ā€‹ā€‹Ready to go beyond the basics when it comes to summit promotion? I’ve shared strategies for promoting virtual summits on the podcast many times before, and this week I’ve got a more advanced strategy to share with you that can take your summit promotion to a whole new level.
I’m so excited to have my client in the Launch with a Summit Accelerator, Victoria Boyd on the podcast with me this week to share her incredible DM outreach system for generating leads on Instagram that she put to use in some really creative ways during her summit promotion period.
Victoria is a marketing consultant, lead generation expert, and host of the Lucrative Leads Summit, which we’ll be talking about in depth in this episode. We got into all the details about her DM lead generation strategy, how she used it in her most recent summit, and how it contributed to an amazing sense of community at her event.
We also talked about the process she followed to niche down her summit audience despite selling a course targeted at a more general audience, and how that made her DM outreach strategy even more effective.
This is a juicy one packed with tons of insights and practical tips, so let’s dive right in!
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Episode at a glance:
[1:31] Victoria is a marketing consultant who specializes in lead generation through cold Instagram DM outreach. She decided to host a summit with the goal of using it to launch her DMs to Dollars course following her event. Her course serves a wide variety of online business owners, so she had to do quite a bit of positioning work to choose a niche and topic that would work for her summit and align well with her course.
[3:00] In the end, Victoria decided on the Lucrative Leads Summit: VIP Day Edition as the theme for her event, to focus on serving online services providers who offer VIP Days. She realized that, while her course serves a much wider audience, a big portion of her clients and customers had successfully used her strategies to sell VIP Days, so that’s who she focused on for her event.
[4:39] It was a journey to get to the decision to narrow down her summit niche, and in the Launch with a Summit Accelerator, we worked with Victoria closely as she brainstormed different ideas. She had some hesitations and concerns that VIP Day service providers might be too specific, despite our encouragement that she was on the right track. It didn’t really start to click for her that she had chosen the right audience until she started reaching out to sponsors who jumped at the opportunity to sponsor her event!
I ended up landing two sponsors who served VIP Day service providers specifically, which was very cool, especially given it was my very first summit, so I really had no numbers to share. I was able to give estimates of what I thought would happen, but even without concrete numbers to share, they were like, “sign us up!.” Fortunately, they were really cool, and they were very involved in the summit, which I absolutely loved having.
[7:01] Victoria loved the experience of hosting a summit, but her biggest outcomes and takeaways have shifted in the months that followed the event.
If you’d asked me right after the summit, I would have said the best things about my summit were the community, the audience growth, and of course the extra income. But what's really interesting is now that I’m a few months out from it, I'm definitely viewed as an expert in the space, and I'm signing clients that I don't think would have looked at me otherwise. I'm viewed as an expert in a way I don't think I was before. And I'm getting clients that I don't think would have looked my way before.
[9:58] After getting some context about Victoria’s business and the summit she hosted, we dove into her DM sales strategy that she teaches her clients, uses in her own marketing, and most recently, used to increase registrations and sales during her summit.
The idea of selling in the DMs, doesn’t necessarily have to be about literal selling. The “sale” can be any conversion that you need or want. Once you’ve identified a lead and start having a DM conversation with them, you want it to go pretty quickly from friendship, to pitching to hopefully enrolling them in the free or paid thing you have to offer at that moment.
[13:04] Victoria recommends connecting with people without going in with a cold pitch right away. Instead, you should be making some sort of offer within 14 days of connecting with someone, but that doesn’t necessarily mean an offer for something paid! In fact, one of the best ways to deepen the connection with a new lead is by guiding them to genuinely helpful resources that will help them with something they’re struggling with. It feels a lot better than leading with a hard pitch for a paid offer, and also leaves the door open for future follow-up.
[14:14] Victoria gave me a full breakdown of her cold outreach DM strategy that she used to generate and nurture leads leading up to her event. This strategy totally paid off in the results Victoria saw from her summit. You’ll have to listen to the episode to hear all the details of what this genius strategy looked like!
[19:14] We won’t lie, this DM strategy can be a bit time-consuming, but I see it as a perfect thing to focus on during your summit promotion period. The time leading up to registration opening is usually packed with tasks to get ready for promotion, but once it opens, and you’ve done what you need to do to support your speakers, there can be a lot of sitting and waiting for the event to start. Use that time to DM potential leads for your summit!
[21:48] Practical tip: One thing Victoria did during her DM outreach that worked really well was using the “Primary” and “General” inbox features in her Instagram DMs. This made it easy for her to separate out the leads she was DMing for the summit from her DMs with friends and connections. This made it easy for her assistant to go in and know which messages to respond to, and also allowed Victoria to get on Instagram for fun on the weekends without seeing DMs she didn’t want to respond to at that moment.
I started flagging people so that my personal friends were in my primary inbox and the general inbox was for my summit lead list conversations. That made it really easy for days I was taking off. If I wasn't doing the lead generation on Saturday and Sunday, I could leave that aside, and that was a nice boundary that I had in place that I really liked.
[24:07] One thing that made this cold DM outreach strategy so effective for Victoria's summit was that she niched her event down to focus on a very specific audience. She was able to search and pretty easily find leads that were a perfect fit for her event because they offered VIP Days. This would have been much harder to do with a general summit for all online business owners, which is the target audience for her course.
[24:47] The combination of a very specific audience and hundreds of 1:1 conversations with summit attendees leading up to the event created an incredible sense of community during the summit.
I was more confident because I felt like I really knew the people that were attending my summit. I felt like I knew their tone of voice, and how they talked, and the questions they had. Even though I had over 1500 summit attendees, I had a really good pulse on them from the lead generation and DM conversations that I had. It created a sense of community that felt way more authentic and engaging than it would have otherwise.
[27:11] Want to start selling in the DMs but aren’t sure where to start? Victoria recommends starting with articulating what your offer is and how it helps people in a format that makes sense for DM conversations, and regurgitating the information on your sales page isn’t going to cut it!
When I say articulate your offer, what I'm really looking for is the name of the thing that you're selling, and one to two sentences explaining what it is and what it'll do for someone. It can be super simple, but it should be transformation oriented.
[31:30] Victoria shared some gold in this episode that was packed with practical strategies you can start using right away to generate leads and sell in the DMs, and she generously offered up her Selling in the DMs playbook so you can learn this DM outreach strategy in detail and start using in your business right away. This is normally a $37 offer, but you can grab it for FREE with coupon code SUMMITHOSTHANGOUT201. Enjoy!
About Victoria
Victoria H. Boyd is a marketing consultant and the host of the Make it Marketable podcast. She's had her feet in the marketing world since 2012 earning her Bachelor's in Business Administration and Master of Science in Internet Marketing along the way. Since starting her business in 2016, she's helped dozens of business owners hone their messaging, increase their visibility, generate new leads, and exceed their profit goals so they can truly enjoy the life and businesses they’ve built!
Connect on Instagram | Sell in the DMs Playbook | Website
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