How Annual Virtual Summits Fit Into Your Marketing Strategy (and make everything else work even better)

This is part 2 of a short series on the power of hosting repeat events, and today we’re focusing on how hosting regular summits fits into your marketing strategy, and makes everything else you do to market your business work even better.

By the end of this episode, you’ll understand:

• Exactly what it looks like to include an annual summit in your marketing strategy.
• The cycle of how your summits and other marketing strategies keep feeding into each other once you have the strategy down.
• What it looks like in action with examples of how I've used annual virtual summits in my marketing.

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Your summit is just the beginning

As we covered in the first episode of this 2-part series, your summit and the immediate results it creates are truly just the beginning when it comes to the impact and momentum that can come from this strategy.

Don’t get me wrong, the immediate leads, all-access pass revenue, launch revenue, connections, and boost in post-summit sales are absolutely incredible and totally worth it on their own. But today, we’re going to skip talking about all of that, and instead dive right into how you can build on what you started with your first summit.

When you go in with intentionality and focus on the longer-term impact of hosting virtual summits it doesn’t even come close to ending at the first one.

BEYOND ONE AND DONE

To go even deeper into the ways you can use annual virtual summits to fuel your marketing and see bigger and better results with every event, be sure to save your seat for the Beyond One and Done workshop for repeat summit hosts happening next week! This workshop is just for those of you who have hosted a virtual summit before, and the goal is to help you build on your previous summit(s) for bigger and better results with smart and simple tweaks to your initial strategy. Get all the details and save your seat while they're still available! 

6 Steps to Fueling Your Marketing with Annual Summits

When you add virtual summits to your marketing strategy and start hosting them as annual (or more often) events, not only do your summits get bigger and better each time, but they also make everything else you do in your marketing more effective. Once you have this system up and running, your summits and other marketing efforts all feed into each other, creating a growth cycle that just gets stronger over time. Let’s take a closer look at how this works in action: 

Step #1: Generate leads through your first summit.

The first step to fitting summits into your entire marketing strategy is to host that first event. Your first summit will bring in hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of leads. Those new leads are great for the immediate results, but they also carry over into everything else you do in your marketing following the event.

Step #2: Launch your product or service.

Once you bring in all those new leads from your summit, the next step is launching an offer to those new leads, whether it’s a product or service. We teach this strategy for launching a course, membership, or other scalable offer through a summit in our Launch with a Summit Accelerator and it’s powerful. When you launch following your summit, some of those new leads will buy right away, bringing in additional revenue from your event. But of course, the majority of your new leads won’t be quite ready to buy, which takes us to the next step.

Step #3: Add non-buyers to your evergreen funnel.

After your summit, the leads that came in through your summit but didn't buy during your launch should be added to your evergreen funnels. This allows you to continue nurturing them and convert them into sales throughout the rest of the year.

Side note: If you don't have an evergreen funnel, I highly recommend it! It's such an important part of not having to rely on constant live launches.

Your summit added major fuel to your evergreen funnel by filling it with fresh new leads, and that will pay off consistently moving forward, whether that's two weeks after your summit, or in two years.

We’ve seen attendees go through our evergreen funnel within a couple of weeks of the summit ending, and buy, and we’ve also had people hang out on our list for two years, seeing our evergreen funnel promoted consistently, and then decide to buy when the timing is right for them. 

Step #4: Continue your normal lead generation.

After your summit wraps up and you've added your new leads to your evergreen funnel, you’ll want to continue with your normal lead generation between summits. This can look different for everyone, but the important thing here is that there is so much less pressure on your other lead-generation strategies because of that influx from the summit.

I tend to focus my other lead generation on Facebook ads and being in other peoples’ summits and bundles because those things are fun and easy for me.

The 1100 people we added to our list in our December summit are 1100 fewer people I have to figure out how to target correctly in Facebook ads and probably $10,000 or more that I don’t have to spend to do it.

You won’t just quit all of your other lead generation activities, but thanks to your summit, there is far less pressure on it between events.

Step #5: Keep launching as normal.

In addition to continuing your normal lead generation between summits, you'll also want to keep going with whatever other launch events you might choose to do throughout the year.

This can look different for everyone:

• We have some clients who host 4+ summits per year as their primary way of launching. They truly don’t do anything other than hosting summits to launch, which is one way to do it if you’re really all-in on summits.
• For me, I like to mix it up throughout the year with a challenge or two, maybe a conference or workshop, or something else that comes up and sounds fun at the time between my summits.

This is where the momentum from your last summit comes in again.

