How we used our booth at Traffic and Conversion Summit to grow our list, brand and following, using t-shirts, girls and a helicopter…?
On today’s episode Russell talks about the Traffic Conversion Summit and why Clickfunnels did a booth, and some of the challenges that came with it.
Here are some fun stuff to listen for in this episode:
Listen below to hear how Russell and Clickfunnels made thier name stand out at the Traffic Conversion Summit.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone! This is Russell and I want to welcome you to the one and only, Marketing In Your Car. I hope you guys are having an awesome day today. I have some fun stuff to talk about to you guys. I hope that you’re in the mood to hang out. Just dropped my son off at school, and I’m heading back into the office.
And it was funny… someone messaged me this week on Facebook and asked me to do a podcast about my thoughts on the Traffic and Conversions Summit, which we just got back from late last night, and so I thought that I would do that.
So I want kind of talk about some of you guys know the Traffic and Conversion Summit. It’s a huge conference that happens every year. This year they had, I think like 3,500 people. It was pretty impressive that there were that many people all there. It was kind of crazy.
And so it’s kind of like a no-pitch event, pretty much. You know, they come and they teach, and, you know, Ryan and Perry that run it, they sell a couple of their own little things, but not really aggressively or anything like that.
And so anyway, so they kind of were doing the event, and because with that many people there, we obviously wanted to be there with ClickFunnels, and so we decided to do a sponsorship booth.
And so they had different sponsorship levels. The highest one, I think, was like $75,000, which we didn’t want to do that one. But there’s one at $25,000 where you got a booth, and then you were able to actually speak onstage for like 45 minutes in one of the break out rooms.
And so we did that, and so we had to figure out like how to maximize that. You know, in a format where I can’t sell, how do we make as much money as possible?
And so we tried a bunch of strategies -- some worked, some didn’t work, but I thought I’d kind of share some of them.
So first thing, obviously, we got a booth, and we had never really done big booths before. We had kind of, you know, had a little booth, we’d taken a couple of events, but that was about it.
So we had a big booth, and so we showed up there the night before and our booth was set up, and they put us like clear in the back corner where nobody could find us, and I looked at our booth and everyone else had these amazingly huge, designed booths and all these crazy things.
And anyway, it was kind of interesting, and we looked at ours. Ours looked so crappy next to everybody else’s because all we had were like these two little side banners and then like a tablecloth and that was it.
And I was like, honestly that night, so embarrassed about our booth, and then second off, like kind of upset that they gave us such a… like literally, I think there were four $25,000 sponsors and all of them had like front row and we were like way in the back, like we got the worst placement of anyone by far, which was kind of annoying.
So anyways, the first thing, I was just like, “We’ve got to fix this somehow,” and Roland Frasier, he’s one of the owners of Digital Marketer, he was like, “If I was you guys, I’d go rent a big huge TV for that and make your booth look a little more presentable.”
So 6:00 o’clock in the morning, the next morning, we called around and we were able to rent out an 80” TV, so we boom! Popped this huge 80” TV and we put like a loop reel of ClickFunnels on the background, and now our booth looked actually pretty dang awesome, to be honest.
So that was kind of cool, and then that day I had a chance to speak, and so we were trying to figure out like how in the world, first off, to get as many people into my break out sessions as possible because I’m competing with two other speakers, and I was the first up.
And then second was like, how to make this thing memoriable? Memoriable? Memorable. How to make this memorable so people start talking about us and how to create a good buzz, and so the thing first we did is we got a whole bunch of t-shirts that on the front said “#Funnel Hacker” and then on the back had the ClickFunnels logo and it said “Powered by ClickFunnels.”
And so we actually ordered 1,200 of those shirts, 500 pounds of them, and had them shipped to the event, and so we had all these shirts there, and so we were handing out shirts and telling everyone, “If you come to Russell’s session, you get one of these cool Funnel Hacker t-shirts.”
You know, the day before or a couple days before, we’d messaged all the ClickFunnels members as well and said, “Hey, if you’re going to be in Traffic and Conversion, come help us get people into the booth and if you do, we’ll take you out to dinner.”
And that kind of, that like, we didn’t execute that part right. You know, I wanted to base like an affiliate program where they came in, they had coupons and they’d use these coupons to push people into my session.
But just the way that -- I kind of didn’t execute that one right -- we only had a couple of people end up doing it. And yeah, so it’s kind of, that part didn’t work as well as we thought.
