How to fill your seminar room

If you do plan on taking the time and spending the money to produce, prepare, and deliver a presentation or mini-seminar, here are seven event marketing tips that will help you fill your room:

Marketing Timing:
Usually, professionals market their events much too early. One firm that I know recently had extremely high business development hopes from hosting a series of six short seminars.

They sent very well-written letters to inform clients and prospects of the series. The 'invitations' reached the client base about 12 weeks before the first mini-seminar, 14 weeks before the second mini-seminar, 16 before the third, etc.

Attendance was decidedly underwhelming.

Their mistake was in the mailing lead time. They were surprised when we told them that announcements for generating attendance for 2 hour seminars is best done about three or four weeks in advance, not 12 or 16 or 20.

A good rule of thumb is that the shorter the seminar the shorter the event announcement lead time should be.

List Targeting:
In direct mail the three greatest indicators of success are lists, lists, and lists.

Before you send out one piece of mail, you should make sure that you have a reasonable expectation that the people on the list will be interested in your topic first because if you send a weight loss seminar package to a fitness guru, you can bet that you will not get much attendance.

A great seminar title, mailing package, and value proposition will generate zero attendance if you mail it to a list that is not interested in your topic.

Marketing Response Expectations:
Easy math which is the number of names times’ response rate equals attendance. 2,000 names times 2% response equals 40 attendees. "And why shouldn't we get a 2% response," inexperienced event marketers often say to themselves. "I've seen the research on direct marketing: 2% response is average for direct mail."

According to the Direct Marketing Association 2003 response rate study, direct marketing responses are somewhere in the 2% range on an average basis.

Consider, however, that most professional event marketers don't measure response in percents; they measure it in response per thousand because, by and large, they only get fractions of a percent to attend.

So if you're going to be an event marketer, forget about wondering, "What percent of our mailing will come to our event," and start thinking about how many per thousand might attend.

Some highly successful events that are marketed by professionals don't even get a 1 per thousand responses. Mailings for mini-seminars tend to do better than this, but not always by much.

The point of this information to inform you that if you have your direct marketing response expectations set too high, you are in for both disappointment and low attendance.

So make sure you have enough good names to mail to, and mail enough pieces to actually fill your room.