Lauren Tilden 0:00
It's by far the fastest way that I've grown, especially my email list, which is the thing that I care the most about, because those are where all my sales come from. If you're really looking for a big boost in email subscribers, and you're willing to put in the work, I think it's kind of in a world of its own. That's Lauren Tilden, fellow marketer and podcast host like me, she believes that great marketing can change the world. I met Lauren through a program we were both members of, and she invited me to join her on her virtual summit. The one thing Summit, it was so well run. I increased my email list so much I wanted to share this insight track with you also. So here's to find out what it takes to be both part of and to run a successful summit, and how it can grow your business.
Finola Howard 0:50
I'm Finola Howard, Business Growth strategist with a joyful heart and your host of the your truth shared podcast. I believe that every business has a story to tell, because that's how the market decides whether to buy or not, and your story has to resonate with who you are and with the people you want to serve. And this podcast is about helping you reach the market in a way that feels right to you. So if you're an entrepreneur with a dream you want to make real, then this is the podcast for you, because great marketing is your truth shared. And today I have a treat for you. But you know what? I think I always have a treat for you when I have a guest on so but this is a treat, one of which I've sampled myself, because I have collaborated with this lady very recently, and I wanted to put forth some ideas from marketing ideas for you as a business. And I was involved in a collaboration with the lovely Lauren Tilden, who I'm going to welcome on board now in a second, and it was a summit. So hey, welcome aboard, Lauren. I'm delighted to have you with us. Thank you so much for having me. I'm I'm so thrilled about this conversation, anytime we can talk about marketing, and I know we have some good things to uncover today. So thank you for having me. Well, Lauren reached out to me to take part in her Summit, and I really,
Finola Howard 2:16
I like the idea of summits, and she's going to explain what a summit is, but I had been on summits before, and summits were a way of exposing you to another audience, okay, and, and there's other summits that I never really worked for me, and I think it's because of something that Lauren did, both in how she communicated, collaborated, reached out, you Know, because if we talk about great marketing, and this is the other thing we have in common, I digress here a little bit, because on her website, she says, great marketing can change the world. And I completely agree with her, completely. And why I like Lauren is because it felt right to collaborate with her, and a summit was a way to collaborate. So I'm going to hand you over to Lauren now. Welcome again.
Lauren Tilden 3:06
Thank you so much for having me, oh, all the way from Seattle. Tell us a little bit about you and your work, because you're also a marketer, and I really like talking to other marketers.
Lauren Tilden 3:18
Yes. Okay, so I am Lauren, as Finola said, I'm from Seattle, so way across the world, and I love that we get to have conversations like these. Anyway, in this day and age,
Lauren Tilden 3:33
I I was a marketer in corporate America until 2017 when I liked a lot about my job, and I did a lot of email marketing and campaign marketing. I worked in the market research industry, but was not a researchers market helping helping market research companies market their own companies.
Lauren Tilden 3:55
I liked marketing a lot, but there's just something about the working environment, like the corporate working environment that wasn't working for me, and I got kind of burned out and quit my job on a whim, on a business trip to Amsterdam. I pulled my boss aside, and I was like, can't do this anymore. Gave him a lot of notice, and then several months later, left, like retired, is what I like to say, because I don't intend to be employed ever again. At that time, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, so I started a stationary business with water, like I did watercolor and calligraphy, and I made greeting cards out of them. I made art prints vinyl stickers. Now I also do wrapping paper and in that like, you know, I sold it through my website. I sold it through retail stores.
Lauren Tilden 4:48
I started meeting a lot of other very small business owners who I realized, like,
Lauren Tilden 4:54
they had their business because they were really good at something, or they had a craft they loved. Or, increasingly, now.
