Do you know how to create an Automated Hyper-Local Leads Machine using events?

Imagine being one of the most well-known people in a city.

San Francisco? Los Angeles?

You name it.

It’s not hard. Since living in San Francisco for the last year, I’ve connected to thousands of the most well-respected founders, venture capitalists, and growth hackers.

How?

Events.

Everyone attends events.

High-level entrepreneurs attend events to speak at them, and startup founders go to learn. If you’re the host, then you meet both parties. The first step to creating a hyper-local marketing machine for leads is to know your audience.

Who do you want in your network?

I wanted as many local, high-level entrepreneurs in my network as possible.

The next step is to start small, then leverage your way up as your audience increases.

This means holding Meetups and hustling to build a local network to where you feel comfortable filling up a 70-person event every month (approximate time for someone with zero network: 2 - 3 months).

During this time, the number one metric you need to focus on is retention. If your members don’t show up again, then you’ve lost. It’s far less expensive to retain an audience, then capture one that’s new.

If you’re looking to grow your event lead list, here are three ways to drive traffic on a tight budget (all of which work well):  

1. Use Meetup’s organic search and perfect your layout

-Ask for reviews

-Upload pictures of attendees

-SEO title and description for Meetup search

2.Use Eventbrite’s organic search

-Always include a paid option to fuel a feeling of scarcity for free or less expensive tickets.

3.Attend three to four relevant events every week and poach their members

-To effectively poach another group’s member, you need to add them on Facebook and follow-up with them every week whether with a Facebook comment or personal message. Ideally, you should do this until you’ve poached around 100 people (approximate time: 3 months)

4.Automate your LinkedIn network growth and outreach

-To automate the growth of your LinkedIn network, the first step it to purchase GPZ LinkedIn Tools. This tool allows you to auto-connect with people based on search queries with personalized messages.

For example, if you hold events in San Francisco for growth marketers, then you can auto-connect with growth marketers in your city with personalized messages.

When reaching out, don’t immediately ask them to attend an event. Provide them a benefit. I do this by giving them a hyper-local community resource.

Example message:

“Hey BAMF, I noticed you do growth marketing in San Francisco. I organize a FB Group of over 5K+ growth marketers in SF where we provide the best growth hacks. Thought I’d reach out and let you know. Here’s the Facebook Group link: [URL]”

Once these people join your Facebook Group, you can now invite them to a Facebook event. Because you’ve already provided them a lot of value with your community, they will be more likely to respond well to your event invite.

To get speakers, use cold email and LinkedIn messaging with excellent copy:

“Hey [first name],

I love what you’re doing as the [job title] for [company]. You guys are crushing it!

Would you be interested in a local interview in front of thirty entrepreneurs?

If yes, let’s set a time to talk for fifteen minutes. How does [date & time] work for you?”

This is the easy part.

The hard part is covering event costs.

Here are two ways to keep your costs low:

1. Partner with a company who has a special interest in advertising to your members (i.e. VC firm, accelerator, bootcamp)
2. Ask someone who already has venue connections to join you as an event organizer.

If you have a small audience, you will probably have to pay for food.

It’s around $200 - $250 for every event. Don’t go overboard. Your attendees don’t mind the quality (think pizza) because they have after work munchies.

The good news:

If you can get fifty to seventy potential customers of a company sitting for an hour, then you’ll no longer have to pay for food - a sponsor will.

Moreover, you can once again level-up your game. This is where Facebook Ads come into play.

To understand my Facebook audience size, I plug-in relevant interests into Facebook Ads targeting. I have around fifteen interests listed to identify people who are entrepreneurs in San Francisco.

I could cast a wider net to 30 miles rather than 15, but my lead magnet is free attendance to local startup events. If they’re too far away to attend events, then they’re more likely to unsubscribe from my email list.

Once I have my audience down, I target them with a Facebook Ad. As you can see, my average cost per lead is $2.20 for a San Francisco entrepreneur. Not bad.

To drive down the cost, I send all my traffic to Facebook’s mobile feed.

Here’s what one of the ads looks like:

How well does the landing page convert?

After many iterations, my landing page converts at 40%.

Here’s the design of the mobile landing page:

This page converts well for these reasons:

1. Social validation with testimonials and logos
2. A question to attract the attention of the visitors
3. Using the phrase San Francisco a couple of times (positive emotional trigger)
4. Clear messaging of the benefit, including where and when they’ll receive it
5. A dark background of San Francisco to help people concentrate on the CTA

Now I have an email list getting built for events!

