Entrepreneur Office Hours - Issue #143
Learning from my mistakes
I made a mistake. Even worse, one of my subscribers called me out on it. #Awkward
Here’s what happened…
If you’ll recall, in this space last week I basically asked if all of you subscribers to my newsletter about entrepreneurship are also interested in me including advice about creating social media content and growing audiences on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
The response was lukewarm. I figured it was a bad idea (or the wrong audience) until I got an email from one of you. Here’s what the email pointed out:
You’re not selling your audience the right way. You’re basically asking if a bunch of entrepreneurs want to be Insta-famous, which means they have to already understand the value of that and want it. I’m guessing most of them never really thought about it or don’t thin it’s relevant to their work.
You should shift your CTA. Rather than asking entrepreneurs if they want to learn how to grow a social media audience, you should be reminding them that having a large audience is very valuable for becoming a successful entrepreneur. It means they’ll already have lots of access to people they can sell their shit to!
Yeah… right… what he said. Let’s try this again…
Hey Readers: Having large social media followings makes building successful companies much easier. Because of this, if you’re serious about entrepreneurship, you need to be cultivating your online brand. I’ll teach you how. Sign up here.
Yeah… that’s definitely a more clear value prop. I love learning from my mistakes. Thanks for the advice!
-Aaron
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Office Hours Q&A
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QUESTION:
I’m at a growing startup and my boss wants to start a conference for customers. I was put in charge of creating it because I have lots of experience in event planning.
However, I’m not experienced with marketing events. This is probably a long shot, but do you have any ideas for how I can turn something like a conference into something lots of people want to attend?
- Kelly
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It’s definitely a long shot in the sense that I’ve never marketed a large, annual event like a conference, and I don’t want to step too far out of my lane. Any advice I might give specifically about conference marketing is advice you might as well ignore because it would be meaningless.
What I can tell you is that one of the most powerful forms of marketing is word of mouth. If you can get people telling other people in your industry, that’s going to drive future attendance. Because of this, if I’m you, that’s what I’d be focusing on.
Here’s the question I’d constantly be asking myself as I made decisions for what to include (and what not to include) for the first iteration of the even: “Will this make the people who attend want to tell other people?”
If the answer to that question is “yes,” I’d find a way to include it. If the answer is “no,” I’d probably skip it.
In other words, the most impactful marketers are going to be attendees. Make the ones who risk showing up to your first conference feel like it’s the best event they’ve ever experienced and I guarantee you’ll have lots more people in year two.
Oh… and if you need a keynote speaker… you know how to reach me… ;-)
Got startup questions of your own? Reply to this email with whatever you want to know, and I’ll do my best to answer!