Lauren Tilden 5:00
I work with a lot of service providers too, who you know, they're a photographer, they're an event designer, they have a skill or a passion, but they're not necessarily a business person or a marketer by trade. So they like I was lucky enough to have all this expertise that I hadn't realized how helpful it had been
Lauren Tilden 5:18
to me. I ended up also taking over my mom's retail store, which bought from a lot of small businesses. So then I was also working. I was buying from businesses, and I was like, Oh my gosh. Why is their marketing so terrible? They could be selling so much more or, you know,
Lauren Tilden 5:34
and so kind of the mix of these two experiences working with so many other small, small businesses. I just realized I found myself teaching a lot of marketing, just like one on one. But I was like, this is such a missed opportunity. All of these amazing businesses that do amazing things, they make amazing impacts on the world. A lot of them had, like, donations, or they just, like, had really big hearts as well. And I was like, I want to see these businesses doing even better so that they can continue to make a bigger and bigger impact. So I started a podcast in May 2020 called Making good, which was all about making doing better marketing so you can make a bigger impact. And it just kind of took off, like I didn't have a business associated with it at the time it was actually, it was like, I had my retail store. It was early covid. I had to, like, shut the doors for a while. I needed something to be excited about.
Lauren Tilden 6:30
So I kind of put all this energy into this podcast. And for two years there was no monetization whatsoever. It's just like, this is a thing I care about. And then as the years have gone by, I've kind of realized no like this is kind of my first love is marketing and teaching marketing and
Lauren Tilden 6:49
showing small businesses how approachable marketing can be if you do it intentionally. So now I have the podcast. I have a membership. I do things like summits, which I know we'll talk about.
Lauren Tilden 7:01
I still have my I sold the retail store. Still have the stationary business very back burner, like when orders come in from retail stores, I fulfill them, but it's really just a fun thing for me. Now, my eggs are really in the basket of this marketing business I have. So can I ask you a question? Yeah, go ahead. Well, it's a podcast, so I should be able
Finola Howard 7:24
to but I like your your we have this in common also, apart from, we think that great marketing can change the world, but this idea of 10 intentionality, because I think, I think something happens with small businesses that anything they ever knew, any form of intelligence, leaves the room when the word marketing comes on the table, and it's so scary, yet they are the best expert in their own business, in their own customers. Yet it just scares the living bejays out of small businesses and even some bigger businesses too. But this idea of intentionality say more about that. It's, I agree. I just like your perspective.
Lauren Tilden 8:09
I think when many small businesses start out, they realize they need to do something about marketing, which I think to them is like, get the word out of my about my business, get customers. And so what they tend to do is look around at what other businesses like them are doing and just do that. So go up they see people doing Instagram. So they spend, I mean, what I find is most of the small businesses I work with, they kind of equate social media with marketing. It's like they think the only thing they have to do is create however many Instagram slash Tiktok. Maybe they have multiple social accounts. Maybe just they focus on one or two, but they really tend to spend almost all of their time on that, which is the opposite of intentional. Intentional, to me, means getting really clear on what your goal is. So marketing, as we know, can do so many things for you. Can help you build brand awareness. It can help you build relationships so customers that can help you directly make sales. It can help you like there's you really it does require more intentionality than I want to market my business. You need to know what your goal is. So, for example, for me, if I was really pursuing my stationary business right now, if it was like something I was more focused on, I was doing more more marketing for it, I would know that my priority was to sell to retail stores. Because as a stationary business, at least mine, that's what makes a lot more sense. I can, you know, making a $6 sale for a greeting card through my website. I have to do so many of those before that makes any kind of scale, versus selling it wholesale and selling it to small stores, they buy a lot more at one. Ones, I just know that that's a better model for me generally. So if I want to sell to retail stores, the way I'm going to market my business is really different from, let's say, a jewelry store, who they only sell through their website directly to customers. So if I'm selling to wholesale stores, this is just an example I know probably not all of your audience sell wholesale, but if I'm selling wholesale to stores, I'm doing a lot of pitching one on one. I have a fair. Fair is a marketplace for wholesale. I've got a fair listing. I'm doing a lot of follow up. I'm maybe getting myself on podcasts that I know shop owners listen to. You know, my the way that I'm going to approach marketing is so specific versus if I know I sell through my website, primarily, another thing that comes into intentionality is just knowing your ideal customer, which I kind of just touched on. So who is the type of person who will buy from you? Who is that like perfect, perfect customer? A lot of times when people are trying to think