You may be wondering: What type of entrepreneur would opt-in for free startup events?

Not the best entrepreneurs. A few maybe, but for the most part, no. My job is to get butts in seats. The more butts I have in seats, the more high-level entrepreneurs I attract interested in speaking in front of a huge crowd.

As soon as you can offer value to high-level entrepreneurs, you’ll begin to connect with them fast. Now, it’s time to focus on email list retention.

I increase retention in two ways:

1.On my thank-you page, I prompt them to join my Facebook Group, Marketers & Founders. I do this again in my follow-up email (later in the guide).

Here’s the thank-you page:

2. I send them a LinkedIn and Angellist connection request, Twitter follow, and Quora follow

Using a lead’s email, I can sync with FullContact and Zapier to pull their social profile links.

Here’s how I do it:

First step: I sync Zapier with my landing page. In this case, I hook up Unbounce to Google Sheets.

Then, I create a dedicated sheet for these leads in Google Drive. When a prospect opts in on the Unbounce landing page, Zapier will automatically populate their email in your dedicate Google sheet.

When your new drive sheet gets populated, then upload the new emails to FullContact to find their social profile information. Make sure to properly tag your import so that you can find it later.

Here’s an inside look at FullContact:

The next step is to add this Chrome extension to your arsenal to auto-follow your leads on LinkedIn based on their profile URL with a personalized message:

Download here: https://bit.ly/2mASbEj

Unzip the folder, then drag or upload the “extension” folder in your Chrome extension settings area. Make sure you’re in Developer mode when you run this extension.

Here’s a preview of the extension:

Use this Python Script to clean up the exported data from FullContact, so you can easily follow your leads on their favorite social channels:

Download Python Script: https://bit.ly/2mFF58z

Directions on running the Python script:

1. Put a copy of the script into a folder with your FullContact exported CSV files which need to be organized and cleaned

2. Open your terminal and navigate to this directory (eg. type 'cd <space bar>' and drag-and-drop the directory to the terminal)

3. Run 'python organize.py'

Results will appear in the same directory with the filenames starting from "clean_"

To not leave you hanging, here’s the follow-up email I send to every lead (I adjust it every Monday depending on what events I’m hosting):

“Hey!

My name is BAMF.

I’ve hosted seventy underground tech events in the last year and a half.

I'm also one of the youngest tech evangelists, an author, and lead a community of over 10,000 marketers and founders.

In turn, I have comp’ed tickets to the best San Francisco tech events. I'd love to share them with you every week 🙂

Make sure to mark this email as important because it only comes once a week and you don't want to miss it.

Our next two events in downtown San Francisco:

Tomorrow night:

From 0 - 1 Million Visitors with World-Class Growth Hacker, Vin Clancy

Vin Clancy launched two websites that got to over a million visitors a month, got into the Techstars accelerator, was voted best talk at SXSW V2V 2016, and had a debut book/course "Secret Sauce: A step-by-step guide to growth hacking"raise over $100,000 via crowdfunding.

He also launched a Facebook Group for growth marketers to over 20K members in 6 months.

You can register here for free: https://growth.chat/vinclancy

February 23rd (This Thursday):

Hyper-Growth Marketing Frameworks for Going From 0-30 Million in Revenue

George just completed his role as the CMO and Head of Growth for Soothe, the world's largest on-demand massage service. Most recently, he delivered 11 months of double-digit revenue growth (many of them 20-30% MoM), taking the company to 45 cities and 3 countries.

Sam Venning recently left his position as the marketing manager at Wonoloo to found a company on track to 1 Million ARR in its first year.

You can register here for free: https://growth.chat/marketingframeworks

There will be refreshments.

If you have any questions, just hit reply.

Stoked to keep up the momentum.

See you soon,

Houston 

Quora - Facebook - LinkedIn

P.S. Feel free to join my Facebook Group of 7,000+ marketers and founders “

To take the follow-up process to the next level, I use Autopilot’s customer journey automation to nurture all of our event registrants:

In the customer journey, we’re A/B split testing emails, using lead scoring, setting up Salesforce Campaigns, and excluding our competitors. For each event, I simple duplicate this journey, then change a few variables includes the emails and synced campaigns. This way I never have to think about it again.

It’s Time to Connect

If you’re looking to connect with thousands of local prospects, then a hyper-local sales funnels with a well-designed automated follow-up is one of the fastest ways to do so. You’ll create a network of people willing to attend your events and workshops, and generate thousands of leads while thinking of the next city you’ll take over.