How to Validate Your Next Online Event and Set Achievable Goals Like a Pro!

Jennie Wright [00:00:01]:

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Acquire podcast. I’m Jenny Wright, and I’m excited for today. I love these solo episodes. But before we dive in, I am here as your go to person for all things list building, lead generation, online events, and sales. And today we’re diving into something I think is super important, especially if you’re thinking about hosting an online event anytime soon, whether it’s a summit, a webinar, a challenge, anything like that, there’s one thing you absolutely need to do first you cannot skip, and that is validating your idea. And we’re gonna go deep. We’re gonna go there, so stay tuned.

 

Jennie Wright [00:00:39]:

Alright. So before we get into this deep dive in this episode, I wanna make sure you know my brand new guide, 5 game changing steps to set clear achievable goals for your online event success. And this free guide is packed full of strategies to help you set those clear objectives, actionable goals, and help your next event be a massive hit and miss all of the crap that could make it not be so massive. So you can snag a copy of that right now. Head on over to, of course, I have to figure this out. So head on over to highimpactrevenue.comforward/5 steps. That’s highimpactrevenue.comforward/5 steps. You’ll get that.

 

Jennie Wright [00:01:25]:

It’s absolutely for free. And as soon as you put your name and email in the box, you’ll get that sent over to your inbox. Alright. So let’s get into it. Let’s dive in. We’re gonna talk about the first thing here, and that is validating your idea and why you need to do it. Just like with anything else, we need to make sure that what we’re going to create is something that our ideal audience wants. I have seen many, many people not validate an idea for a summit, a webinar, a challenge, whatever it is.

 

Jennie Wright [00:01:54]:

And when they go to create it, it’s crickets. Nobody comes forward from their their list, nobody comes forward from their ideal audience because it didn’t click, it didn’t resonate. So let’s start with that. Let’s look at why we have to do this first and make sure that we have a lot of information. Validation is like doing your homework before the big test, and I hated tests too. Some people loved them, I was not one of them. And what it does is it ensures you are on the right track, that you’re going to help solve the big problem that your ideal client is facing. And when you get this right, not only are you filling all those virtual seats with potential leads and customers, but you also build trust and authority, and most importantly, you build a relationship with these people.

 

Jennie Wright [00:02:41]:

And those relationships are amazing. That’s what leads to sales, growth, a thriving business, referrals, and other opportunities. This is a must do step. So how are we going to validate your idea? 1st, we’re gonna look at surveying your audience. Now I’m not expecting that you’re going to send out a 10 question survey on a Google Form. You can if you want. What I am gonna say is you’re gonna you’re gonna survey your audience in a non survey style. So there’s a couple of things I do here.

 

Jennie Wright [00:03:12]:

Number 1 is I actually go into Facebook Groups where my ideal clients are, and I see what questions are coming up, things that are they’re struggling with. And I look at what people are saying as to the things they just can’t solve, they can’t figure out. And then I look at the answers people are giving. Are they giving the right answers? Is it an answer I would give? Sometimes, no. My answer would be different. And I start recording what these are because my ideal client is telling me exactly what I am struggling with. So if like, you know, if you’re hosting a summit that you want to have, and you’re potentially gonna call it something like content creation strategies for coaches. Okay? Ask your audience if this topic interests them.

 

Jennie Wright [00:03:55]:

So let me back that up. Facebook Groups, I see what people are saying, and then my next thing is to actually pull my audience, but I do it informally. I will do that on a Facebook post or a LinkedIn post. And I will do that in the form of, hey, who wants to, you know, would you be interested if I created a resource all about content creation strategies for coaches? I asked them that. And then I asked them what the big pain points are. So if I created a resource for content creation strategies for coaches, what would you say has to be part of it? What what is it that would be missing for you that would have to be in there so that it would make sense? And you’re you’re gonna be surprised as how many people actually relate to that and actually answer the question. Now you can go another route completely, and this is another way I do it as well. I will post a poll on LinkedIn, and it will pretty much say, what’s the biggest struggle that you’re facing with x y z? And then I’ll give them 4 or 5 or even 6 options and let people choose.