And then like two hours before I was speaking, maybe about three hours before, we were looking at the layout, and like my break out room is really far away from the main stage and like, “How are we going to get people here?”
And one of the guys who was with us, I was like, “Man, I wish we could get some booth babes, some pretty girls to kind of push people in.” He’s like, “I’m going to get some really quick.” And I’m like, “Are you serious?”
So he jumped online, he started calling all of these different like modeling agencies, and I think he called Hooters. He called all these things, trying to find some cute girls to help us push people in, and finally he found some.
He found a company that was able to get three girls to us, like in the next half an hour, and so these three girls came. They were beautiful girls, we gave them Funnel Hacks t-shirts, trained them really quick on how to get people into our session.
And we had these girls plus about eight of our staff members all pushing people and funneling people into my session, which was cool, and we filled up my entire room. We had no more room, so that was the first step. We got them in there.
Then in my presentation, which is the same presentation I normally sell Funnel Hacks from, except for I wasn’t allowed to sell. So basically I did all the build up, all the excitement, and then I had to stop, and so we pushed everyone.
We said, “Hey, let’s push everybody over to, you know, like in a situation where we can sell them.” I’m like, “Well, we need as many selling options as possible.”
So one thing we did is we had guys in our team with mini laptops, or mini iPads there, and we had this DVD that was a DVD of my Funnel Hacks presentation with a pitch and everything, and basically it said:
“Hey, if you come back and get a DVD, put your email address in here and register for a webinar, we’ll give it to you.” So basically we got, I don’t know, a couple hundred people registered for a webinar that we’re going to do on Wednesday, selling Funnel Hacks.
And so those guys all got into our funnel so I’ll have a chance to sell them there, plus we gave them all these DVDs that if they watched the DVDs, also sells the presentation as well.
So trying to like throw this in as many different directions as possible, and so we did that and we gave away a ton of DVDs. We gave away, I think, like 600 or 700 t-shirts during the presentation, which was really cool.
And then got a whole bunch of people registered for the webinar as well as giving them these DVDs that is the webinar, so hopefully they’ll watch those as well.
So that was kind of the first major attack that we did, which was cool. And then the next day we woke up, and what was cool is that almost everyone was wearing our t-shirts.
So now we have like 300 or 400 walking billboards of our company, walking around the whole event, which was really cool. I recommend bringing t-shirts if you’re doing a booth and trying to dominate an area, right?
So that was kind of cool. So we had all these billboards walking around, and our booth was in such a crappy location, Brent was able to go and get them to move it to like a prime location right out in front, which was good.
And then for the next two days, we just kept funneling people back to the thing, and we were getting people registered for the webinar. We were selling people, we’re signing people up, we were doing all sorts of just crazy cool stuff, and it was really, really fun.
And so, our goal going into it is like, we wanted to make so much noise and we wanted to get everyone talking about ClickFunnels and about Funnel Hacking and just stick out like a sore thumb.
And I think that if you were to ask anybody at the event, like who was memorable, like will they remember the vendors, definitely it would’ve been us.
Everyone else had a booth with like a little bowl of candy out there and that was it. Where we’re out there just doing crazy things and getting people to do stuff, and giving away just crazy gifts and a whole bunch of really cool stuff.
So we had a good time with it. It’ll be interesting to see kind of how it pans out financially over the next little while. But, you know, for us the biggest thing we wanted is, you know, for us in this industry, that’s kind of the big event of the year.
And it sets the tone for the year, and we wanted to be a part of that message and to be able to kind of launch this year out with everyone talking about ClickFunnels and about Funnel Hacking and about that whole concept.
And so, so far it was, you know, from that standpoint it was really good with people; all their Facebook, posting their pictures of, you know, the shirts and stuff, and it was really, really cool. So that was kind of what happened from our side.
The event as a whole, people kept asking about it. It was good. I didn’t have a chance to go to all the sessions, but as a whole it was good. I felt like this, this year… it’s interesting, I’ve been, I think, four years in a row now.
In the first year, I really felt that when we went, it was like what they shared was very, very prolific and very different and unique, and which I think is why they initially got the following for this event and why it started growing.
The second year they started bringing in more guest speakers, and it kind of diluted it and kind of watered it down.
Last year was pretty good as well. They had a really good focus, they were focusing on funnels, they were pushing people through a really cool sales process, and I felt they had a lot of, like prolific things.
