Attendee Persona: The Starting Point for Your Impactful Virtual Event

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Hi there. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to ask you an important question. Are you wondering why your hard work isn't reflecting in your bank account? If so, I've got something that could change the game for you. With my Digital Product Accelerator One on one coaching program, I'm on a mission to help entrepreneurs like you bank consistent revenue without sacrificing your time, time or sanity. Imagine shifting from 90% client facing work to enjoying consistent revenue from your digital products, all while reclaiming your time. You already know that you don't need another course and a one size fits all approach isn't going to cut it. What you need is a strategic long term plan tailored just for you. So if you're ready to build the profitable, freedom giving business you've dreamed of, apply to work with me by going to destinycop.com apply I cannot wait to learn more about you and your business. 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 automated sales funnels. In this podcast we tell the stories of ordinary business owners just like you. We talk about their story and how they got started, the challenges they've experienced and how they overcame them. These are discussions with real people who understand what it's like to own an online course or membership business. Before we begin our show today, I want to let you know that this episode is sponsored by our flagship Course in a Box program which helps you create your revenue generating course in less than a week. Course in a Box is available on AppSumo at a special deal and you can learn more about Course in a Box by visiting the link in the show notes. Let's jump right into our show.

And my special guest today is Rob Gale. Rob runs hey Summit, the event marketing platform for creators and independent entrepreneurs. Before leading hey Summit, he founded a privacy conscious social network for families and organized a non profit documentary video series profiling aspiring people making a difference across America run from a school bus. He also helped start Code youe Future Scotland, a coding school for refugees and asylum seekers. He's passionate about entrepreneurship that delivers social impact. You can reach him@robaysummit.com to talk impact summits, startups, school buses or anything Star Trek related. Rob I'm super excited about our conversation here today. We're going to be talking about about events, virtual events and how we can grow and scale our business through virtual events. But before we jump in, a couple things I want you to tell us a little bit about Star Trek or a fun fact about Star Trek and a little bit more about you and your background.

Well, thank you very much for having me. Destiny and wow. You should not ask me anything about Star Trek because we could be here for literally hours. But there are 724 episodes of Star Trek before they started on the New Year series. So why don't we just go with that as a, as a fun fact.

So 724. So I love Star Trek. I haven't watched it in years, I will say. So the new series that they have out, what is it called?

There are several. So there's one called Discovery, another one called Picard, another one called Lower Decks and there's a new one called Prodigy, so I was familiar with.

So I'm definitely going to check that out. Well, tell us a little bit more about your background and how you got into running hey Summit.

So I mean hey Summit started off as kind of most, most great things do a side project, trying to deal with a need that was, you know, that people were facing. And so my great friend Ben, Ben Dell, who people might know him as the CEO and founder of Missing Letter, he had a problem. He wanted to run an online event, a virtual summit. And he couldn't find any kind of platforms that would work for him. He's pretty particular in terms of wanting to produce something that looks nice. So he decided to just set a date and say I'm having this event, it's going to be 100 speakers and it's going to happen over two weeks. And he decided to set it about six weeks ahead of time without actually having a platform in mind. So he looked around, couldn't find anything that he liked, so he decided to build his own. And it ended up working. It was tough. But we built what would eventually become hey Summit. And it was a two week event, 100 speakers, 5,000 attendees. So it's you know, pretty, pretty decently sized. And part of the reason why there wasn't anything out there that kind of suited was because there were so many moving parts. Especially if you're thinking about virtual events, especially in the pre Covid era. It's about creating an opportunity for you to get in front of your customers without you necessarily having to have a lot of team members. So everything out there that either existed was too complex or it required too much technical skill. And so we just saw there, there was an opportunity that a lot of people wanted to run these kind of multi talk events or prerecorded summits. But the stuff out there was either really expensive or just wasn't really good enough. So that's what kind of prompted heysummit to start.

Okay, so, and I, and I can relate to some of this, you know, you people, because I've run a couple of virtual events, summits in the past myself. And you know, people that are probably listening here, probably like me, they're not extremely technical. They need something that's very easy. They can just, you know, put in their information and everything is set up for them. So I definitely want to delve into that today. But before we kind of get into that, can we talk about who is a good fit to run an online event and some of the benefits of running a virtual event for your business?