 

Jennie Wright [00:05:01]:

That stays up for about 2 weeks on LinkedIn. Then I look at the answers, and I’ve been doing that actually for months. And then I’ve been creating blogs off of the back end of that and putting those on my website. So I actually answer the question. So I ask the question on a poll, I get my answers, the biggest problem that people are facing with whatever, I write a blog that complements that, and also maybe even a LinkedIn newsletter, that goes up. I’m answering the questions that my ideal client faces, right? So now they’re finding the answers they want and need from me, and I’m giving them what they’re looking for, which is great. And I build those relationships and I build that trust. The next step that I do is I check out the competition.

 

Jennie Wright [00:05:44]:

And I want to see what is out there and I recommend that you do this. And no, I am not suggesting that you copy somebody else’s content or somebody else’s event, but knowing what’s working in your niche can give you a really great starting point. So what I do is I look at similar events. What is the look and feel? What is the hook that they’re putting out? What kind of speakers are they bringing in? What is the pricing strategy for their VIP offers? All of that good stuff. You can learn a lot by being a bit of a sleuth and seeing what’s already resonating in your space. And here’s a pro tip, look for gaps, look for opportunities that nobody has been talking about, or maybe you notice that nobody has created a summit or a challenge that is specifically tailored for email marketing for non techie coaches, as an example. That could be an incredible space to dip into and kind of like your golden ticket right there. It’d be really cool.

 

Jennie Wright [00:06:45]:

Next up, you can actually run a beta test. Not the beta test that you’re probably thinking. So this one is a little bit more of an advanced technique. It is absolutely worth it. It is phenomenal. But it does mean that you’re going to launch something a bit smaller than you initially thought first to prove the idea before you actually go and do the bigger summit or the bigger online event. So you can host a small webinar. You can host maybe a small interview series with 2 or 3 of the speakers that you’re thinking of having on your event and testing it out with not only your audience, but their audience because they’re the ones who are gonna be promoting the summit as a speaker.

 

Jennie Wright [00:07:27]:

So testing it out to see what people think and have something very impromptu, informal, light, fun, and look to see how people react. If people react really, really well, if you get people signing up left and right, if you have people who are super engaged, asking questions, really interested, then you’ve got a winner on your hands. And that is the fun part. That’s the magic. If they’re not as engaged as you hope, don’t sweat it. You actually have figured it out early and you have an opportunity to tweak your messaging or even pivot your idea or your topic slightly to fit what people need. Remember, this is all part of the validation process. And although a lot of people wanna skip the beta test, I recommend, especially if you’re gonna be hosting a summit with a longer runway, a longer, planning period, like 5 or 6 months, the beta test is essential.

 

Jennie Wright [00:08:15]:

Now something also that I always do is I always want to make sure that you’re working from the end goal in mind. And you’ll hear me having said this in various episodes. What are you trying to achieve with your event? How are you trying to form this summit? Think about it as an encapsulation of your end goal. Everything runs towards it. All spokes lead to the center of the wheel. A summit is not a point A to point Z and your offer is after point Z. It is more like a circle, like I was just saying, and everything leads towards it. So everything needs to be focused on it.

 

Jennie Wright [00:09:02]:

If not, you’re going to struggle. And in addition, you don’t want to get people from a summit coming in on the landing page at point A and exiting your summit at point z without having mentioned your offer, either through breadcrumbing your offer or other ways, and then waiting till the very end and then going, ta da, by the way, I have an offer. Would you like it? Because you haven’t sort of created that opportunity for people to get to know things. And I’ve actually, this is something, this technique, or my way of approaching this, having it sort of encapsulate your offer, actually comes from a very weird background, and it comes from the fact that I grew up with really strict parents. And if I wanted to go out, I had to get my parents used to the idea of me going out If I sprung in on them on, like, a Friday and said, hey, I wanna go out tonight, it was gonna be an automatic no because I jumped it on them. And all of a sudden, whatever they’re thinking their Friday night was going to be was gonna be different because now they may have to drive me or pick me up or wait up for me or whatever. This is Jenny in her early teens. And so what I would do through trial and error and figure this out is I would say, hey, I’m thinking of going to a movie with my friends on maybe Friday, maybe Saturday, we might go to a movie or we might go to, you know, so and so’s house and watch a movie or something.

