Beyond the Booth: Sponsoring, Speaking & Sparking Ideas | The Growth Booth #97

​Welcome to The Growth Booth. This is episode number 97, and in today's episode, I want to share some thoughts that I've had after having recently attended a live event in Orlando this past weekend. Now, the event that I attended was about marketing, specifically about marketing using webinars and other online virtual events, so something that I do a lot of in my business, but the audience that was there extended far beyond people who just do webinars. We had people who were software creators, we had people who ran affiliate websites, people who ran e-commerce stores, and much, much more. I came away from that event just feeling charged up about my online business.

I want to share seven of the big takeaways that I got from this event, but there are things that I've also found and other live offline events that I've attended in the past. So this event in the past week that I've been to was in Orlando. It was an express trip for me, I was only up there for two nights. So I had two nights traveling on the plane one night up one night back, and two nights at the event. It was a real express trip. I was a guest speaker at the event. I did a one-hour presentation and I was also a sponsor of the event. In fact, funny story about sponsorship: with my excitement and actually getting to the event, we completely forgot to prepare any signs or marketing material for the event. There were all these fancy booths out the back or out the front of the room, and ours was empty, so our booth got put to good use by people doing all kinds of things. I saw one guy getting a massage on there, I saw other people storing their suitcases on there and everything in between. It wasn't my finest moment in preparedness, you could say, but one thing I will say is that the booth was probably the thing that we could have got the least value from at the event because all the value we got was from, or the vast majority of the value that we got was through from networking from meeting people, and just from being in the room.

So there are seven ideas that I thought I would share with you, seven takeaways that I had. The first was to do with relationship building. We were able to foster relationships with some of our existing partners, and this happened through dinners, lunches, catching someone for a coffee in the morning. There's nothing like being in person with someone to share what you're working on to get feedback and just to foster the relationship. Some of the people that I saw at the event, I've known them online for a decade, and it was the first time that I actually met them offline. That's a relationship changer, in my opinion.

I should add, I wasn't at the event alone. I had to have my team there as well. We were able to really get to know other of our partners and also their teams. It wasn't just about partners in the online business space, but they were also software providers there. Just so happened that our legal counsel, our attorney, was there. Affiliate partners were there. We had people who operated in the same niche, different niches as us that were there. We found that we were just randomly sitting down on the table with someone who are the people that were movers and shakers in different niches completely unrelated to online business education, but other niches that we're in. So these are the kind of things that happen when you go to an event. I think that relationship building element is huge.

The second point I've got here is that you just don't know what you don't know. I think when you don't go to live events, it's easy to get into cruise control, because you know the tools and tactics and strategies that you're using, and you don't really necessarily get exposed to new ones. But at this live event, I learned about some amazing new software that I never would have known existed. One of them, for example, is a software that can be used to help streamline support solutions whereby if you've got an online training program or any kind of online education, you can upload your videos or whatever that education is, if it's a book, you could do that, and then that can be plugged into your support system. So if someone says in an email, "Hey Aidan, where can I find that information about identifying a niche?" the software has scanned or listened to the entire course and it can automatically craft a reply saying, "Oh, you'll find that in video 3, 4:00," that kind of thing.

So that's a software, which I think we'll probably end up plugging into our support to be able to provide even more comprehensive and rapid responses to questions that we get. It's not to replace the humans, it's really just to be able to do a better job and provide a better level of support. That software is something that I didn't know existed. I saw other ways to use AI, solutions, other ways to leverage artificial intelligence in the online space that I couldn't have imagined, advertising tactics, and much, much more. So again, this point was just about, you don't know what you don't know. You get in a comfort zone with what you do know, and when you're able to push yourself outside of your comfort zone, that's where you can learn new things.

The third tip that I've got, or the third piece of feedback, I guess, that I've got, that I picked up at this event was that there's just an abundance of experts out there. There's an abundance of expertise with other people that you can tap into. I saw top grade copywriters, top grade webinar writers, top grade product creators, tech people, and much, much more. I think when we are online, in a virtual environment, it can seem daunting or sometimes seem hard to find these kinds of people, but these people are out there. When you get to an event, then you can find them much more easily. In fact, they'll probably come to find you if they want to sell the work that they're doing. I saw a whole range of different expertise that was available to be hired, essentially, and made some great contacts that way as well.

The fourth thing I'll say is that first impressions really matter. If you're meeting someone for the first time, if you're putting yourself out there, then I think you need to come prepared with the right frame of mind, come energized, and also dress for success. This is based on not just this event that I was at over the past week, but other events that I've been to in the past. I think it really makes a difference. You could sense the people that were in the right frame of mind, you could sense the people that really wanted to put their best foot forward, the people that were energized, and those that weren't. I know that I found myself gravitating towards the people that I would want to work with, the people that sent off the right kind of vibes, if that makes sense. So again, I think a lot of that comes down to realizing that first impressions matter, and in a place where you're only going to be with people for a couple of days, like a live event, you really need to make the most of each one of those interactions.