Anytime you do a live launch, it re-engages the leads that came in through your summit and, assuming everything was targeted well, you’ll see attendees convert every single time. 

After the summit I hosted in 2020, at least one sale in every single one of my launches over the next 2+ years came from that summit. 

And I calculated that we brought in a minimum of $180,000 in additional revenue over the course of the 18 months following that summit through a combination of converting leads that came in through that summit, evergreen sales, and live launches. How cool is that?

You'll continue to see all of your other live launches work better because of the thousands of additional leads it brought in.

Step #6: Host your next summit.  

And finally, it's time to host your next summit! The next event is going to re-engage your past attendees and be bigger and better because you're starting with a bigger and warmer list. Many of those original attendees will convert through your launch, and all the new leads who don't convert right away will be added to your list. This whole process starts all over again.

It snowballs with each summit because you have a bigger starting audience who already knows about and loves your summit each time.

How This Has Played Out In My Business

To show you what this looks like in action, I’m going to share two examples of how I’ve seen this play out in my businesses that have very different business models, one selling services, and the other selling a course.

Example #1: Development Business

The first example is my previous service-based web development business that I ran 6 summits for. I covered how my summits grew from one event to the next in the last episode, but here I want to focus on the way those summits contributed to my business growth.

Prior to that first summit, I struggled to bring in clients consistently. I’d get them just as I needed them and nothing more. But after that first summit, I was booked out for 6 months within a few weeks!

That allowed me to raise my rates, so I was getting paid more for the work I was doing, and I also had 6 months of lead time for booking new projects!

I continued nurturing my email list, which was filled with summit attendees, and I had no problem staying booked because of the evergreen funnel I had set up for my services.

I ran that summit once per year, and that just started it all over again.

I didn’t sell digital products in that business, so I wasn’t seeing ongoing evergreen revenue without me doing anything between summits, but my services stayed booked, which was exactly what I was looking for. I never had to do any type of special promotions or launches because the summit fueled my client schedule.

Example #2: Summit In A Box

For the second example, let's look at how summits have impacted our course sales and overall business growth at Summit in a Box. I hosted our first summit for this business in 2020 and hit our biggest launch ever at the time.

I would have been happy if the impact ended there, but after that, we’d see a random sale come in on any given day, and I could look and see that they were tagged as having come from the summit.

Then I started noticing that every time we launched, one or more of the people who joined our program had originally come through the summit.

That’s not something I had ever expected or thought about prior to it happening, so it blew my mind!

Like I said before, it took over two years of launches before we did a launch where we didn’t see someone from that original summit convert. And we’ve brought in a minimum of $180k in evergreen or launch revenue because of that event - and that’s just the amount I was able to easily track!

It has been a game changer for us and has taken so much pressure off bringing in leads in other ways.

Where summits fit for you

Now that you understand the power of repeat summits, I want you to look at where ongoing virtual summits can fit into your marketing strategy!

It ultimately comes down to choosing a rhythm for your summits that feels good for you, whether that's hosting annual events, or hosting them more often.

Hosting one summit per year feels pretty good to me, but we have many clients who host a summit every six months, and some going all the way up to 9 summits per year.

If you haven’t hosted a summit before, don't worry about making this decision yet. Focus on hosting your first one, and then you can decide how often you want to repeat them from there. Not sure if a virtual summit is right for your business? Consider these 3 things.

For those of you with summit-hosting experience, you probably have a gut feeling for what that pattern looks like, and you can fill your remaining marketing calendar in from there. This is something we actually have a complete system and strategy for in the Launch with a Summit Accelerator so feel free to reach out if you’d like more information on that

Summits are so much more than a strategy that gives short-term returns. They give that immediate return and pay off for years down the road.

To help you make the most of your repeat events and leverage what you’ve already done with your previous summits, we’ve got our Beyond One and Done workshop for repeat summit hosts starting next week. This is the first workshop or training I’ve ever seen offered for those of you have already hosted a summit and once you already have the initial work of that first event out of the way, it’s all fairly simple tweaks that can lead you to tens of thousands in additional sales. So don’t miss out on Beyond One and Done. Grab your spot today!

Resources

• Beyond One and Done
• Episode 90: Behind the Scenes of My September 2020 Virtual Summit
• Episode 213: Is a Virtual Summit Right For Your Business? Consider These 3 Things
• Episode 220: Find What Works and Create Your Evergreen Ecosystem with Mariah Coz
• Episode 228: The Power of Repeat Summits (and how they're not a 1-time cash injection)
• Summit Host Hangout Facebook group
• Launch with a Summit Accelerator
• 6-Figure Summits Workshop Bundle

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