about this, I recommend that they think about a past customer, someone who, like, they wish they could work with over and over again, or the person who just got it, the person who didn't have to be sold. They just, like, immediately were on board. You want to, like, really channel that person and figure out where they hang out. What are they interested in? What do they want to learn? You know, where can you reach them? What kind of media do they consume? Any any thing you can learn about them will be useful in your marketing. So there's a couple of places to start. When it comes into intentionality. I would say a third thing I would be thinking through would be, I like to teach marketing in a really simple way where marketing just has three jobs. Your marketing needs to help you get found by ideal customers. It needs to help you build a relationship with them, and it needs to help you make the sale. So making sure that you're kind of checking off each of those three things somewhere in your marketing that you are. You have some good strategies for getting found by your ideal customers, you have a method of building relationship with them. For most people, for that, I recommend email marketing, and then you have a way of making really converting to a sale. And for me, I also recommend that email is probably the easiest place to make sales once you've built relationships, although that happens other places too. So kind of a long winded response, but I would say, in short, intentionality is about knowing what you're trying to do and really asking yourself, like, what's the best way to do this, versus just looking around and kind of copy pasting what you see other people doing, because the person next door to you, the competitor next door To you, who has a really beautiful Instagram account and 100,000 followers and whatever like you actually have no idea what that translates to in terms of business results, having a big following or apparently, a lot of success on social media can have very little to do with how much Money that person is making or from their business versus there could be someone on the other side of you who has less than 1000 followers and is killing it financially. So just looking around and copying what the biggest businesses on social are doing is a mistake that I see basically everyone doing. Yeah. Everyone
Finola Howard 13:20
do, yeah, you forget. Just because they look good beside you doesn't mean it's working. And just out of curiosity, this back to this intentionality thing, everything you said there just is, just makes so much sense, right? It's just and to me and you seem so obvious to us that this is you know what you would do, and it's very rational, and it seems like common sense, but as we know, it's not common. Why do you think this happens? Why does the brain leave the body with so many small businesses that? And why this fear of saying, who's my customer, and what is you know, of customer profiling? Why do you think that's happening? Because it's everywhere, and there's such a resistance. I spoke to someone earlier today, and I asked them, well, who's the customer you're going after? And it's like, in sometimes when you speak to people, they're like, of course, I know who my customer is, but in my experience, most people don't
Lauren Tilden 14:21
I mean, I think there's two things that immediately come to mind. One is just very directly to what you just said. I think people are worried about getting too specific when they narrow down their ideal customer, because then they feel like they're going to be excluding everyone else, and like, if I only speak to this very narrowly defined ideal customer, then no one else will buy from me. And that's actually just not true at all. You will still sell to a lot of other people who just kind of get swooped up in the net and like, like what you have to say, but when you are super specific about your ideal. Customer. You know their habits, their interests, what keeps them up at night, their pain points, what they care about. And you can speak so directly and in their language, using their words like that feeling of being that ideal customer, receiving that marketing. It's so magnetic, it's so hard to resist, so you're just gonna get a lot more of your actual ideal person. But you also that doesn't mean you're not selling to other people. Other people will still buy.
Finola Howard 15:32
Just because you're saying yes to this customer doesn't mean you're saying no to everybody else.
Lauren Tilden 15:36
That's yeah, that's exactly right. The other thing I'll say, just around like, this overall concept of fear in marketing is, actually, marketing is kind of scary. Like, you're it requires, I think it's good to just say it requires some courage to do marketing. You are making yourself pretty vulnerable. You're saying, like, here's this thing I made. Do you want it like, look at it like, if you think about like human behavior, I don't think it's that surprising that marketing, like we're really asking to be seen, and making ourselves seen in a way that is not comfortable or natural, right out of the gate for a lot of us. So to that, I would just say, like, small steps, like, you know, start with what you're comfortable with, and you can do scarier and scarier things, but you will get used to it. It's like jumping into Finola, just telling me she goes into the ocean every morning, even this time of year, we're recording this in October, like the first time someone tries to do that. And if I were to be with her and hanging out and going to the ocean first thing in the morning, like I might put my toes in and then the next time I might go up to my knees. And, you know, it's like, it's little by little
Finola Howard 16:55
that wouldn't happen, you know, Lauren, because I'd splash you.
