You can make a fortune using seminars as a marketing tool. Smart financial advisors, attorneys, CPAs, real estate agents, mortgage brokers and other professionals and business owners use seminar marketing to pack a room of potential new clients and turn them into business. Rather than prospecting one person at a time, you have a room of 50 people.

First, do your research and know what your market wants. Call potential attendees and ask them: What's the biggest challenge in your business? If there would be one thing you could change about your financial situation, what would it be? What aspect of your life is most out of balance? Or send a survey or do a teleconference but you must gather this information.

Too many professionals and business owners dive into seminar marketing and choose a topic based on their perceptions rather than asking their market. Okay, now that you have your topic, you must convert it into a message that packs the seminar room.

The next mistake in seminar marketing is not putting enough effort or applying enough expertise to the seminar invitation. AS THE MINISTERS SAY, YOU CAN'T SAVE SOULS IN AN EMPTY CHURCH. So if your attendance is poor, you've lost money and missed an opportunity to help potential attendees with your wisdom, product or service.

Your seminar invitation must be a super compelling, motivational piece that would sell ice to eskimos. You've got two choices-either develop the skills to write great copy or hire a copywriter to write your seminar invitation. To develop the skills, study books like Cash Copy by Jeffrey Lant, Magic Words that Bring You Riches by Ted Nicholas or any books by John Caples. Alternatively, hire a copywriter and simply pay them to do it. A good copywriter is about the best seminar marketing investment you can make.

Just to give you an example of the difference that copy makes, which seminar would you rather attend:

"What's the Stock Market Doing This Year" Or "Five Ways these Wealthy Investors Make Consistent Profits in the Stock Market"

Is it any surprise that the second title will gain far greater seminar attendance?

Now you know what your target market wants and you've created a seminar invitation with compelling language. Attendees show up and they love the presentation. So what? How will you turn this successful seminar event into business? Just because you give a great and enlightening presentation does not mean anyone will call you. That's our third common mistake: failure to have a mechanism to convert attendees into clients.

The seminar must end with an invitation to meet with you (or a colleague). Even though your presentation was great and showed your attendees several great ideas, you still need the final killer offer so that they make a commitment to meet with you before they leave. You must have such a process before they leave because if you think you can call later and set appointments, forget it. Your prospects will have cooled off.

Your final killer offer ties back to what you learned when you did your initial research. Let's say you're an estate planning attorney and you learned that a common and frequent concern was that your audience is worried that their heirs will spend their inheritance foolishly. In that case, your final offer sounds like this:

"You've learned a great deal about how to plan an estate well and I'd like to show you how to put these techniques to work in your situation. So I have set aside some free consultation times for which I normally charge $300. But for those of you who were nice enough to put up with me today, I can offer you those consultation hours for free. At that meeting I will answers any questions that you have about your estate plan and additionally, I will show you three ways to keep heirs from spending their inheritance and how to protect those assets from their creditors. Since I have fewer consultation slots available than people are here today, please check off a time and date right now….."

Now, you have created a hungry audience for your scarce time and to get information that's important to them. From a crowd of say 50 people, you can get appointments with at least half and 90% of those will become clients. Now that's successful seminar marketing.

Copyright (c) 2006 Larry Klein

Larry Klein CPA/PFS,CFP(r),CRFA(TM) is a national financial speaker and expert in markteing financial services. You can access his seminar marketing libary at seminar marketing.

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