Urgent Help Needed - Offline Seminar!

Hey Nick,

How about these headings just from the top of my head here:

Staying Ahead of The Competition
How Internet Marketing Will Increase Your Bottom Line
Increase Your Sales Volume and Decrease Your Advertising Costs
The TRUTH About Online Marketing

I would focus the seminar on how you can help them increase their bottom line. Bring actual facts, presentations, charts. Show them actual results you have had in the past and relate to them as best you can. Pretend you are the business owner and you want to make more money, see where that leads you. Hope these help and best of luck in your presentation.

I"m no offline guru, but I do know that most offline business people do not do enough with their customer lists. You know that they have them, but they don't utilize them to their fullest extent. You could explain about email marketing campaigns to their usual customers and how they could get unexpected sales through this avenue.

If you had time, I'd set up a quick site that had the domain name of your city and a generic business (i.e. bestperthdentist.com) and put some content up and see if you could drive some traffic to it. If you could, then you can show the chamber of commerce how quickly they could be getting new clients via the internet.

Hope this helps a little.

"How To Recession Proof Your Business"

That will do it.

PM me if you like as I'm just about to start gearing up to do this very thing in Solihull, and I'd be glad to bounce around a few ideas for my own benefit too.

-Frank Haywood

I have done a few of these and first off, congratulations, giving these seminars are absolutely the best thing you can do to grow your business like crazy. I do at least one a month and even though I am not selling directly, the backend on these is ridiculous! Couple of tips. First, you would be surprised at the amount of information that your attendees already know. They aren't complete idiots in terms of online/internet marketing as most would have you believe, but the vast majority have not connected all the dots to design an overall effective marketing plan. That is where you come in and believe me, they will be hanging on your every word, but there WILL be some skeptics in the room because they are used to hearing crackpot SEO consultants telling them about being on the first page like that is the magical talisman to dominating their market. It is really only one piece and you will probably find that those who have used PPC in the past aren't seeing the returns they were promised. Again, most SMBs don't have an effective overall online marketing plan and that is what I end up selling to most because they have either experienced or heard from their fellow business owners about their disappointing results. Personally, I really have no interest in doing one piece of the pie because I can't achieve the results I promise them anyway.

Back on topic though. The bottom line is that all small business owners are concerned with lead generation and converting these leads into sales so I gear every presentation ultimately to this topic. Whether the topic is website design, social media, etc. I always come back to the point of how these activities can help you generate leads then convert these leads into customers. A growing customer base and customers that purchase more often is the key to sales and cashflow and all small to medium sized businesses worry about this every single day. Like you mentioned, they don't wake up thinking about on page versus off page SEO or anything like that. They worry about growing their businsess and/or keeping the doors open.

Someone pointed out earlier that they also generally have tons of customer list information, but my experience is that these small businesses may have customer information, but they have never developed the relationship from day one that allows them to market to their customers. That presents you another huge area of opportunity because helping businesses developing these relationships by producing content in the form of blogs, videos, branded social media sites gets them to the point of establishing trust with their customers. Once you have trust you have implicit permission to begin marketing to them. Otherwise, SMBs just come across as spammy and who needs more email that they didn't sign up for.

At any rate, there is tons of opportunity here in terms of seminars. I work with small local banks, small business development centers, investment professionals, attorneys, etc. to set these things up and they generally underwrite the tab. I am booked up and I am now expanding into another major southeastern city because the opportunity is huge. Good luck and keep us posted.

E.

I would definetely say when dealing with these offline businesses focus with them on how they need to improve and build stronger relationships with their customer base to result in more sales long term