 

Jennie Wright [00:10:23]:

And I would mention it several times through the week to get them used to the idea so that it was never a, like, a surprise. And it was something that they could just be like, oh, yeah, Jenny’s been talking about this all week, I know it’s something she wants to do, seems okay, their mind was wrapped around it, by the time it was like, hey, you know what, I’m going out tonight, or I want to go out tonight or whatnot, it was, you know, a lot easier. And if you’ve ever had strict parents, you know this is a technique, and, hopefully it worked for you, definitely worked for me. So that’s where this comes from, everything has an origin, it just happens to be mine. So when you’re looking at your summit, you want to make sure everything is focused on that end goal, and whatever that is, you work backwards, forwards, and all the different ways to make sure that your summit completely backwards, forwards, and all the different ways to make sure that your summit completely reflects that. So if you have a program at the end of it that you’re offering, which is like a 10 ks Mastermind, and you have a title for that, and I’m just gonna use the title of something I used a little bit earlier, which was like email marketing, And I’m just gonna use the title of something I used a little bit earlier, which was like email marketing for non techie coaches. Let’s just say that our summit is, how to, you know, how how to master email marketing, even if you’re not a techy person. Right? Or email marketing secrets from the pros.

 

Jennie Wright [00:11:38]:

That’s your that’s your summit. And your offer off the back end of that is sales from email marketing, right? And obviously, insert better title here. Everything works together. So everything feels like it wraps around each other. Another example I can give you is one of my clients is, or has, a podcast product. So they not only produce, they help the client record, they do all the post edits, they do all the social media posts, they do everything for the client’s podcast and all the all the social media stuff around that, etcetera. And so the summit that we did was focused on social media, like, basically social media savviness and all these different areas within it. And we talked about the program, not ad nauseam, but we did mention it quite a bit, in very innocuous ways.

 

Jennie Wright [00:12:31]:

So we would have a link to learn more about the program or, this is coming soon, it’s not yet out, but if you want to learn more, you can go here, things like that. So I recommend that you look at how to build your summit around the end goal in mind. That is the only way I would do it. Now the next thing I want to chat about is setting clear and achievable goals. Everybody’s gonna tell you, like, oh yeah, how many registrants do I want? I want 5,000 or I want 10,000 or whatever the case is. That’s great, goals are awesome. Goals have to actually be really clear and also measurable and also something that you can achieve and if you’re making a massive goal of 5,000 registrants when you have 24 speakers and your speakers audiences don’t exceed a 1,000 on their own list and your landing page only converts at 25%, you’re not going to hit that number. It’s impossible.

 

Jennie Wright [00:13:27]:

The math just doesn’t math, right? So if you’ve historically had landing pages like the ones that I build that convert over 50 to 80% then we can start doing the math and then we can make those achievable goals. I can say I have 30 speakers, each one of them has 3,000 people on their list. Their emails typically convert or their open rates are typically between 20 30%. Their click through rates are usually between, I don’t know, 9 12%, if you can get that information. So figure out your math. 3,000 people, they have a, you know, x amount of open rate, so figure out what that would be, then what the click through rate is. Then of those people who click on the link, of those who get to the landing page, let’s just say 50% of them will register, that’s how many people are coming from that speaker. Then do it for every other speaker.

 

Jennie Wright [00:14:19]:

Now you’re not gonna get all the open rates from your speakers, it’s almost information that nobody’s gonna give you, and I don’t even like to ask it. And I sure as crap don’t have list minimums on my summits. But what I can do is I can take industry standard and I can create an idea as to what that looks like. Then I can set an achievable goal for the list build. From the achievable goal for the list build, then I usually do keep it low, like, well, not low, but conservative, then I can figure out my potential achievable goal for sales of VIP. VIP usually converts anywhere between 10 20% on the summits that I do usually 20 to 30%. I know it’s kind of a big number but like a big swing but you can kind of like estimate it. And so if you have a 1,000 people registering your for your summit and let’s just say 25% of those people will actually take your VIP, that’s what you can kind of do the math on, so you can set that goal and so on and so forth.

 

Jennie Wright [00:15:19]:

Right? People who are going to take your bump offer, you know, so if a purchase, if a person purchases your VIP, depending on what the bump offer is, you can say that that is, you know, 20 to 40% or 30 to 40%, whatever number you wanna take, and then you can make the math work for you there. So that is how we look at the achievable goals on the numbers side. Now let’s let’s pull things back and let’s talk about your event’s purpose. Now if your event’s purpose is to build a list and head towards that course we talked about or that program or product, amazing. Have that clarity. Be completely concise on what that is. If your goal is to just to build your niche, gain authority, build the list, then that is that’s amazing too. But that, I will tell you, doesn’t always, turn out to sell the program, product, or service that you figure out later that you wanna do because you’ve already built the summit at that point.

