Attendee Persona: The Starting Point for Your Impactful Virtual Event
In today's bonus podcast episode, I chat with Rob Gelb with HeySummit. If you've been in business for a while, you already know that hosting a virtual event is a great way to grow your business and expand your reach and impact. In this episode, Rob talks about an attendee persona and why it's the starting point for planning an impactful virtual event that serves your audience, promotes engagement, and gives you the best return on your event investment.
In addition, we discuss:
The benefits of running a virtual event for your business
The different ways you can structure your event
How you can evergreen your event content to maximize its impact
Tune in to learn about virtual events and why you should consider a virtual event to grow your audience and expand your reach.
Note: Some of these links are affiliate links, which means I may get a commission if you try them and purchase. However, none of the fees have been increased to compensate me.
Mentioned In This Episode
Transcript:
Speaker 1 (00:15):
And my special guest today is Rob Gelb Rob runs HeySummit, the event marketing platform for creators and independent entrepreneurs. Before leading HeySummit he founded a privacy conscious social network for families and organized a nonprofit documentary video series profiling, aspiring people, making a difference across America, run from a school bus. He also helped start coach or future Scotland, a coding school for refugees and asylum seekers. He's passionate about entrepreneurship that delivers social impact. You can reach him at rob@heysummit.com to talk about impact summits, startups, school buses, or anything, star Trek related. Rob, I'm super excited about our conversation here today. We're going to be talking about events, virtual events and how we can grow and scale our business through virtual against. But before we jump in a couple of things, I want you to tell us a little bit about Star Trek or a fun fact about star Trek and a little bit more about you and your background.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Well thank you very much for having me destiny and wow. You should not ask me anything about star Trek because we could be here for literally hours, but there are 724 episodes of star Trek before they started on the new year series. So w why don't we just go with that as a as a fun fact? Yeah,
Speaker 1 (01:46):
The 724. So I, I, I love star Trek. I haven't watched it in years, I will say. So the new series that they have out, what is it called?
Speaker 2 (01:57):
There are several, so there's one called discovery, another one called Picard, another one called lower decks. And there's a, a new one called a prodigy. So they're there
Speaker 1 (02:06):
For coming. I was familiar with, so I'm definitely to go to check that out. Well, tell us a little bit more about your background and how you got into running. Hey summit.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
So I mean he summit started off as kind of most, most great things, do a side project, trying to deal with a need that was you know, that, that people were facing. And so my great friend, Ben Bendel, who people might know him as the CEO and founder of missing letter. He had a problem. He wanted to run an online event, a virtual summit, and he couldn't find any kind of platforms that would work for him. He's pretty particular in terms of wanting to produce something that looks nice. So he decided to just set a date and say, I'm having this event, it's going to be a hundred speakers. And it's going to happen over two weeks. And he decided to set it about six weeks ahead of time without actually having a platform in mind.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
So I looked around, couldn't find anything that he liked. So I decided to build this out and it, it, it ended up working. It was, it was, it was tough, but but we built what would eventually become Hey summit. And it was a two week two week event, a hundred speakers 5,000 attendees. So as you know, pretty pretty decently sized and, and part of the reason why there wasn't anything out there that kind of suited was because there were so many moving parts, especially if you're thinking about virtual events, especially in the pre COVID era. It's about creating an opportunity for you to get in front of your customers without you necessarily having to have a lot of team members. So everything out there that, that either existed was too complex or required too much technical skill. And so we just saw there, there was an opportunity that a lot of people wanted to run these kind of multi talk events or or prerecorded summits. But the stuff out there was either really expensive or just wasn't really good enough. So that's what kind of prompted Hey summit to, to start.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Okay. So, and I, and I can relate to some of this, you know, you people, cause I've run a couple of virtual events summits in the past myself and, you know, people that are probably listening here are probably like me. They're not extremely technical. They need something that's very easy. They can just, you know, put in their information and everything is set up for them. So I definitely want to delve into that today, but before we kind of get into that, can we talk about who is a good fit to run an online event and some of the benefits of running a virtual bent where your business?
