390 – An Automation Case Study With Jake Hower – Preview

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In this case study:

01:50 – A quick flashback
02:43 – The stats of the event
04:26 – The planning phase
06:27 – What Jake did first
07:13 – 5 emails, 2 weeks
08:45 – The pre-December countdown
09:27 – Lessons from a master interrogator
12:26 – The most powerful thing they did
13:31 – On to production
15:27 – The importance of languaging
18:14 – Now comes the fun part
20:16 – A look at the results
22:23 – The technical part: Facebook ads

(Part 2 of this recording and other powerful business resources are available for members: click HERE)

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Tweetables:

Matching branding and matching messaging [Click To Tweet]
The product is key. [Click To Tweet]
The stats and strategies behind marketing a live event [Click To Tweet]

Transcription:

James: This first session is the most anticipated slot of the entire event according to the survey, and I’m not surprised. When I had a little glance at what you’re about to discover, it actually blew me away, some of the stats in this.

I think the overriding feature about this is it is real. You’re a part of it, you’ve experienced part of the process in some way, the fact that you’re here, and we’re going to lift the curtain on my business and I’ve given Jake full permission to go into the behind the scenes. I won’t say what Nathan said yesterday, “Interrogate the back end”, for that was very unfortunate.

I’ve said to Jake, “You can go and log in, get whatever stats you need, and just put it out there, whatever they are, even the mistakes.” So we’re going to see a real case study of how this event was marketed. So I want to welcome up Jake Hower, a brilliant, technical, funnel expert.

Jake on stage

Jake: Thanks man. Cheers.

James: Have some fun!

Jake: Cool. So I want to take you back to 2011, it was FastWebFormula 4.

I was very green. This was my first online event, and I was sitting somewhere around there. I was sitting next to Ryan Spanger, who was in a very similar position. We both had real businesses and this was our first event. So that was my first foray into this community and into the online space.

Now fast forward to 2014, March, the event had just finished.

I was sitting here, just behind me in a surf with James, and he suggested that for the 2015 event that we should do something like this. That essentially brought me on stage today, looking at the funnel and building this out with James.

Some stats
Raise your hand if you think that this is going to be complex. Fantastic. Cool. So I’ll run through some of the stats.

43 emails were created and sent during the campaign.

Nearly 300,000 emails in total were sent.

13 videos were shot, specifically for the event funnel.

121 Facebook ads were created over the course of the six months or so that we were actually marketing the event.

Blog posts including podcasts; there were 19 in total that hit James’ site that had a call to action for this particular event.

This was a side effect. So a cross-sell was that one of the things we’re going to detail in a little bit in a second where there was 18 new members added to SuperFastBusiness because of the purchase of a ticket here, and that’s so far.

So if you’re here and you’re not yet a SuperFastBusiness member, you have 2 months where you can actually access the community so I’d suggest you do that. If you don’t have that email anymore, just shoot an email to James and he’ll get you access.

And 172 attendees.

At the point that I started doing this, I’d only ever done this for myself internally for my own business, for my travel agency, for a few years, my software service. I’d never done this externally before so what you’re going to see today is basically me breaking it down. We’re going to step through in a linear fashion exactly what I did.

I guess at the start, we broke it into 3 main sections: the strategy or the planning, the production, which is where Ryan and a few others come into it, and then executing on it, and then we’ll run through some results.

Planning Stage
From the planning perspective, the first thing that we did is had a couple of conversations.

So the first conversation was with James, and I just wanted to understand what the goal of us doing this was. Literally, the main goal was, James’s instructions were to just get more people at the event this year. No sort of specific number. “Let’s just get more people at the event, and don’t take up too much of my time.”

The next conversation I had at this point was with Ryan, and we had a couple of conversations actually. We were just talking about different ideas that we had about how we could potentially market this. So we’re talking, this probably was mid last year, conversation with James, conversation with Ryan. At that point then, I went back and I started, obviously needing to build out the sales sequence, so what I thought was going to be the sales sequence, so that we could move in to the next steps of production.

You’ve got some diagram software up here. I wanted to include this here because if you’re trying to map out something, a funnel or a sequence, the inclination for me, I’m relatively I guess, I love tech, so my inclination would be to come and try and do it online. What I found though is that this is completely the wrong thing to do. These tools make you focus rather on the content and what you’re actually trying to produce.

You end up focusing on lining up and connecting the things that are making it really pretty. So they are very counter-productive to use, one of these online tools. The only reason you’d want to use one of these is if you had to present it to a client and you wanted to make an impression. But even then, I believe they’re quite useless.

I guess the best tool that I have that anybody has at their disposal is a notepad, or it’s a whiteboard and it’s one of these. It’s a phone. So that’s essentially what we use.

This is the first thing that I did. We had some deadlines, we had the event starting on the 5th of March, we had an early bird deadline of the 31st of December, and we knew that we wanted to include a few different campaigns.