The fifth point that I've got here is similar to number two, actually, and this is that you're able to find or learn about ideas that you would never get from anywhere else. This could be something simple, like for example, one of the speakers was talking about how they're able to reach different demographics with their marketing, and what they're doing is hiring someone on Fiverr or Craigslist to be the face of ads in order to reach a different demographic. Now, this is something that is one of those ideas that's so simple when you hear about it. So cost-effective, yet, it wouldn't necessarily have occurred to me to do that if I hadn't actually heard it first. So just the point though is that you're able to find and learn about ideas that would, otherwise, probably you might not see them or realize they exist ever or you might be much slower to actually pick them up.

The sixth thing that I've got is about brand visibility. Sponsored sponsorship at events are something that allows you to have extreme visibility with the audience that you are around, and we were one of the what they call Diamond sponsors at this particular event, which was called WebinarCon, by the way. It was about webinars but much, much more than that. So we were a Diamond sponsor. It cost a lot of money to be a sponsor, but it also gave a lot of visibility. So everywhere we looked, I could see my branding and my marketing. That also helped people come and find me and ask about what we were doing. I was able to get in front of a lot of people. There was also a really useful directory of participants, which we could write a couple of paragraphs about ourselves, about our companies. That worked really nicely to be able to connect up with people as well.

Now, the seventh idea that I've taken away from this is just related to brainstorming. When you are surrounded by like-minded individuals, surrounded by experts, people who understand what you're talking about, it gives a unique opportunity to discuss different ideas and to get an immediate feedback on different ideas and to sort of sanity-check different ideas, and also to polish the elevator pitch, which, if you're selling anything, is really, really important. The elevator pitch is something that I certainly was able to polish for a couple of different projects that I'm working on just through talking to maybe 50 or 100 different people and talking about what I was doing. The first time I shared some of the ideas, it was a little bit long winded, a little bit crude, but by the time I got to the 10th or 15th person that I was talking to sharing what we were doing, it was so much more refined. That's active learning happening while I was at the event.

A few final thoughts to wrap this episode up. I think it's really hard to replicate an offline event by anything you're doing virtually. We've tried many, many times in the past, and it's just hard to replicate. I think also, it's worth mentioning that not all events are created equal. This was an event where we were surrounded by like-minded individuals, and it was a relatively small boutique event, well, just a couple of 100 people. I've been to events in the past that have had 5000 or more people. It can be a little bit overwhelming because everyone is so diverse in what they're doing. This one however, there was a lot of like-minded, similar individuals in the same room. That really supercharged the networking, I think.

Events might not be right for every one, it really depends what you're doing and what you want to achieve. Events can be great just to go to learn, but I think if you're only learning at an event, you are potentially leaving a lot of opportunity on the table because you can learn a lot at events just like you can learn a lot from being part of an online program. It's in those partnership opportunities, those connections that you can make, where you can get that expected value from an event. So I think if you're considering attending an event, what I would say is make sure that it's one that's very focused on what you're doing. I would probably only go if you had the intention of really being able to connect with other people and either form partnerships with other people or learn specifically from other people because if you're just learning tactics, you can learn tactics through online training. Maybe you might not get as many hidden gems as what you do get when you meet people in person and watch presentations in person, but you can still do that.

The other thing that is I think impossible to replicate at an offline event is the energy in the room. There's an energy in the room that is contagious. I think it really makes you lift your game, and talking about lifting your game, I was able to see where other people were in their journeys, and look at the energy that they were bringing. So I've been building an online business, I started building my online business in 2005. We're going to be in our 19th year. I can remember back when I was starting out, I was like a machine in household mode working, working, working, working, working. It's fair to say that after 19 years, you've reached a point where you're kind of in cruise control, and seeing some of these other people who were not just starting up new businesses, but head mature businesses who were still putting an enormous amount of energy into what they were doing was quite contagious and it made me feel like I could up my own game in that regard as well.

I wanted to share this while it's fresh in my mind because getting to live events might be a way that you can inject energy into what you're doing online or offline. It doesn't have to be an event about online marketing, but it could be related to an offline business or an offline passion of some kind. I think when you attend a live event, all you need is one little nugget of wisdom, and that alone will typically pay for all the sacrifice and cost of actually getting to the event.

That wraps up episode number 97 of The Growth Booth. A little bit of a short shorter episode here today, but again, I wanted to share these thoughts. As always, you can find show notes, transcription, and everything else over at thegrowthbooth.com. Just head over to thegrowthbooth.com, navigate to episode number 97. And as always, you can see the video version of this also at The Growth Booth or you can go to YouTube and search for The Growth Booth, and you'll find the video version of this podcast as well if you want to watch that. That's a wrap for this episode. I will see you in the next episode of The Growth Booth. Bye for now.