 

Jennie Wright [00:16:19]:

So try and have your product completely figured out by that point. And if you’re not sure where to start, this is where I suggest my guide, the 5 game changing the 5 game changing steps to set clear, achievable goals for your online event success, and the link is in the show notes to go and grab that. I break this down by step by step, even more information than I’m giving to you on this episode, and you’ll get all the tools that you need to figure out the purpose of your summit or event and align it with those goals. So go and grab that and make sure you come back. Alright. Let’s talk about understanding your audience because we touched on this a little bit earlier but you always really need to dig deep. Who is your ideal attendee? What do they need? What do they want? What is their struggle? The more specific you can get the better it will be. And if you’ve been struggling with your niche, if you’ve been struggling to figure out who your ideal client is, do that work first because it’s big and you need to be clear.

 

Jennie Wright [00:17:19]:

And then come back and do the work on an understanding your audience for your event. If you do a summit where you don’t know your niche, it’s going to not work well. Ask me how I know, that’s what happened in my first summit. I had no idea what to do it on. The coach who was teaching me summits at the time said, just do a summit on something you’re really interested in and you’ll figure it out later. Literally, those were the words. I mean, practically quoted. And so I did a summit and it was called Build Your Dream Business Summit because that’s what I was interested in at the time, and I got 356 people to register, and, yeah, it went nowhere.

 

Jennie Wright [00:17:58]:

I became a VA, so that did nothing for me because I could not turn that into a business. I wasn’t a coach, I wasn’t ready to coach, I definitely wasn’t at the level that I am now with marketing and strategy, so I turned myself into a VA and then an OBM. So really having that clarity is essential, making sure that you understand what the audience is, you understand everything, what do they want, Knowing your niche and then building everything around it is just absolutely bar none the place to start. Full stop. And if you really want to play around with, goals then you can go as far as as setting some SMART goals. I’m not a huge fan of SMART goals. It gives me a bit of the cringe because of corporate, and I mean, I have a little bit of trauma from corporate. I think a lot of us do if you’ve left corporate.

 

Jennie Wright [00:18:49]:

So every time I hear the word KPI or SMART goals or any of that kind of stuff, I get a little shiver up my spine now. Doesn’t mean they’re wrong to do, they are actually good, you just have to, you know, get over your trauma around what that meant for you at a corporate job. So if you don’t know, SMART goals are, specific, measurable, achievable, and relevant, and also time bound. So example, instead of saying I want a lot of people to attend my event, try I want 500 people to register within the next 4 weeks. I want a conversion rate of x to my VIP, etcetera. Okay? Those are the difference. One’s a wish, one’s a goal. So figure out how you like to term it and then go from there.

 

Jennie Wright [00:19:36]:

And if you’re thinking, oh my gosh. Okay, Jenny, this all sounds amazing, and thank you for that clarity. Fantastic. But you need more guidance, I’ve got you. This is exactly why I created the guide that I’ve been talking about in this episode. Inside, you’ll find everything you need to go from overwhelmed to be feeling a lot more certain and confident and ready to rock your next online event. So make sure you grab it. The link is definitely in the show notes for you, or you can go to high impact revenue.comforward/ 5 dash steps and get it there.

 

Jennie Wright [00:20:08]:

And hopefully that answers a lot of your questions. And if not, you can reach out to me. I am everywhere, and I love hearing your questions and supporting you with your list building and lead generation. So, all right, my friends, that is a wrap on today’s episode. Remember validating your online event idea is your first step to success and setting clear and achievable goals is absolutely the secret sauce that’ll take you there. So don’t wait, start putting these strategies into effect effect today. Get some action going there, and if you’re ready to dive deeper, go ahead and download the guide, and I can’t wait to see what you create. Until next time, please keep building your amazing list, get into your fall list building, bookend your year with something really, really cool.

 

Jennie Wright [00:20:51]:

I’d love to hear all about it. Let me know what it is, and keep showing up for your audience. And as always, the Acquire podcast is brought to you by the Odd Phonic Podcast Network. Make sure that you’re heading on over also to jennywright.com for the resources and also how to get in touch with me. Thanks so much and we’ll talk to you all soon, take care.