Creating Successful Online Events

Welcome to pelibiz podcast. I'm Dr. Kelly Alhui. I've grown my pelvic health practice, orthopelvic physical therapy, and now I'm helping pelvic health professionals do the same. Each week I give you the knowledge.

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Today I'm going to talk about how I used online to actually make orthopelvic what it is today. So we're going to talk about online events and why every single one of you guys listening to this podcast, why you should do at least one online event. Let's get into it. I moved from Southern California to Northern Virginia. No one had a clue who I was, what I did, all the things. So I was like, how can I actually make a massive impact in my community without killing myself going door to door, doctor to doctor, saying, hey, this is what I am, this is what I do. All the things. Now I did do that, but in the meantime I was like, how can I get to know my community? I love bringing community together and as you can see with Polyviz, um, and I just love bringing women together and I wanted something that was going to represent that. So I came up with this topic called Be well. And then I was like, let me do something called Be well Women's Summit. So that's what we called it. And the I. The concept that I came up with was we have all these women in the community, we have all these locally women owned businesses. And back then I was still passionate about supporting women owned businesses. There's just something about it that it's just a fire inside of me and I just want to help women in business. Like that's it. And so this was the concept to it. And so it's like there's so many women in the community, there's so many women owned businesses that most people don't even know even exist, AKA our pelvic health practice. I came to Northern Virginia, who's very stiff here, still kind of is compared to California and Portland, where I was at originally. They were like, pelvic health, what is that? Like no one would ever do that, right? So I was like, all right, Be well Women's Summit. So what I did, I'm going To give you guys steps. So if you have a pen and paper, I would take it out. The first thing is you got to come up with a concept. Why are you doing this? So what's the concept or what's the theme? For me, it was to allow other women in my community know that they could get help from other women business owners in my community and know that whatever their need was, from a car repair women owned business, to a tattooing makeup artist, to a plastic surgeon, to a daycare, whatever it was that they needed, they had other women supporting them. And you just gotta come to this event to find out how these people could help you. And that's it. And that's what I wanted. I just wanted to connect the community. Because when I came here, I just felt so disconnected and it was a massive passion. So that's number one, is come up with, why are you putting on the event? Number two, what's the goal of the event? Is it a branding move? So when I say that, is it just strictly a branding move where you don't make any money from it, but you're just trying to get your brand out there? Okay. Or is it an event that you want to make money off of? And let me just be very honest with you guys, most events that you put on, you're not making money off the event. You're making money typically off what happens after the event, not during the event. So I just, you know, recorded a podcast before this. You guys should listen to it, about investing. And this is one of the things you gotta invest to then have a return on that investment. So go find that podcast. Cause that's a good one to listen to. You gotta invest money to make money. Yes, it's true. Then there's collaboration. Are you doing an event because you're just trying to collaborate with someone or other people or many people? Why? What's the goal of the event? So the goal of the Be well Women Summit was to connect my community and be able to show people that there is help for their leakage and their pain with intercourse and that they don't have to deal with it. And that was the goal, and it was massively successful. Okay. Way more than I ever thought. Number three, do you want to partner with someone? For me, there was a big opportunity to partner with a Facebook group that had over 30,000 women locally in my community that I was able to originally get clients from. And I was like, why are we all not collaborating in this group and talking? So I contacted the owner of the Facebook group And said, hey, do you want to partner up? I really have this idea. She loved the idea. And I said, there's so much opportunity here for everyone that we can just promote everyone's business. Like, we should partner together. And so we did. We partnered. Now, here's the thing with partnership. You have to be very clear on what the outcomes are that each partner is like, is bringing to the table. So, like, you know, maybe the partner I partnered with, her strength was knowing the people and getting them to actually show up online. My strength was actually collaborating, talking with the people, getting them to understand the concept and all that kind of stuff. So I should be doing more of that. So you have to be very clear when you partner with someone on, you know, what the expectation is and who's going to do what and play to the people's strengths. So that's big. Find a Facebook group that you can actually use to help promote that this event