How to HOST a HIGHLY PROFITABLE Virtual Conference: John Bowen’s 7-Step Formula

Our next presenter. He is a very smart, very strategic guy who has learned a form of automation and a way of delivering knowledge and information to people in a way that he runs a multi million dollar business with, with no employees. He does have people that help. They're contractors. I have been to his home, beautiful home outside of San Francisco, and he has this whole system of what he does completely dialed. So let me just share who he is now. A headline in the Huffington Post last year, read, Virtual conference will transform industries worldwide. And they have. One of the experts in this area is John Bowen. He's the CEO and founder of CEG Worldwide. For 14 years. John has put on events just like this one today for his coaching clients. Now he's added this new dimension to his thriving business of coaching highly successful financial advisors. John is the top coach in the world to the most successful financial advisors. And so John's title is Seven Steps to a Hugely Successful Virtual Conference. This is really an amazing delivery system. Welcome, John Bowen.

Thank you, Joe.

Thank you. Thank you.

Okay, we, over the last two days, we have heard a lot of messages from extremely remarkable entrepreneurs. Each of us in the room, we have a message we want to bring out. I'm going to share one more tool and I know over two days we've got a couple tools in it. I'm going to share one more tool that you can leverage that is extremely effective. So how I'd like to start the presentation. I'm going to first define what a virtual conference is because not everyone, or maybe a show of hands, how many of you either participated in a virtual conference or have been to one? Okay, so the most of us have been there. I'm going to start with that and I'll just touch on it. Then the second part. Then what I'd like to do is share some of the results we're having. We do over 100 webinars a year. Each webinar I run generates on average about $50,000. I'm trying to figure out how I can do 200. I haven't gotten to that point yet. But they're all automated. Nobody's there. Yesterday I ran a couple. They're all pre done. We looked at that and we're seeing the success and we said, why don't we just do it on a bigger scale? And that's where we started working with virtual conferences. And I want to share the results. Then I'm going to share with you seven steps that we use to make sure they're extremely effective. And in each of those I'm going to share a little bit like Ari, and I have worked with Ari and he's phenomenal. Share with you kind of some of the processes along the way. So let's get started. Very first thing in the seven steps is to take a look. There we go. Technology is to take a look at the conference itself. You know, look around the room here. Do you think this might. I don't know, Joe, what you spent on this? I do two of these a year like this. Somewhere between 350,000 and $500,000 to put these events on. They're expensive, they're time consuming, they're energy, they're great meetings, but they're also a lot of things at risk. All of us have gone to professional or trade associations. How many of you have either put one on or exhibited and spent over $50,000 as an event? Yeah. Okay. A lot of us have. I'm going to show you how you can stop doing that and make it very effective. And those of you who have avoided that pain of being at a booth and all that, you can be at a virtual booth. So that's what we have here. We have an auditorium. You can see in the lobby, the auditorium where keynotes, typically, we'll have about eight keynotes, 12 to 16 breakouts. We have the lounge where you can chat. There's all kinds of interaction you can generate. There's the exhibit hall, everything. So it's pretty amazing technology. Now we're just getting started on it. We've done three events, but I want to share with you the success we've had. We've started in our core business with financial advisors. We've done two and we've done one recently. It was really kicked off with Dan and Babs from Strategic Coach Joe as well and a number of others here in the room. And it was very successful. It was a good start. On the entrepreneurial side, what we found in doing this is that there's an opportunity to engage. So you think of a virtual on your desk, seeing this on your laptop or an iPad or an iPhone. How engaged can you be? The average person that attended, across the three that we did spent just under three hours. They went to four presentations, they visited the exhibit hall. They walked away with on average, at least five downloaded reports or ebooks. It's amazing. We were able to put a clear path to really engage them and deepen the relationship with our existing clients as well as the prospects. And. And it's very cost effective. Depending on how much you do. It's somewhere between. Oops, let me go back. It's somewhere. Let's see, I get the right slides here. Okay. It's somewhere between 20 to 40,000 on the effectiveness. Second part here though is who's showing up. So we're targeting, and this is kind of a mixed one. We're targeting financial advisors. Just it's fairly high level. 