They introduced the tripwire concept and things like that, whereas this year I was kind of disappointed because I didn’t feel like it had evolved at all. It was kind of just like, “Hey, all that stuff we talked about last year? Yeah, you just keep doing that.”
And you know, it didn’t really, I mean, they tried, you know, to talk about 2.0 of everything, and they tried to like “and here’s the next step,” but there was nothing really that jumped out to me as like new or prolific or that much different.
So that was kind of a little disappointing from that side of it, but as a whole, the networking there was second to none. I saw people there who I hadn’t seen in 10 or 15 years, and it was kind of cool.
So I’m at the office now, I got one more story to tell you and then I’ll be done. And this is, you know, I kind of shared with you guys some of the strategies and things we went into this event with, but you know, I’ve never had a company where we did booths before or where we go to events.
And so I’m kind of learning this whole thing and how to stick out and how to, you know, acquire customers and things through that kind of a process. And so, you know, I’m still kind of learning it, but we had a guy who was in our inner circle group, man, probably five or six years ago.
His name was Big Mike and he was a big booth person. He sells advanced hydroponics -- and so, yeah, take that for what it’s worth. But he does, at least when he was in our group, he was doing like $40 or $50 million a year selling this stuff.
And he was kind of like the bad guy in his group and nobody in his market wanted him there. They didn’t want him at their events, they refused to sell him booth space, they refused to sell tickets to him, and so he got really upset by that, so he wanted…
Anyway, they were doing this big industry event and he wanted to come and just dominate it, and so he was strategizing this in our mastermind group and then he executed it, and then afterwards came back and shared what he did and it was crazy.
And so we were trying to do this in a small part. Obviously, we didn’t do it to this extent of what he did, but what he did was amazing. So what he did, the night before the event, he rented out the venue across the street from where the convention was, and he threw like the biggest party in the industry.
He spent, you know, I don’t know, $50,000, $100,000 on the stuff. And he had girls there and all these things, and he brought all these people in and he kind of made a theme for the event.
He made these t-shirts of this big huge bowl, and if you could imagine this in your head, the bowl is, you know, taking a big huge drink. The bowl is standing upright, right? And he’s all flexing and huge, and he’s taking a drink of his hydroponics.
And then it shows down below, it shows him peeing out into a bucket, and has his competitors, the name of his competitor’s product on the other bucket, and he made these t-shirts like that.
And so what he did is he gave everyone at this party all these t-shirts and he said, “Hey, tomorrow we’re walking around handing out $1,000 bills to people who are wearing this t-shirt.” And so the next in the entire event, almost every attendee was wearing those t-shirts with the bowl on it.
And so he basically, even though they wouldn’t sell him booth space, he had, you know, 2,000 or 3,000 people all wearing that t-shirt the entire week, so he basically was walking billboards on everyone. But then the next part that just like took it to the next level, it’s just ridiculous.
He went in and he rented a helicopter and then -- I can’t even like say this without just laughing -- he rented a helicopter and on the back of it he flew this huge banner ad that had that picture of the bowl, drinking it and his competitor, and he had some like headline or something on the thing.
And for the three-day event, he had this helicopter just circling on top of the event building for three days, and anyway, that’s like he went and completely seminar hacked this seminar and just went in there and just became the talk of the whole thing.
And the campaign, you know, spending a quarter-million dollars on the campaign, but you know, when all is said and done, like everybody knew who he was and everyone was talking about him the entire time.
So anyway I thought it was really, really cool, so just think about that when you guys, you know, I was just trying to be -- obviously, you know, this guy was doing everything out of spite so he was able to take it to the next level. You know, I respect Ryan and Perry, and we didn’t want anything that, you know, that they wouldn’t like, so we tried to do everything within the confines.
We still wanted to come in and use this as a tool to get new customers and to get our name out there and stuff like that, and so we were trying to be creative and stuff like that.
So if you guys ever do booths and things like that, hopefully, it gives you a couple of ideas on how you can dominate it and really maximize it to the end. And so, anyway I hope that helps you guys.
I’m in the office now, I’m going to go hang out, get some work done. I got a webinar today, this afternoon. My goal, I think we can do 100,000 on this one, so that’s the goal. If I do that I will be excited, and that’ll take me to the weekend where I can relax a little bit, so that’ll be fun.
So anyway, appreciate you guys listening. Hope you love the podcast. If you do, go tell your friends, go post it on Facebook, or do something cool like that. I appreciate it, and we will go from there.
Thanks you guys! And we’ll talk soon.