is going on. Okay. Like, we're a local Facebook group that's in your community that you can, you know, talk in it and be like, hey, this is what's happening, guys. We cannot wait for this event. If you want in, please let me know. So what I did is I went in the Facebook group and I was like, hey, any women business owners here? Please comment below and tell me about your business. And so they commented in the Facebook group, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Please tell me about your business. Okay, awesome. And so we would go and vet. You had to vet some of these businesses because was it someone that was trying to, like, just promote their only fans? I mean, my only wasn't back then, but still there was, like, interesting businesses that or multi marketing level, like businesses where they're trying to just sell makeup to you. Well, we weren't going for that. We were going for what is actually going to bring value to the community. So it was doctors, it was tattoo artists, it was glass repair, it was cement repair, it was a handyman, divorce lawyers, plastic surgeons, facial people, dentist, gynecologist, other different doctors in the field. But it was everyone. It literally was everyone and anyone that had a business that was wanting to help women out. And so we vetted the business. We then said, okay, cool, if you want to be part of this summit, then we're going to have different tiers. So the first tiered was platinum. The second tier was gold. So if they wanted to be a platinum sponsor to this event, AKA speaker. Okay. Because our sponsors were our speakers, then they need to pay 300 to be part of the event. So then what they would do is we create an account. They just wired the money to that account, and then AKA Venmo, you can also use just Venmo. And then they were able to speak for 20 minutes at the event. Um, and then if they were gold, it was $150 to be part of the event, and they were able to speak for 10 minutes at the event. Now, what is included in the platinum, they also got their logos blasted all over all the social media marketing. They also got their logos on the brochures and on the actual bag that we provided for all the goodies. The gold people just got to speak. Now what we required of them was that, number one, that they give something in the gift bag, Something tangible, not a piece of paper, not, you know, pens. Like, what could they give that was gonna make their clients be like, oh, I want more of you. So we wanted, like some really fun gift bags. We asked them to provide education or teach some kind of skill to the community so that they got massive value. And it wasn't just they're promoting their businesses. So, like, we had a massage therapist come on, and she taught us how to self mobilize certain body parts. And everyone loved that. We had a therapist, like a mental health therapist, come on. And she taught us a different way of, like, thinking and had us all, like, meditate. And so that was really cool. We had an energy healer come on, and she gave us so much energy. She was so fun. That was really cool. So, like, you want people to be like, hype. You don't want Debbie Downer to be talking for a long time, then you need to cut Debbie Downer off, because then your numbers are going down online because no one wants to listen to that person. And we also came out with a schedule for the event. So if they're like, you know, I really want to listen to this energy healer and this massage therapist. Okay, well, I need to come on at 1:00, and then I need to come back on at 4 o' clock so I can hear these speakers so they didn't have to be on the entire time. And this was all done on Zoom. Find a platform that you want this to be done on. We had to upgrade our Zoom big time because we had over a thousand participants come on many times throughout the conference. It was a big, big hit. But, yeah, more than we expected. But that's kind of how we did it now. We had, in person goodie bags and I stuffed all of these. We just picked 300 goodie bags to stuff because we just didn't know how many people were going to attend the event. And if people attended the event, it was free to attend. But they did have to give us their contact information so we could send them the link. I think we got almost like 2000 contacts from this event, which is insane. So I stuffed 300 gift bags. It took me eight hours. My back was killing me by the end. Cause I got to bend down in the box, put it in the bag and all the things. But they had to then come to Orthopelvic to get these bags. And I had a very small clinic back then in a basement. And we were stuffing these things underneath desks, above the cabinets, all around my Reformer. I couldn't even walk on my floor because there were so many gift bags. People would come to our location and pick up their gift bags and they would actually see what Orthopelvic looks like. They would get to know us. We would say hey to them. And that also got them attracted to us because they were like, wow, we already know, like, and trust these people because we've been there. We know their location and all the things. So that is something for an online event. If you really want to build a community. Also have gift bags where they have to come into your clinic or wherever they need to come to say hey to you. Make sure you got gift bags. Because I think that was massively important because everyone literally took away something physically if they came and picked up their gift bags. Some