200,000 net income and above. And then the entrepreneurs were targeting roughly 5 million and above businesses. But let me give you some numbers across the three. You can see there were 6,357 attendees. Registrations, 2,680 attended. The first one was a financial advisor. One we did. We generated over 500,000 of revenue for ourselves, our firms, and that doesn't count any of what the other providers did. So it was very, very successful. And what did the speakers have to do? They basically had to cut a 27 minute video and if they wanted a booth, they had to show up. Okay. Other than that, there wasn't much work. We put all the technology. I don't want to say it's really easy, but if you have a good technology group, it's not hard to do. One of the. I want to. As Mike Klein in the room. Mike from Tech Guys who gets marketing has really helped us begin to streamline the process as much like what Ari was showing you on podcasts. It's just an amazing process and the data that's generated out of this is unbelievable. I want to focus on the 625. This is the one where strategic coach Dan and Babs were the linchpin. JJ Helped me out on this. Vern, I think I saw Vernon, a number of you. I'll put the pictures up. Bo Eason over here. So we had a whole bunch of great speakers that helped out and a couple lessons. One 2,600 registered. With no effort and no good marketing. Our tech people just shot up at the last minute. 10% of the people bought a $100 package for the videos so they could have it for the rest of the year. Okay. Kind of a, oh, maybe we should actually do something about that type thing in this audience. Second part is we had 18 people raise their hand. Financial advisors were not invited to this. That came and raise their hand. One third of them have already bought a $24,000 coaching program we had with just a test market. Eight people raised their hand to become investors through a referral program that's worth a couple hundred thousand dollars. Okay. So the opportunity we saw and our partners saw were pretty amazing on this. Now let Me go and share with you. Why? Let's see. This is. There we go. Okay, Let me go to the steps. There are some steps that you want to have. Number one, you want to identify who your clients are. This is one where you really target. We found it to be targeting upmarket. People love this. They love the engagement. Everything else. Got to be clear On a date. You need about three months to put this on to do it right. Pricing, there's all kinds of models. But the key is the pricing is mostly free and an upsell I use On24 as a platform. They are the Cadillac. The way we look at it, this is. I'll make available through Joe just because of time. I don't want to go into it. But we do a lot of research on our audience. These are entrepreneurs. The level of affluence in the US and we've got a whole book on that. From there, what we have is we go. The next step is a marketing platform. We use the software Eloqua. It's unbelievable. Captures every piece of data, the whole thing. It's really important. Obviously have the copywriting done from there. What we're looking at is sponsorships. I don't know if Robin is still here, but Robin has taught me an awful lot. If anybody wants to know about sponsorship, Robin has done. Robin Robbins has done a phenomenal job. Very clear to have targeting technology we use is a ime. It's like go meetings or join me. It's a very successful one. Just real quick. There's a lot of revenue and sponsorship that I didn't get that I am now getting for the next ones. We're running ones in September and November. We do get media partners. They've been really good on doing promotions. The big thing has been email. One of the technologies though that we've had a lot of success with is one called Inside Sales. It's a sales automation for telemarketing. Post into your CRM. You're able to do 30 calls in an hour. And we're getting some tremendous success there. In addition, speakers. One of the key things with Learn Lessons we got locked down earlier. You want to have at least two weeks to get everything organized with all the videos. Make sure it works. One of the best production software where you can do shoot it and have it all done is Wirecast. It's a very inexpensive software. This is one of the programs that's just coming up. Most important part is a call to action. The call to action is critical. We look at like peter diamantes with Abundance360 having a program where you're qualifying Strategic Coach doing the same thing having that discussion with we do that as well. In addition kind of last step putting it all together is follow up, follow up, follow up. Not only do we get the results immediately but they trickle in. All the data goes into Salesforce. It is huge. Having all that last thing is a lot of merchant account stuff. We use a service called Pay Hub that puts out our business for bid. It's been saved a tremendous amount of money and with that you can do conferences with tremendous conference and what we've gone ahead and we're doing in 2015 we're going to be doing partnering with Strategic Coach with Joe and his team and a few others to put on a series of conferences next year that are going to be really successful. You can too wish you the best of success. Your future clients are counting on you here. Thank you. Thank you.