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Yeah, I think that's a good, good question. And I think that when you're, especially if you're an independent entrepreneur or maybe you have a very small team or maybe no team at all, you are, you, you need to be very efficient with your time, right? And so I think there's a lot out there that is a, you know, a bit of a FOMO, right? Kind of culture out there. Oh, I need to be doing this for a lead magnet, or I need to be creating a course or I need to be creating a podcast. I need to have everything I need to be on all social network social networks at the same time. There's a lot of this pressure to get out there and do everything and be everything to everyone. And we just don't have time. We don't have time for that.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Especially as creators or as independent entrepreneurs, you need you need to test out things you need to get in front of your audience. But at the end of the day, you know there needs to be you can't be focusing on things that aren't efficient with your time. And so I think that when thinking about virtual events and if they would be relevant to your business, I wouldn't be necessarily thinking about it from a point of view of thinking that creating a virtual summit, for example, as this massive thing that, that requires 30 people in order to run that's I think not necessarily the right way to, to think about it. I think more of it's, it's more relevant to think about whether or not a virtual event is the right way to reach your audience or, or not.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
And there are certain things that are attractive about virtual events especially virtual summits that are, that make it a very efficient, you know, a method of getting in front of your audience. The most important one is this idea of cross-pollination. So for example you know you, you might have an audience, maybe you don't have a huge audience yet. Maybe you have a little bit of one. The idea of cross-pollination is that if you're in inviting speakers to speak at your event part of that understanding part of that the purpose of bringing those speakers on to the, to that event is for them to get in front of your audience and for you to reach their audience. And so podcasts are a good examples of cross-pollination opportunities. So I come on your podcast and then I I'll probably share the podcast of my audience.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
So I'm serving your audience, but also hopefully bringing more awareness and attention to your, your podcasts through my through my network virtual events can have a similar effect, but much to a much greater degree in a much shorter amount of time. If you're thinking about creating an event with 30 speakers, that's 30 opportunities to expand your network and to cross-pollinate with other people. So it's very effective for things like that. The other thing to keep in mind is whether or not your audience is on an audience that really is motivated by learning versus motivated by let's say connecting to each other either way. If you're a, maybe you're a community owner or you're a brand where you're teaching people, things or training people, things virtual events can, can cater to both of those setups. They just need to be configured in slightly a different way.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Especially if you're, you're focused on learning primarily over over networking, you can run online events with one person, maybe two, if you need to and you can, you can make them all prerecorded, if you want to, maybe we we'll, we'll dive into that a little bit better, but fundamentally when you're thinking is a virtual event, right, for me we always suggest start with your customer, start with your attendees, build out what we call an attendee persona, try and understand what is it is it that they want? How can you provide that to them and is an online event, the right mechanism to provide that information, that value that you want to give to your your audience.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
I love that build out your attendee persona. That's a great tip there. So let's go into it. You, you talked about an L a little bit about the presentations or the training can be prerecorded. What are some ways that you can structure a virtual event?
Speaker 2 (09:04):
So an online event is basically a collection of talks over a specific amount of time. I know that sounds very simplistic, but when you unpack that, that can take the, the the mold of a lot of different things. Especially if you're a smaller scale a team, let's say you only have a few people on your team, or maybe you're just on your own. You might not want to have 30 people being live one after another worrying about different people's zoom connections or, or what have you. And so in order to help with that, pre-record them you can, you can either ask for recordings from your speakers or you can interview them and record them ahead of time, and then schedule those sessions to go live at particular times. So you can still have that excitement when it for, for an event that is happening exactly on the 20th.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
But then you know, starting at 9:00 AM, the first video goes live, then the second, then the third, et cetera. We also see people doing really cool things with hybrid events which for us means that the talk itself is prerecorded, but the speaker is on the live chat and there to answer people's questions at the same time. So you're still able to get back that excitement that bringing together of people at one specific time, but you're not having to worry about some of the technical worries, especially when you're on a small team or a team of one.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
