Meetup Marketing: Any successful stories?

[alxvallejo]

Aside from B2B marketing, is there a way to channel your marketing efforts directly to your customers on meetup? Has anyone ever hosted one and had it go successfully? The whole idea of a meetup is to offer something for free and create loyalty down the road, from a marketing perspective that is.

[Gary Zaydman]

HI Alx,
I have done Meetups and they work fantastic. It's not that much work to put together and I think for the time investment you get the best possible ROI. You get to know people, connect with partners, build your list, recruit affiliates, prospect and customers. I have also made a ton of great friends using Meetups. Here is a example of the one I have in Los Angeles

Internet Business Mastermind (Los Angeles, CA) - Meetup

[packerfan]

What are you marketing?

For example, I think the following would work great for small business SEO stuff.

Get maybe 15-25 small business owners in a room, and tell them everything you know about SEO. Show them how to do it all, etc. They'll realize 2 things. 1. You're an expert (at least compared to them) and
2. It's a lot of work, and they'd rather pay you to do it.

I'm sure you'd be collecting checks by the end of the session if your good. Just give them something of value, make sure they understand what you can do for them, and it should work great.

[Gary Zaydman]

When I sat down and calculated all the clients I got as a result. Every meeting I had I was making at least 2k per meeting (follow up calls, requests for services. I did educate 1st and didn't do any hard selling or anything like that. Just more natural to hook people up and show them the good stuff. Then they are more likely to trust you. People are very skeptical and almost expect a sales pitch. So when they don't get one they are surprised in very good way

[alxvallejo]

Originally Posted by Gary Zaydman

When I sat down and calculated all the clients I got as a result. Every meeting I had I was making at least 2k per meeting (follow up calls, requests for services. I did educate 1st and didn't do any hard selling or anything like that. Just more natural to hook people up and show them the good stuff. Then they are more likely to trust you. People are very skeptical and almost expect a sales pitch. So when they don't get one they are surprised in very good way

I agree completely and I envy your success. I do think it's a great marketing platform, especially when you don't hard sell. All you have to do is leave an email and maybe your website and it will probably work. Haven't tried it yet but thanks.

[Yogini]

I didn't use it in the internet marketing context, but I ran a yoga meetup for a year and gained some ongoing clients that way. Also, some people do charge a minimal fee so the meetings don't necessarily have to be free. I've seen some in my area where they are similar to breakfast club meetings and everyone gets a chance to go around the room and speak about their business.

Debbie

[Gary Zaydman]

Originally Posted by Gary Zaydman

When I sat down and calculated all the clients I got as a result. Every meeting I had I was making at least 2k per meeting (follow up calls, requests for services. I did educate 1st and didn't do any hard selling or anything like that. Just more natural to hook people up and show them the good stuff. Then they are more likely to trust you. People are very skeptical and almost expect a sales pitch. So when they don't get one they are surprised in very good way

Hi Alex,
You can totally do it. When I started out I had no idea what I was doing. Honestly, I made a bunch of mistakes when I first started out and I still got people calling me. The good thing is it really doesn’t cost you anything to try. Maybe a $70 meetup.com membership

Here are few mistakes I did early on that I would recommend avoiding

Mistake #1 Not building list

For a long time I just used meetup.com to manage the list but they send out emails with [meetupseoxxx] in subject line and they also send out a bunch of emails I don’t like. So make sure to get people who attend on aWeber list in order to attend. Just doing this one alone will make a big difference

Mistake #2 Not having networking time

People come to these events to learn and meet other people. Remember most people who are attending are coming with the intent to sell something. So they want to find people to talk to. So it’s really helpful to have some formal networking time.

Mistake #3 Doing it all by yourself

One thing I realized that’s it takes a little bit of work to do everything by yourself. Once I started getting members involved and contributing things became much much easier. Another words be more of publisher rather then author.

Feel free to ask any questions if it's something you want to try