Lauren Tilden 17:00
Okay, well, I accept that. The other thing that happens, though, is probably even for you, when you first get in, it's still really cold, but you know that, like, you habituate to it, like you just, that's it, you know, you you understand that it's going to be pretty painful for a few seconds, but then you're going to get the hang of it. I give a lot of like workshops where I'm presenting live, and I don't know what possessed me to do it. The first time, I was so scared, I was so nervous to do it. And even now, the first minute or two, I have my nerve like I can feel my nerves, like I'm just kind of wired. And by like, 10 or 15 minutes in, like I could be sitting on my couch. That's how comfortable it feels. But you have to do it in order to get to the point where it feels like it doesn't feel less scary by waiting for it to feel less scary, it feels less scary by doing it.
Finola Howard 17:59
So, yeah, that was very deep. Lauren,
Finola Howard 18:09
so let's talk about what is a summit.
Lauren Tilden 18:13
So a summit is, I think, in the context what we're talking about, we're talking about virtual summits, which are online events that happen over the course of anywhere from like one to four or five days, where people register in advance so they will sign up by giving you their email address. They are consenting to be joining your email list in exchange for a ticket to the summit. And then when the date arrives, where the summit begins, they have, usually there's a chunk of presentations each day, so maybe 10 presentations a day that they can watch. They're run very differently depending on who runs it. So sometimes the presentations will be live. Where? Okay, at 9am is Lauren. At 10am is Sarah. At 11am is someone else. And you only get to watch the presentation if you're there live. Some people do it the way that I've done it, which is, each day, you have 24 hours to watch each of the presentations. So if I register for my free ticket, when day one goes live, I have 24 hours to watch all of the presentations from day one. And then normally, there's also an upgraded ticket, where, if you know you're not going to be able to watch them all live, or if you know that you're going to want ongoing access to the content, you can pay, usually a pretty affordable fee to get lifetime, or something close to lifetime access, where you can watch it. You can watch all the content from SMS whenever you want. So yeah, usually it's a multi day event where each day new content becomes. Available. You can only, typically, you can only register for it before, so or like, before or during, but after the event's over, if you've missed it, you've missed it kind of thing. So it naturally has this sort of urgency built in, where, you know, you might have something really good for free to offer people, but if they can get at any time, there's just less, less incentive to act. Now. The thing that I think is so effective about summits is like, there's this energy around it that, like, if you want to now, is the time, like you need to register now. You can't do it later, because you'll miss it. To me, I think that energy is what is most effective in making them affect making them work. I think there's a couple of reasons people host them. If you kind of heard me just describe that, it probably sounds like a lot of work. It's even more work than it sounds like to run, is what I've learned. And the reason, there's kind of two reasons, I think people do them. One is to make money from the ticket sales. So anyone who buys an upgraded ticket, there will be some money associated um. But I think more importantly, certainly for me and many other hosts, is to grow your email list. So this is a short period of time where probably a lot of people are going to be joining your email list. If you've designed the summit in a way that's really reflective of your work. So you know my Summit, my last summit, was called The One Thing, and it was, think, 44 different speakers teaching one marketing thing, and Finola is one of them. The way that I structured it, it was very representative of like, what I'm all about. So my hope, and what I've seen so far, is that, like, yes, inevitably, you get some unsubscribers afterward, but not everyone. Like, you're going to end up with some pretty serious email list growth anyway. And yeah, it's, it's like Finola mentioned, it's a collaboration. So typically, there's a lot of speakers, or there's some degree of speakers for me, like I said, I think they're around 44 we are all promoting it to our audience. We are all hopefully we have a lot of overlap between the people who follow us, so that when Finola promotes it to her audience, there's some people there who end up being interested in what I have to say. And when I'm promoting it to my audience, they come and watch her session and they're like, Oh, I love what she's all about. And so there ends up being this, like really beautiful, healthy growth, hopefully on all ends, if it's done well, where anyone who participates as a speaker gets exposure to a lot of new people. And of course, as the organizer, you you do all the work, but you also get the huge benefit of the email list growth of anyone who registered. So, yeah, well, that's there's a start. I'm sure we can dig in more to this. But Well,
