many less people signed up that like it. You're still probably going to see fewer result, like less lower results with a paid event. Unless you already have a big audience that you're promoting it to.

And then you said you, you got the same amount of money from the summit itself, right?

Yep. Yeah. Within a couple thousand, the, our free Summit brought in 68, or wait, maybe it was 78,000 total for the free summit and then this paid one brought in 68.

Wow. So almost. That's not very.

It was not a huge difference.

No. So let's talk about how do we monetize a free summit?

Yeah. So yeah, that's like a big concern everyone has is, especially when I'm talking about a summit as a revenue generating task. They're like, well, how is a free summit going to make me money? The first chance to do that is with an all access pass. So people sign up to your summit for free. And then all throughout the event, starting immediately after they sign up, they're being offered a chance to upgrade for ongoing access to the replays, special bonuses from you, maybe some live sessions and the most important part is really high value related bonuses from your speaker. So it's kind of like tying in a paid bundle along with your summit. That's going to be your first chance to make money. With the way we teach All Access Passes, our students see anywhere from like 10 to 25% conversion rates with that. And that's a chance to bring in tens of thousands of dollars. So our very first summ, I started with less than 500 people on my email list and we brought in 16,000 through the all Access Pass, which for me was absolutely life changing. At the time we were making 3 to $4,000 in my business and 16k all in one go was like absolutely blew my mind. And in future summits we've made up to 121,000 in sales just from the All Access Pass. And this is also a great way to be able to benefit your speakers because they can promote, make affiliate commissions and earn money from participating. And then another way you can make money is through sponsorships. A lot of people kind of rule them out, rule themselves out for sponsorships for a first time summit. You can absolutely get sponsorships for a well positioned first time summit. So that is another route you can take. I've only actually pursued sponsorships with my most recent event. We brought in $12,000 in sponsorships through the last summit I hosted. And that was a great way to have money sitting to kind of fund like ads or anything like that. There was just like no pressure because we, we weren't spending money out of pocket for those things. We already had money from SP sponsorship sitting there. And then another really powerful way that we're, we're working really hard at Summit in a Box to build awareness of is the opportunity to launch your offer through a summit. And that adds on like the third tier of monetizing. So you have the All Access Pass, you have sponsorships if you choose to, and then you have an incredible chance to launch your offer on the back end.

So that's a lot of opportunities to make money. Even if you just initially focused on the All Access Pass and maybe launched a new offer later. I mean you can just start with one piece and then that's, you know, once you do your summit again in the future, you have other monetary monetization opportunities. Did I say that right?

You sure did.

Monetization opportunities that you can do later on.

Yeah, and that's so true. We, like I said, we posted. I don't, I'm for some reason blanking. If we've done seven or eight summits, but actually only one of our own. We have launched something on the back end. The rest, it's like we just focus on all access Pass sales because it's such a powerful revenue generator all by itself.

Well, Krista, thank you so much for joining us. Can you tell the folks where they can find you on Instagram? And then I'm going to make sure that the link for our class that we're going to be covering all of this, actually I will talk a little bit about it. We're going to be talking about four keys to skyrocket your signature offer sales with a virtual summit. I will make sure that that link is in the show notes so people can come join us for that. But tell them where they can find you on Instagram.

Yeah, you can find me on Instagram Summit in a box. I would love to connect with you over there and answer any questions you have about this podcast episode.

Krista, thank you so much for joining us for this podcast series. I love chatting with you.

Thank you so much for having me.

Thanks for listening all the way to the end of the episode. Now don't forget to sign up for our free class the three part framework to triple your monthly revenue with a virtual summit while building your list for free. Go to the link in the podcast show notes and sign up today. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.