people didn't pick up their gift bags, and that was fine. We just gave them out to the patients then. But I think that was an added bonus to an online event, especially locally. We also polled our audience. We use Google forms. We use Google forms to A, communicate with our audience and B, communicate with participants. What do they want to talk about? What's their topic? Can you send us a headshot? Can you send us your logo? So we got that as well. Um, and then we were able to use that to promote them out and so on our personal Instagram for Orthopelvic, we would be promoting each of these businesses out, like every single week. I think it was like Small Business Wednesday or something we came up with. And we would just promote them out and say, hey, go follow them. Go follow them. And by doing that, they then would also promote us. So then we were cross collaborating there indirectly without like, really kind of even knowing it, to be honest. Then our event we did Saturday and Sunday because most people were often. So we did nine to four each day. And we just plan out a schedule of this. How many speakers we had, we had over, I think we had 40 women. Locally owned business owners speak and provide so much value. Everyone loved it. We had to start planning this event six months out. And it was a lot of work that we weren't expecting because you have to coordinate with people, you have to make sure you get payment from people. You have to make sure you get items from people. So people had to come early and drop off what they needed in the gift bag. We had to make sure people were going to show up online for these people because we were kind of promising these business owners that, you know, you know they're going to be promoted a to over 30,000 people locally because we had access to the Facebook group and also on all of our Instagrams, which is big for them. So the event happened. There was four of us. It was me, the founder of it. Then I pulled in another person that owned the Facebook group. I pulled her in. Then I pulled in my manager to help me with just organizing it all. And she really did the heavy lifting. And then we had another assistant of the Facebook group come in and it was just us four. And we went to my office and we launched this thing from my office. And for two days we were just there. We are narrators in between the people speaking. Like, next up is this person. Can't wait. Getting the energy high. Answering the questions in the chat. Clearly. I was a speaker at it too. We ordered bands from China that had orthopelvic logos on them and gave those out in a goodie bag so people could remember us and use our exercise bands. So we did that. I probably spent thousand dollars, I want to say, on those bands alone. I think we made around $2,000 off the event. Wasn't anything crazy. I ended up giving that to my manager because she did most of the leg work. I was more of the ideas and helping kind of get the community involved. So I probably lost money on the event by how much time, but not really. People will look at that. Oh, I lost money. I would never do this event again. No, what it did, the after effect of this thing was a. It got us almost 2000 contacts. Local women, 2000 contacts. No Google Ad is going to be getting you that. It's not. So like, this is. It's a massive, massive move. And yes, it takes about six months to plan this, but it is worth it. And then it also got our name out to locally owned businesses. And those businesses are more than Likely going to refer to you because they're like, oh, well, she's promoting me, so I'll help her out and promote her. They get it. They get the business side, right? The people in the Facebook group were like, oh my God, I never even knew existed. I needed help, you know, so much with this. Like, it's amazing that there's help and that just launched us and it got ortho pelvic really making a massive wave to be able to know that we are here and that we can help you and that these are the problems that we solve. So if someone is thinking or if you guys are listening to this thinking, man, I don't know if I should do an in person event or online event or. Um, the positive with an online event is you can make massive ways, if done correctly, to a massive audience and your community. In person events, to me, I love them more because it's more interactive and I can like, you know, really get to know the people online. You can reach so many more people in your community and they don't have to like physically take time to come into the clinic and all the things because they have maybe have the kids or whatever else. They can just tune in and hear you and just by them listening to you may just push them over the edge to actually come into your clinic and take the time for that online. Guys, using Facebook still is massively important to continue to connect with the Facebook communities. There is a lot of value in that. So hopefully this gives you a little insight for anyone and everyone that was like, hey, maybe I'll do an online event. What does it look like? This is what it looks like. These are the outcomes that you can get. It's so worth it. There's a lot more involvement that you're not getting paid for that time. You know, it's a gamble, but if you're willing to do the hard stuff, you're going to get the best outcomes and that's how you make moves, is do that. Hopefully you guys do an online event. Let me know if you do.

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