Financial Seminar Marketing

There are a lot of people (maybe like you) who are in the financial services business who use seminars as one of their means of marketing. I have a number of clients who do exactly that. One of my clients is two or three weeks away from launching a couple of seminars geared to generating leads for his main business.

Are seminars the best way to promote yourself and your business in this field. The answer is IT DEPENDS! If your goal is to get people to give you money at the seminar itself, good luck. It ain’t gonna happen! People are more skeptical today that ever before. Instead, I would suggest to you that lead generation is the way to go. Don’t try and sell anyone when you get them in your seminar seats, try and get them to PHYSICALLY opt-in.

A number of years back, I got an invitation to dinner from an “energy savings” company. The claim on the very well worded postcard was they wanted to have me come to dinner at the “lovely” Olive Garden down the street. They would pay for dinner and they just wanted me to watch a demonstration. Being a sucker for a free dinner, I went. The free meal helped me decide, but MORE important to me was they said to NOT bring a checkbook. They would NOT be taking ANY money at the dinner.

WOW!

No hard sell. I was in!

I went to the dinner, watched the demo and I was impressed. What did they close me for? An appointment. They came to my house a couple of days later, gave me an estimate and left with a deposit check of $500. They ended up installing this space age material that was supposed to lower my electric bills in both the summer and winter.

Did it work? NO. Did I do it on more than one of my houses? Yes. Why? Because I wanted it to work!

Your less as a financial type? Don’t try and close people at the events or seminars that you do. Use those events to get people to commit to appointments where you can close them face to face, one on one.

But whatever you do, don’t do your seminar at an Olive Garden. I still haven’t eaten there since I wrote the last check for the second house!