Finola Howard 23:09
what's interesting about it is just to share with people that this is a tried and test marketing technique, if you were going to do it's a way of you growing your email list. And as Lauren said earlier, email list is one of the most, highest converting spaces. Marketing tools that you can have is your email list. So if every time you grow your email list, you grow your ability to make additional sales. And as we know, we can't keep dipping into the same pool of potential customers. We've got to go, we've got in order to scale, in order to grow, we've got to meet new people. And inverted commas, meet new people. So adding them to your email list is a way of doing it. The upside for the customer, the potential customer or subscriber to that list, is that they get exposure to many experts all at the same time, and they can pick and choose for either for free or for quite a reasonable price, like it's in the kind of $50 range that you usually sign up for. I don't think they're really more expensive than that. And very often summits are if they're done, well, they're usually themed. So Lauren themed hers about one thing. So it attracted people who went, Okay, I can't get my head around this marketing thing, but if I was able to just do one thing, then if I got 44 one things that I have available to me because I signed up for it, then I could just do one thing a week for a year. You know, who do you think is best suited to take part in a summit or to host a summit?
Lauren Tilden 24:46
Anyone to both questions with the caveat that it needs to be a good fit for your audience. So I think the first question when it would come to thinking about, should I. Week at a summit, or should I host a summit? Would be, who is your ideal customer? What is something they're interested in? What do they need? What are they wanting to learn? I think when it comes to hosting a summit, it's it's very natural. It's a very natural fit for anyone who sells to business owners. So if you are a B to B business so you sell, you know, let's say graphic design or marketing or bookkeeping or whatever it is, if you sell to business owners. Business owners are always looking to improve their skills, so I think that's a pretty easy one. If you find the right angle for it, you'll want to again, think about your ideal customer. What are they interested in? What are their pain points? What do they need? What do they struggle with? And then find other speakers who have an ideal audience, or have have an audience that reflects your ideal customers. So as an example for me, if I invited a speaker to my summit who really was into, like, hustle culture, and it was like more of what I would call a bro marketer who's like, you know, more Alex hormozi style. That is great for some people, but that audience would not be interested in the way that I teach marketing. I know that that speaker probably my audience wouldn't be as interested in them. So I have to think really carefully when I'm putting a summit together, like, Does their audience? Is their audience gonna like me for one, and are my audience going to be interested in what they have to say? Because that's what makes it a win, win. So really thinking carefully about choosing speakers who you have clear audience overlap with, that would be the first thing I would say about hosting, because that's what's going to make it a win for you, and that's what's going to make it a win for them. And it's really important that you kind of have that Win Win mentality approaching hosting a summit, because it's not just about you. There's a lot of people who will be putting a lot of effort into the event, like all of your speakers, they'll be sending you materials, recording a presentation like it is a lot of work to put together. It's also a lot of work to participate in. So you really want to make sure you have the right people, so that they get results out of it. And, you know, everyone's kind of done their part. So that's what I would say for hosts. I think even if you sell directly, you know, even if I was, if my main business was a stationary business, I think there would be a way for me to host a summit. If I really know my ideal customer, and my ideal customer in that business is, is someone who's kind of crafty. They're interested in small batch stuff, they will spend money to get things that are more one of a kind and locally made. So there might be some kind of summit I could host there that was either like, maybe it's a bunch of crafters teaching a craft, or maybe it's, maybe it's around for a roundup of local Seattle businesses that you know, I don't know, are doing something Seattle related, because I know that my audience loves local shopping, so I think there definitely are ways to do it if you're a B to C business, but it's very natural for B to B, because businesses are just a great fit for for summits, because they're always looking to learn business owners.
