How we Convinced 5 Marketing Celebs to Meet Us
Again, today is another post inspired by our trip to Social Media Marketing World in San Diego as well as Your Coffee List. We wanted to share with you how we got 5 face to face meetings with 5 speakers at the event.
Now bear in mind, this event is HUGE – the biggest in Social Media, and the speakers there aren’t your standard speakers, they are top level stuff. In fact, one of the speakers told us that over 100 people asked to meet him face to face. So how did we, out of the hundreds of invites, manage to get a face to face meeting with 5 of them? Here’s how…
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Deciding Who
There were 130 speakers at the event we could choose from, so the first step was to narrow this list down. We could have sent a blanket email to the lot of them with minimal effort, but that really wasn’t going to work.
The end goal with the meetings was to do some form of collaboration, so we looked at who worked with our target audience, who we got a good ‘vibe’ from and who we liked – in the hope that they would like us too. It was tough but we narrowed down the list to 15 people.
Having a good intention that was going to benefit both parties is important. This needs to come across, as it gives a purpose to the meetings that makes it beneficial for all. The last thing we wanted to do was waste somebodies time.
Pre-Invite Interaction
The next step was to get them use to our faces so that when we sent them an invite they would recognise us and give us time, as we have given them time previously. So we added them to a Twitter List, and commented and RT’d their stuff. We only had a limited amount of time so in an ideal world this process would have gone on longer (comment on their blogs, read their freebies and so on), but luckily we already had interacted with a couple of them in the past.
Creating a Personal Invite that went the Extra Mile
Now we had to ask them to meet us. This was the most innovative part of the process, which really got their attention. Instead of sending a Tweet/Email etc. we created them a personal 1 page website on ‘Instapage’ that got across:
– Who we are
– Why we like them
– What we are trying to achieve
– How we were travelling all the way from the UK
– Our Passion
The most important point in the above list is ‘Why we like them.’ We included their picture, and unique information about why we like them to make the invite REALLY personal.
After the websites were created, we tweeted them a link.
Making it Easy
Making the process super easy for them was important. On the website we included a big button that said ‘Yes’ to the meeting. This collected their email address and sent them to a page that had options of time and place for them, and asked them to choose which was most convenient.
The Results
From our initial list of 15, we had 9 agree to meet us. 4 Couldn’t nail down a time but asked us to find them at the event, but 5 of them we managed to get a time and place in the diary.
The results of which open up a whole new world to us and a HUGE audience – super! The power of influencer marketing is tremendous and can take businesses from zero to hero.
ACTION: Would you really like to meet key influencers in your industry? Follow this process and see if you too can get that dream meeting in the diary.
Remember: The more people do a stand out marketing idea like this, the less effective it is. We created a beautiful landing page because we are good at that kind of thing, but we encourage you to use your own skills, talents and creative ideas. So maybe you could draw something for them, or knit, or do a video, or whatever you want, the point is to make it personal and special.
Good luck!
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