Yeah, I think that's a good, good question. And I think that when you're, especially if you're an independent entrepreneur or maybe you have a very small team, or maybe no team at all, you are, you need to be very efficient with your time. Right. And so I think there's a lot out there that is, you know, a bit of a FOMO right kind of culture out there. Oh, I need to be doing this for a lead magnet, or I need to be creating a course, or I need to be creating a podcast. I need to have everything, I need to be on all social network, social networks at the same time. There's a lot of this pressure to get out there and do everything and be everything to everyone. And we just don't have time, we don't have time for that. Especially as creators or as independent entrepreneurs, you need to, you need to test out things, you need to get in front of your audience. But at the end of the day, you know, there needs to be, you can't be focusing on things that aren't efficient with your time. And so I think that when thinking about virtual events and if they would be relevant to your business, I wouldn't be necessarily thinking about it from a point of view of thinking that creating a virtual summit, for example, is this massive thing that, that requires 30 people in order to run. That's, I think, not necessarily the right way to think about it. I think more of it's more relevant to think about whether or not a virtual event is the right way to reach your audience or not. And there are certain things that are attractive about virtual events, especially virtual summits, that make it a very efficient method of getting in front of your audience. The most important one is this idea of cross pollination. So, for example, you might have an audience, maybe you don't have a huge audience yet, maybe you have a little bit of one. The idea with cross pollination is that if you're inviting speakers to speak at your event, part of that understanding, part of the purpose of bringing those speakers on to that event is for them to get in front of your audience and for you to reach their audience. And so podcasts are good examples of cross pollination opportunities. So I come on your podcast and then I'll probably share the podcast of my audience. So I'm serving your audience, but also hopefully bringing more awareness and attention to your podcast through my network. Virtual events can have a similar effect, but to a much greater degree in a much shorter amount of time. If you're thinking about creating an event with 30 speakers, that's 30 opportunities to expand your network and to cross pollinate with other people. So it's very effective for things like that. The other thing to keep in mind is whether or not your audience is an audience that really is motivated by learning versus motivated by, let's say, connecting to each other. Either way, if you're maybe your community owner or you're a brand where you're teaching people things or training people things, virtual events can cater to both of those setups. They just need to be configured in slightly a different way. Especially if you're focused on learning primarily over over networking. You can run online events with one person, maybe two if you need to. And you can, you can make them all pre recorded if you want to. Maybe we will dive into that a little bit better. But fundamentally, when you're thinking is a virtual event right? For me we always suggest start with your customer, start with your attendee. Build out what we call an attendee Persona. Try and understand what is it that they want, how can you provide that to them? And is an online event the right mechanism to provide that information, that value that you want to give to your audience?

I love that. Build out your attendee Persona. That's a great tip there. So let's go into it. You talked about a little bit about the presentations or the training can be pre recorded. What are some ways that you can structure a virtual event?

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So an online event is basically a collection of talks over a specific amount of time. I know that sounds very simplistic, but when you unpack that, that can take the mold of a lot of different things. Especially if you're a smaller scale team. Let's say you only have a few people on your team or maybe you're just on your own. You might not want to have 30 people being live one after another worrying about different people's zoom connections or, or what have you. And so in order to help with that pre record them, you can, you can either ask for recordings from your speakers, or you can interview them and record them ahead of time and then schedule those sessions to go live at particular times. So you can still have that excitement when it for an event that is happening exactly on the 20th, but then starting at 9am the first video goes live, then the second, then the third, etc. We also see people doing really cool things with hybrid events, which for us means that the talk itself is prerecorded, but the speaker is on the live chat and there to answer people's questions at the same time. So you're still able to get that, that excitement, that bringing together of people at one specific time. But you're not having to worry about some of the technical worries, especially when you're on a small team or a team of one.

So I will let you know that I have done events where we did the live presentations and then I've done several events where we've done the pre recorded ones. And I highly recommend the pre recorded ones because technical issues always happen, always happen, always happen, always happen.