Finola Howard 28:47
I also think that it's to open your mind up to this idea of collaboration, so that some kind of beat some professionals may be worried about being in a room with those 44 people who may be competing for the same share of wallet. But the reality is, when we collaborate, we're one, we expand our own way of thinking. Two, we expand our audiences. It's just a better way to grow your business to not be so scared of collaborating or so scared of people who are in the same space as you. What's your view on on that idea around collaboration?
Lauren Tilden 29:24
Yeah, I totally agree with that. And there, when you think about the idea of growing your audience, to me, there have been very few things I've done in my business that have more rapidly grown my audience then through collaborations, and specifically, like a collaboration one on one with another business owner, is great. Let's say something like an email swap, where you send a newsletter and you talk about something I have to offer, I send a newsletter with something you have to offer. We each get a little bump. And attention, hopefully subscribers to our email list. That's an example of a collaboration. But when you're collaborating with like 30 or 40 other people, the scale, if you're all invested, if you're all promoting it, you know, if it's done well, the scale to which all of you can grow your audiences, but specifically, especially the person hosting it, who's getting all of the registrations, it's, it's by far the fastest way that I've grown, especially my email list, which is the thing that I care the most about, when it comes to my own audience. Like, yay Instagram follower. That's great. But I'm much more interested in my email list, because i Those are where all my sales come from. Are from email so when I look at my email analytics, and I look at the big spikes in subscribers, like, when did I get? When did that really jump up? It's it's been from my two summits. Those have been by far the biggest drivers of email list growth to me. For me, you know, I've done ads, I've done free workshops, I've done all kinds of other things to grow my email list, and seen success to some extent, with many different things. But the this has been the fastest, the most dramatic jump in my email list has has come from the summits. So if you're really looking for a big boost in email subscribers, and you're willing to put in the work, because it will be work to organize it, I think it's kind of in a world of its own for me, at least. So as for who should speak at a summit, I think if you can find the right Summit. So the summit of people, of the summit where your ideal customer is really interested in it, you know, you know that the people registered are going to represent your ideal customers, then it's a fit for you. And so I think, as for speaking at a summit, it's a matter of finding the right one. And if you, if you do, then I would apply, I would try to build a relationship with the host. Yeah, I think it's a great fit. And actually, I'd love to hear from you like it seems like you were happy you participated in in my Summit. So, like, what was the outcome? What made it a good fit for you? What would be your criteria moving forward for, like, what kind of Summit you would say yes to? What wouldn't
Finola Howard 32:34
So, as a result of yourself? So I've done a summit before. Okay? And the vibe wasn't the same as me. I'm I'm very direct, I'm very I'm also very warm and and I it's important to me. Relationships are very important to me. I did a summit a few years ago, and I didn't, and it would have been the first time I'd done it. I was probably excited that I was asking, being asked to speak at it, and I was live speaking, I was being interviewed for it, and but I didn't feel a connection to the person who was running Summit. From this perspective, we're on the same program together. So I knew and I checked you out because so you reached out to me, and the first thing I did was Google you and look at your website and see how aligned is exactly what you said. I wanted to see where the alignment was. I wanted to see if I could believe this person was going that it would be worth my while. That was a really important thing. Is this worth my while? What is my goal here? What do I want to achieve here? And it ticked all, all the boxes for me, in terms of the idea that you had for the theme of the summit, who you are as a person, who you are as a marketer, and the fact that I knew I had a product I wanted to like a freebie that I wanted to offer, to get them into my email list. And it worked, and I used it. I had a specific goal in mind, so but the alignment was critical and and your believability was critical to me, and as a result, I've signed up for another summit, just coming up now shortly. And it's also because I believe that person amazing. And I did get, I was very happy, Lauren, because I did get a spike, a spike in email subscribers and people who went on to so I did a recording. They could download my free one page plan, annual plan, and they could sign up for my course. And people went through the whole way through, and I was really happy. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. Like, well done.