So I will let you know that I have done if that's where we did the live presentations, and then I've done several events where we've done the prerecorded ones, and I highly recommend the prerecorded ones because technical issues always happen, always happen, always happen, always happen,
Speaker 2 (10:58):
But it also doesn't mean that you can't do a mixture of both. So I think some people might not realize that as well. Let you know, especially if your audience likes like the idea of being live in some ways, maybe there's a networking component. You can have a whole bunch of prerecorded talks, but then a live networking together or maybe your, your your kickoff is live. But then a lot of your sessions are prerecorded. So there's a lot of flexibility there in terms of how you, how you construct it.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
And I love that. So for the folks who are listening, because when we did the scale, your business summit, so we had some of the live kind of streams in the Facebook group. And then we had some of the live streams, like in the coworking sessions that we had every day. And then we had kind of a live with the, ask me anything for the panel, with some of the speech speakers. So that was like, but everything else was prerecorded and I didn't have to worry it so super, super easy there.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
So, Rob, let me ask you this, you've been doing this for a while and, you know, and I'll be, you know, full transparency here is something I've little, you know, struggled with a little bit myself. And I'm in the process of evergreening. One of my summits that we did earlier this year, because, you know, we have a lot of great content that I just don't want it to, you know, I need to get that content out in the world and, and let other people that may have not had exposure to the summit actually benefit from it. So tell me a little bit about, you know, what you've seen, how people have successfully taking their, taken there in their content from a live virtual event that they did. And evergreen, that content.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
That's a, it's a really good question and people are so creative and I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of things that you can do. Fundamentally when you're thinking about an online event it is an excuse. It's an excuse to develop a heck of a lot of content and hopefully to get that content developed for you, right. Or in conjunction with other people, but you're, you're sitting on, you know as you say, like a pile of there's really valuable content. And I think there are a couple of different ways that you can see, you can think about utilizing it. And it partially depends on the type of, of it that you're wanting to run. So the first thing that, that, that, that we always say is just because the event is over, doesn't mean you should close the event on our platform about 70% of all of the events that happen on our platform are still active six months plus after the event has happened.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
So just because the event has happened, doesn't mean that people will still not be able to find the event. It's great for SEO. They can still register it. They can still consume the content, they can still consume the replays. So don't underestimate just the value of, of having all of this content there and the first place. The second thing that you can do, especially on our platform and, and obviously on other ones as well is start removing all the dates and turn that event into a video library. So you can still turn it into a like an evergreen style video library for people to discover then separately with the actual content itself, think about all the different things that you can do across the board to your different pieces of content. That makes sense with the way that you market yourself in other areas.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
So for example if you have 30 talks, that could be 30 articles. So you turn every every talk into an article that you can publish, you know and, and drip out 30 talks could become 30 podcast episodes, and you could then start dripping out a podcast episode in anticipation of the next one that is you know, that's going to be coming out. The third is to have the video content, the video library, and have that as an add on to something else that you want your audience to do. If your audience takes X action, you can then they get access to your, the content library of all of your previous events. So those are a few different ideas of, of, of stuff that you can do, but there's some, there's some really creative things that people can people have done with all of the content that they're creating on behalf of their their event.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
You've given me a lot of great ideas there, as I think about evergreening, the summit and things I can do with it, but what are the, and I had 35 speakers at my events, so I have 30 pieces of content that I need to start repurposing and doing something with in, you know, when I think about it, that's 35 weeks of content. I could just push out to the podcast or, you know, do blog articles and other things with it. So that is some great information. Is there anything else that you would like to share with us today about live events and how we can use them to grow and scale our business?