But it also doesn't mean that you can't do a mixture of both. So I think some people might not realize that as well, especially if your audience like the idea of being live in some ways. But maybe there's a networking component. You can have a whole bunch of prerecorded talks, but then a live networking together. Or maybe your kickoff is live, but then a lot of your sessions are prerecorded. So there's a lot of flexibility there in terms of how you construct it.

And I love that. So for the folks who are listening, because when we did the scale your business summit, so we had some of the live kind of streams in the Facebook group, and then we had some of the live streams like in the co working sessions that we had every day. And then we had kind of a live with the ask me anything for the panel with some of the speaker speakers. So that was live, but everything else was prerecorded and I didn't have to worry about it. So super, super easy there.

Absolutely.

So, Rob, let me ask you this. You've been doing this for a while and you know, and I'll be, you know, full transparency here. Something I've little, you know, struggled with a little bit myself. And I'm in the process of evergreening one of my summits that we did earlier this year because, you know, we have a lot of great content that I just don't want it to, you know, I need to get that content out in the world and let other people that may have not had exposure to the summit actually benefit from it. So tell me a little bit about, you know, what you've seen, how people have successfully taken their, taken their content from a live virtual event that they did and evergreen that content.

It's a really good question. And people are so creative. And I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of things that you can do. Fundamentally, when you're thinking about an online event, it is an excuse. It's an excuse to develop a heck of a lot of content and hopefully to get that content developed for you. Right. Or in conjunction with other people. But you're sitting on, you know, as you say, like a pile of this really valuable content. And I think there are a couple of different ways that you can see, you can think about utilizing it, and it partially depends on the type of event that you're wanting to run. So the first thing that we always say is just because the event is over doesn't mean you should close the event. On our platform, about 70% of all of the events that happen on our platform are still active 6 months plus after the event has happened. So just because the event has happened doesn't mean that people will still not be able to find the event. It's great for SEO. They can still register, they can still consume the content, they can still consume the replays. So don't underestimate just the value of having all of this content there in the first place. The second thing that you can do, especially on our platform and obviously on other ones as well, is start removing all the dates and turn that event into a video library. So you can still turn it into a, like an evergreen style video library for people to discover. Then separately with the actual content itself, think about all the different things that you can do across the board to your different pieces of content that makes sense with the way that you market yourself in other areas. So for example, if you have 30 talks, that could be 30 articles. So you turn every, every talk into an article that you can publish, you know, and drip out 30 talks could become 30 podcast episodes and you could then start dripping out a podcast episode in anticipation of the next one that is, you know, that's going to be coming out. The third is to have the video content, the video library and have that as an add on to something else that you want your audience to do. If your audience takes X action you can then they get access to your, the content library of all of your previous events. So those are a few different ideas of stuff that you can do, but there's some, there's some really creative things that people can, people have done with all the content that they're creating on behalf of their event.

You've given me a lot of great ideas there as I think about evergreening the summit and things I can do with it. But one of the, and I had 35 speakers at my event, so I have 35 pieces of content that I need to start repurposing and doing something with. And you know, when I think about it, that's 35 weeks of content I could just push out to the podcast or, you know, do blog articles and other things with it. So that is some great information. Is there anything else that you would like to share with us today about live events and how we can use them to grow and scale our business?