Lauren Tilden 34:58
I. Um, well, well done to you, too. I think you know, the host does what they can, but then you get someone to your presentation, it's then the speaker's job to give a good presentation that is valuable. It's not a sales pitch. There's something more people want. So that would be my big tip. If you are participating in a summit, it's super important that you have something that people need to download from you, like a lead magnet or a giveaway of some kind. You don't want to just hope that they decide to follow you on Instagram, or out of the goodness of their heart, decide to sign up for your email list because they like your presentation. You need to have a very clear next step for them to take, which is, and my recommendation is, it's something to download to get on your email list. So maybe it's a tracker of some kind, or a list of AI prompts, or, you know, depending on what you teach, something that is a natural follow on to your presentation that makes it easy for them to implement, implement what you taught. That's super important, because Finola would not have seen this spike of registrations had she not had a really clear next step of what to download.
Finola Howard 36:17
That's a real piece of feedback for everybody. What's the clear next step?
Lauren Tilden 36:21
Yeah, and there were some speakers who like, I think there are a couple who didn't have a download, and I really hope that they people connected with them, and they got some new followers and maybe even some business out of it. But it's a lot easier on the person watching if they know exactly what to do next. So that would be a very important takeaway. Like, if you're going to commit to a summit, make sure that you have the bandwidth to create, or you already have something created that people can download in exchange for their email address, because that's how you get that spike. Of course, as the host, I get a spike, because everyone who wants to come has to sign up through my link. So I get everyone, but as a participant, you only get the people who watch your presentation, and they're like, yes, I want more. So it's not enough to just participate. You have to do a good job. And you know, everyone I invited did do a good job, like I was so happy with the content, and like everyone for both summits, I feel like really blew me away, but not everyone had a download, and that, that's what I think probably makes the difference between the people who get the most results from my participation. Is, do you have something that people can walk away with that gets them on your email list and also helps them further implement what they learned from you,
Finola Howard 37:44
yeah? And you've got to nurture them once they do download, yeah, and that's that was for me, the test does, did the nurture sequence work? That's what I wanted to do. And it worked, yeah, tell me. And do you think that there's a possibility, you know, because there are a lot of summits coming now, do you think there's a possibility? There's two questions, one that there are maybe too many summits coming, or my second question is that, do you think there's any chance of overwhelm, because there's so much information coming at people and so, for example, on your Summit, there was 44 speakers. Like, that's a lot,
Lauren Tilden 38:23
yeah, I and I definitely think there is, and that's part of the way that I designed. Actually, both of my summits, I'm now doing two every year. The one in the fall is called 15 minute marketing, and it's like every presentation has to be 15 minutes or less. No exceptions. So, like, it has to be cut off at 15 minutes. That is kind of in response to the overwhelm question of like, you know, 44 one hour long sessions is kind of hard to get your head around. I can see how that's overwhelming. 4415 minute sessions where you are encouraged to pick and choose the ones that resonate or are interesting to you. That was an attempt at, kind of combating that potential overwhelm. My other Summit, which you participated in, the one thing, the premise there is just teach one thing, don't teach a whole framework. Don't teach a whole abstract theory, like, teach people something super specific, they can go do themselves as a result. And so that, again, also an attempt at combating overwhelm, like, if you could just learn one tiny thing. And I loved the way that the presentations came together for that there's someone who taught, like, here's how to basically design your Instagram stories. And so she had some specific hacks on that. And, you know, small, super practical, super actionable. So I think just knowing that by their very nature, they could be a little overwhelming, is something you can think through in the. Way that you design it, also just telling people they don't have to watch everything, like you can still sign up for a summit if there's two sessions you're interested in. You know that could still very much be worth even paying for, but at least getting a free ticket for. So not really. I've tried to have the messaging that this is a buffet, pick and choose what you like like. This is not something where you have to watch start to finish every single session, although a lot of people did, a lot of people, I could see it happening as the day as it was alive. I could see people watching every single one. But you don't, certainly don't have to do that. And I would think about that in your messaging. You could, you could host a smaller Summit, so less speakers, fewer speakers, that would make