Speaker 2 (15:51):
I think that, I think that when you're thinking of, of running your online event, one thing to keep in mind is try not to be everything for everyone. Oftentimes we see we S we see creators and we see independent entrepreneurs. They want to start building a summit and they want it to be as big as possible, try and resist building something that is the digital marketing con 2021. Instead try and understand your audience, understand maybe the top five problems that they're, that they're facing, try and create an event, just solving one of those problems. If you have a decision about going deep into one area versus trying to cover five different areas, at least for your first time out, I would focus on the one area. And the reason why is because you can, you can get more in depth, you can have more meaningful either discussions or, or sessions, and it will still appeal to the rest of your audience.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
But it will give you an opportunity to do another one later on tackling a different problem. I can give you an example. We have this one customer, his name's Daniel Wallace, and he's he's like a coach for writers for authors who are writing fiction. And he had a decision to make, does he do the writers summit 2021, or does he do just an event around plot? And luckily he decided we're just going to do the plot summit. It was actually called escape, the plot forest. So it was all around problems with creating and developing your plot. Then the next one that he he's, he was doing was about the editing process. And then the next one's going to be about setting or characters or something like that, even though his audience of authors have all of these problems, they have writing problems, they have business problems, they have marketing problems.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
He just focused on one area that still relevant to his old whole audience. And because of that, he got massively high engagement and an expectation that he can have all of these other subjects that he can line up later on. So whenever, whenever you can try and be as disciplined as you can about the problem that you're solving for this particular event and be okay with saying no to anything that comes outside of that, just because you find a speaker that might sound really, really cool. But if they're not fitting with that particular subject matter, that you're, that you're working on for that event, try and resist the urge to include them anyway, or expand your, your your event to accommodate them. It doesn't mean you can't work with them at some point or on something else, but try and be as pure as possible in terms of what it is that you're looking to achieve with the event, rather than trying to be all things to all people. If you're building something for anyone you end up serving, no one,
Speaker 1 (18:44):
I love that. And as you were thinking about that, you know, some wheels started turning in my head. I'm like, well, I could do, you know, one event just on, and I do a lot of things in my business, but just one event on helping people come up with their online course idea, that would be like one great event instead of, you know, trying to throw in the kitchen sink there. And the other, the other thing that kinda came up in my mind as you were talking, and I don't know what your, you know, the coach for riders does on this, when he does his events, like the smaller, tight niche events. Is that him? Is he the one that's teaching all of that content? Or is he still bringing in other speakers?
Speaker 2 (19:24):
No, he's bringing in other speakers. So the, the the focus on a particular area, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be the, the, the only person speaking, right. It allows you to get a little bit more in depth with that particular subject. It also allows you to bring in multiple points of view. I think that there's this, there's this kind of there's this thinking that, you know, if you're, let's say again, we're going back to the, the marketing summit 20, 21, you're probably then going to have like one or two people talking about Facebook ads, one or two people talking about email marketing and like, in your head, you're thinking, well, if I have to hit tick all the boxes for the marketing summit, I probably need to just take off all these boxes. And you, you end up getting a very shallow kind of point of view and that's very, very broad, and it's not very interesting.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Whereas if you were just saying, we're just going to do, we're just going to do a summit just around LinkedIn, right? We're just going to focus on LinkedIn as a subject. You can have sessions about crafting that that intro message and another one on two or three talks just on LinkedIn advertising and whether or not it's worth it or not. You can have people maybe with conflicting views on a particular subject. That is great. I think a lot of times people think, well, this has to be a, this has to be a pretty light touch kind of event where nobody's disagreeing disagreements actually quite interesting. And it, it, it, it encourages people to come and learn. And so you, shouldn't afraid you shouldn't be afraid to tackle subjects that are, that, that reach a little bit beneath the surface in whatever area that you're you're focusing on and generating a little bit of discussion. I think that those kinds of events are far better when it comes to engagement. And, you know, thinking back to the, to the, to the writing coach, these events were not small events in terms of population. Ironically he probably attracted, and he had a larger attendance for the niche events than he would have if he had just had the writing summit 20, 21 higher engagement, more people ended up attending, made more money.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
I love that. And what my, what am I key takeaways from this discussion here is there's a lot of different ways to structure these events. And you really just got to go back to that, attend a persona that you talked about in the very beginning and figuring out exactly how you can serve your audience. So Rob, can you let people know where they can find you?
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Oh, well, you can find, you can find, HeySummit heysummit.com. You can certainly find me on LinkedIn. Feel free to connect with me on there on Twitter,. You can also of course follow heysummit on all the relevant socials and and yeah, check us out.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
And I will make sure that the link for HeySummit is in our show notes. So people have that. And also I will put the link for our evergreen offer that we have for the scale, your business summit. So folks can kind of go in and if you missed it, you can check out that comment, that, that content also. That's great. Thank you, Rob.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
No worries. Thank you very much, Destini