I think that, I think that when you're thinking of running your online event, one thing to keep in mind is try not to be everything for everyone. Oftentimes we see creators and we see independent entrepreneurs. They want to start building a summit and they want it to be as big as possible. Try and resist building something that is the Digital Marketing Con 2021. Instead, try and understand your audience, understand maybe the top five problems that they're, that they're facing. Try and create an event just solving one of those problems. If you have a decision about going deep into one area versus trying to cover five different areas, at least for your first time out, I would focus on the one area and the reason why is because you can. You can get more in depth. You can have more meaningful either discussions or. Or sessions, and it will still appeal to the rest of your audience, but it will give you an opportunity to do another one later on tackling a different problem. I can give you an example. We have this one customer, his name's Daniel Wallace. And he's a. He's like a coach for writers, for authors who are writing fiction. And he had a decision to make. Does he do the Writers Summit 2021 or does he do just an event around plot? And luckily he decided, we're just going to do the Plot Summit. It was actually called Escape the Plot Forest. So it was all around problems with creating and developing your plot. Then the next one that he was doing was about the editing process, and the next one's going to be about setting or characters or something like that. Even though his audience of authors have all of these problems, they have writing problems, they have business problems, they have marketing problems. He just focused on one area that was still relevant to his whole audience. And because of that, he got a massively high engagement and an expectation that he can have all of these other subjects that he can line up later on. So whenever you can, try and be as disciplined as you can about the problem that you're solving for this particular event and be okay with saying no to anything that comes outside of that just because you find a speaker that might sound really, really cool, but if they're not fitting with that particular subject matter that you're. That you're working on for that event, try and resist the urge to include them anyway or expand your. Your, your event to accommodate them. It doesn't mean you can't work with them at some point or on something else, but try and be as pure as possible in terms of what it is that you're looking to achieve with the event. Rather than trying to be all things to all people, if you're building something for anyone, you end up serving no one.

I love that. And as you were thinking about that, you know, some wheels started turning in my head. I'm like, well, I could do, you know, one event just on. And I do a lot of things in my business, but just one event on helping people come up with their online course idea, that would be like one great event instead of, you know, trying to throw in the kitchen sink there. And the other, the other thing that kind of came up in my mind as you were talking, and I don't know what your, you know, the coach for writers does on this, when he does his events, like the smaller type niche events, is that, is he the one that's teaching all of that content or is he still bringing in other speakers?

No, he's bringing in other speakers. So the, the, the focus on a particular area doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be the, the, the, the only person speaking, right. It allows you to get a little bit more in depth with that particular subject. It also allows you to bring in multiple points of view. I think that there's this, there's this kind of, there's this thinking that, you know, if you're, let's say again, we're going back to the Marketing Summit 2021, you're probably then going to have like one or two people talking about Facebook ads, one or two people talking about email marketing. And like in your head you're thinking, well, if I have to hit tick all the boxes for the Marketing Summit, I probably need to just tick off all these boxes. And you end up getting a very shallow kind of point of view that's very, very broad and it's not very interesting. Whereas if you were just saying we're just going to do, we're just going to do a Summit just around LinkedIn, right? We're just going to focus on LinkedIn as a subject. You can have sessions about crafting that, that intro message and another one on two or three talks just on LinkedIn advertising and whether or not it's worth it or not. You can have people maybe with conflicting views on a particular subject. That is great. I think a lot of times people think, well, this has to be a, this has to be a pretty light touch kind of event where nobody's disagreeing. Disagreement is actually quite interesting and it encourages people to come and learn. And so you shouldn't be afraid to tackle subjects that reach a little bit beneath the surface in whatever area that you're focusing on and generating a little bit of discussion. I think that those kinds of events are far better when it comes to engagement. And thinking back to the writing coach, these events were not small events in terms of population. Ironically, he probably attracted and he had a larger attendance for the niche events than he would have if he had just had The Writing Summit 2021, higher engagement, more people ended up attending, made more money from it.

I love that. And one of my key takeaways from this discussion here is there's a lot of different ways to structure these events and you really just got to go back to that attendee Persona that you talked about in the very beginning and figuring out exactly how you can serve your audience. So, Rob, can you let people know where they can find you?

Oh, well, you can find, you can find hey summit@heysummit.com you can certainly find me on LinkedIn. Feel free to connect with me on there. On Twitter. I'm at thisisgelb. You can also, of course, follow hey Summit on all the relevant socials and yeah, check us out, see how you like it.

And I will make sure that the link for hey Summit is in our show notes so people have that. And also I will put the link for our evergreen offer that we have for the scale your business Summit so folks can kind of go in and if you missed it, you can check out that comment that, that content also.

That's great.

Thank you, Rob.

No worries. Thank you very much.

Destiny, thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you love the show, we'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform and show us some love there. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.