How to Triple Your Audience for Free -- a Simple Co-Promotion Secret You Can Use Today

I recently spoke with Paul Cummings, VP of Sales and Marketing at Impression Management Professionals in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

He told me how he was able to get 600 people on a recent webinar and produce more than 50 qualified leads for his business -- at no cost. 

You can do the same. Here’s how …

Kevin Donlin: Paul, thanks for joining me. Please describe Impression Management Professionals for anyone how doesn’t know you.

Paul Cummings: We help leaders and sales people use outcome thinking to transform the way they think, listen and speak, so their brains work offensively rather than defensively. It works great for high-pressure situations, like a presentation, a negotiation, conflict or even in the sales process.

Kevin: Okay, let’s get right to it. You were able to triple the size of your typical webinar audience with a very creative joint venture. And it’s something people can use to get more prospects for a teleseminar, live event, or even to subscribe to their newsletter. What did you do?

Paul: We’re part of an association of training companies that get together once a year. One of the ideas that came up was that we collaborate together and do a webinar series to benefit all of our clients. We know that we don’t necessarily compete with each other, but we may have tools and ideas that would help each other’s clients.

So we all said, okay, we’ve got 6 people here and we all agreed to send out marketing information to our client list, included in our Twitter, Facebook, social media, and our websites. Then everybody would agree to do that and promote each other for 6 months.

For example, the first month, it was our webinar, and everybody marketed us to their customer lists. Now this month it’s somebody else’s turn, and we’re marketing them.

As a result, we were able to triple the number of people that we reach on a typical webinar.

Kevin: Triple! That’s a nice word. What was the before number and what was the after?

Paul: We typically get about 200 people to attend our webinars and for this last one it was actually over 600 people.

Kevin: Very cool. And what were your costs for this promotion?

Paul: Other than time to promote it, there was no cost. And we did something important for this webinar to make it successful for us. We used surveys before and after.

Before the person could register, they had to fill out a pre-webinar questionnaire with very specific questions. For example, we asked:

• What do you want us to talk about?
• What’s your job title?
• Are you interested in any of our upcoming programs?

So we were able to learn a lot ahead of time, so that we could directly talk to that audience.

Then at the end of the webinar, we had a survey pop up through Survey Monkey, and that’s relatively inexpensive or free. We asked specific questions like these:

• Would you be interested in a special report?
• Would you be interested in this particular public seminar?
• Would you be interested in executive coaching?
• Would you be interested in something for your team?

So there were many different options. And then they would check those survey responses, and we also asked, “If you want us to contact you, just check this box” and we ended up with at least 50 people who we were able to follow up with.

Kevin: All right, let me stop you and recap. That’s really, really valuable stuff that you shared.

First of all, you used surveys two different ways. Before the webinar, to help shape the content – people answered questions when they registered, and you used their answers to plan the webinar itself.

Then, after the webinar, you used surveys for people to qualify themselves by telling you what they were interested in. So you got to qualify people and segment them by interest, which let you follow up effectively.

That’s very, very smart stuff there, Paul. Anyone can use this idea. Bven if you’re not using GoToWebinar, there are a couple of webinar solutions. So I don’t want people to feel intimidated and think, “Oh, I don’t have the correct technology.” There are multiple webinar solutions, or you can do a teleseminar, just get a conference call if you want to start this out, so there are a lot of ways to use these ideas and it’s a really valuable idea.

Let me ask one final question. How did you go about negotiating with these other 5 co-promotion partners?

Paul: Well, first of all, basically we’ve been going to the association with these guys for years, so they became friends and so it just naturally happened. So it was just a discussion and we said, “Hey, let’s not attack each other’s clients, but let’s see if we can add some value and take it from there.”

Kevin: I see. That’s very clever. Paul Cummings, thank you very much. These are great ideas that anybody can use, whether it’s a webinar, teleseminar, or a live event that you want to promote.

Bottom line: Find one or more non-competitors who are already talking to the people you would like to have as clients, and agree to promote each other to your clients. There’s no cost and you’ll probably get a favorable response, such as you got by tripling your webinar audience and getting 50 qualified leads you are now able to market your services to.

Meanwhile, if you want to more clients like your best clients, my free Client Cloning Kit can help. Grab your free copy now, while they last.