it. And a lot of people do that, more of like a like a boutique II, feel. I think that will work better if you have big name, bigger name, bigger following, I guess I should say people. I wasn't necessarily trying to get like the Amy Porterfield level people participate like I wanted people who were really good at what they did had audiences. But I wasn't looking for like, ginormous followings, like, I was looking for something like me, which is like, you know, I have under 5000 followers on Instagram and under 5000 email subscribers. So I was kind of looking in that realm. Some people, some of the speakers, had way more on both counts. But that, anyway, that's generally kind of the zone I was in. And so I knew that if I wanted the bigger results for me and my speakers, that I wanted more speakers, basically, so that we could all kind of pool together more if you I think it'll be harder to get the bigger bump, the fewer speakers you have, essentially, unless they have really big audiences. But
Finola Howard 42:01
what's clear to me, from what you're saying, is you're living your own truth, which is intentionality. Again, you are very intentional about every step of this. But how you themed it, how you chose the people, you looked at their audiences, you looked at their vibe. Did it gel with your vibe? All of those things so very, very intentional. Yeah, do you think that that is a good way to leave people a good message to leave them with today. How would you like to leave people with today? What would you like them to walk away
Lauren Tilden 42:33
with? I think whether you decide to host a summit or participate in a summit or neither just I think intentionality is a really good message to leave people with. I would distill a lot of what we said into something I mentioned before, which is that your marketing needs to do three things. It needs to reach new people. And for me, that's where summits really excel. For me that summits have been the most effective way of growing my audience with new ideal customers. So that's where it falls in when it comes to my like marketing plan, the job one, reaching new people. Summits are amazing for that. But it doesn't have to be summits. It could be other forms of collaborations. It could be pitching yourself to the press or to customers. It could be, maybe you're really good at organic social media growth. Maybe you do paid ads. Maybe it's SEO, like there's so many different ways to reach new ideal customers. You don't have to think about or do all of them. You just pick a couple and really focus and narrow in on those. But what I will the message I will have for you here is it shouldn't just be social media, because that's it's such a crapshoot. It's such a it's something that we don't have enough control over. You could put 40 hours a week into your Instagram account and still not get the results you want, whereas someone else could spend five minutes on a whim, and that could set them up for life, like, if there's no there's no guaranteed result, the way that there, there is with a lot of other forms of marketing. So I'm not saying don't do social media, but please don't put all your eggs in that basket. Please have, like, one or two other forms of reaching new ideal customers. Then once you've reached them, you want to build a relationship with them, and for me, like we've talked about, email is a really key place to do that. So no matter where someone finds me, social media, my podcast, a summit, whatever it is, I want them to have the next step be to get on my email list. For some reason, usually that means I'm giving them something they want in exchange for joining my email list. Normally, just being on an email list is not incentive enough, although some people have newsletters that kind of serve as lead magnets. So there's some wiggle room there, like if you have a sub stack style newsletter where people really want to get it every. Week. Maybe that's an incentive of itself, but for most people, you'll need to be giving people something they want. So no matter where someone finds me, I'm hoping they take my email or they sign up for my email address, and then I'm building relationship on email, and then I'm the third thing that marketing to do is make the sale, and that I also do mostly on email. I'll talk about my launches and sales on social. Almost no sales come from that. It almost all comes from people on my email list who have been nurtured, they built a relationship, they've learned to trust me. And then when I occasionally come in and I'm selling something pretty hard, a pretty good percentage of them usually decides to buy so that is just the the the key application of intentional intention is thinking through those thinking through those three things, how are people finding you? How are you building relationship and how are you making the sale?
Finola Howard 45:54
I love that. Thank you so much, Lauren, thank
Lauren Tilden 45:58
you so much. This was a blast. Thank you for having me. And
Finola Howard 46:01
that's it for this episode, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us, and make sure to connect with Lauren on Instagram, and don't forget to click on the links in the show notes for the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you for listening to your truth shared, and if you enjoyed this episode, please do rate and review it in your favorite app at love the podcast.com/your, truth shared. It really does help spread the word and helps me to continue to invest in this podcast. You.
