In this episode of Do This, Not That, host Jay Schwedelson interviews Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner and Social Media Marketing World. They discuss effective event marketing strategies, speaker selection, and promotional tactics for conferences and webinars. Michael shares his insights on driving event registration, utilizing customer testimonials, and the importance of networking in the events industry.

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Best Moments:

(01:37) Strategies for driving event registration and increasing attendance

(05:01) Techniques for gathering and utilizing customer testimonials

(06:41) Promoting events through various channels, including email marketing

(09:24) Criteria for selecting speakers for events

(11:57) Email marketing strategies for event promotion

(16:51) Michael's approach to attending other events as a talent scout

(18:18) The importance of networking and relationship-building in the events industry

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Guest Bio:

Michael Stelzner is the founder of Social Media Examiner, a leading resource for social media marketing information, and the creator of Social Media Marketing World, one of the largest conferences in the digital marketing industry. He hosts multiple podcasts, including the Social Media Marketing Podcast and AI Explorer. With over 15 years of experience in the social media marketing field, Michael is known for his expertise in content creation, event organization, and industry networking. He is also the author of Launch and Writing White Papers.

Michael's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stelzner/

Michael's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stelzner/

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Foreign.

Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. Also, dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that. We are back for do this, not that.

And I am super excited. You ever have somebody. You listen to their podcast all the time. You're all, like, in. In their world, and then you get to actually talk to them.

Well, that's what's happening right now. I got this guy here is a big deal, Michael Stelzner.

Now, if you don't know him, he is the founder of Social Media examiner, which you probably get that newsletter because, like, 400,000 people get it. He is the founder of Social Media Marketing World, which is the biggest and greatest conference for social media and digital marketing.

You have to be there. It is wild. And he has three podcasts. Okay. Every week I'm listening to them.

But the social Media Marketing podcast is got to be the best marketing podcast on the planet. It's way better than this one. This one sucks compared to that one, so you got to check that one out. But so, Michael, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Jay.

You ever been introduced before by somebody saying that they suck and you don't? That's gotta be like a new intro.

I mean, I. It's quotable, that's for sure.

We try. We try.

So today we're gonna be talking about event marketing strategies, because you've been putting on really successful events for a very, very long time. So I want to be able to dig into that. But before we do that, how did Michael Stelger wind up dominating all these different categories?

How did you become you?

I wrote a book called Writing White Papers. I was a writer, and then social media popped. Started Social Media examiner as an experiment.

It took off and then eventually started a podcast that you just referred to, and then the conference, and here we are 15 years later. We just celebrated our 15th year as a social Media examiner. And my newest show is called AI Explored. And I'm kind of going down that rabbit hole.

But the key to the whole thing was creating content. You know, start as a writer, realized I'm decently good as an interviewer, and the podcasting thing blew up. We've done the YouTube thing.

We've done all the things. But email has been the central core component from day one.

From the first day I launched Social Media Examiner, I had an email first strategy which will make you smile. You know, that's been the key to our entire thing really.

So first of all, I love that obviously, and I'm a big believer in that. When people say emails, legacy or dead, I think that they just don't understand how to use email.

And so as it relates to events, okay, it's one thing to put on an event, get everyone excited about year one, year two, year three, right? It's like the new shiny object. But you've been doing your events for a long time and they keep crushing it.

How, how do you drive event registration and increase attendance? Like how do you keep everybody excited about that?

Okay, well, first of all, if you already have an event, the best thing you can do is incentivize people to come back to the event while they're there. So the first thing we do is we give them a smoking deal they cannot say no to.

And the best we've ever had was we've had more than 1,000 people commit to coming back on the last day of the event. So that's one way to get people committed is they're already there.

You see this, if you've ever been on a cruise, they give you a smoking deal that expires before you get off the cruise ship. But beyond that, the other way that we really do this is we leverage photos. Huge.

Like we've got photographers all over the place capturing close ups of people, smiling people intently taking pictures of slides. All the things that kind of convey graphically what in the world a really good learning experience would be like.

In addition, we capture customer testimonials everywhere. We have hundreds of them that we've trained an AI model on, by the way, and the AI model will automatically find the rest.

The best testimonials for the emails that we put together and what's really cool is if you go to our sales page, which you can Google social media marketing world, we've got this little graphic at the very top and we've got five little short testimonials, not even the name of the person, just kind of instantly signaling to someone who comes to the sales page right below the headline that this is a remarkable event. And we split test this and sure enough, sales, all the metrics, engagement metrics go up when you have this kind of stuff there.

We use testimonials absolutely everywhere. And this is something that applies to non events or events. People love social proof and that's what social proof is.

Other people that sound like them, seem like them that are actually endorsing the product.

So let me ask you a question about that, because I think that you, you all use social proof better than anybody that I've seen on your websites, all this stuff.

So you said you, you go to them and you ask people for testimonials, because the way that I know it is, okay, they're filling out their post conference survey or webinar survey. And did you like it? Yes. No. You want to write anything, but it sounds like you're more intentional about getting the testimonial in other ways.

How else are you getting them?

Okay, first of all, people post all over social about their experience while they're there, and we curate that stuff.

So it's such a good experience that people actually organically take pictures, post on Instagram, write posts about it, private message us telling us how much has transformed their life. So you have to collect it from all these different inputs and then you have to categorize it and put it into a sheet.

But on top of that, obviously we do the things you're talking about.

So all the different inputs, when they come in, and they come in in a thousand different directions when you're doing a really good event, they're all captionable, capturable, and they all should be potentially put into a database that you can use.

I feel like the biggest idiot alive that I never thought about. The fact what people are putting on social actually can become testimonials, that's like gold. So let me ask you a question about that.

I know we're way off script, but I don't care. So when someone posts on social and they're like, oh, my God, social media marketing world's the greatest thing ever. I can't wait to go back.

And you're like, we got to use that. Do you then reach out directly that person say, is it okay, whatever.

Oh, why would I? Because they've already publicly put it out there. I don't need to do that.

I love this. I'm using this. I, I, I, I'm very, very excited about this. Okay, so, all right, all right, let's get in.

That was like kind of an underra under the radar tactic.

Tactics. You want to go, I'm dropping it.

You are. You're dropping knowledge bombs. So give me another one. What's another under the radar tactic that Michael Stell is like, we do this.

Most people don't do it. They're sleeping on it. They should be.

Yeah. So first of all, you gotta play A long game. So in my case, Social Media marketing world is one of the main ways we make money.

So when I get a guest on the show that's a returning guest, like, I just interviewed Sean Cannell who has got a huge YouTube channel. And at the end of the interview, I just said, hey, everybody, Sean Cannell will be presenting at Social Media marketing World.

So if you love what you heard, come meet him live. Sean, where can we discover more about you? So what I do is I. And then, of course, guess what he did, by the way, it's an amazing event.

He gave me an on the fly testimonial. It wasn't even part of the script. So you can work it in to basically your interviews and all the content so it comes in naturally.

Or sometimes when I'm interviewing someone, I'll say, like, you know, when I was at Social media market world, so when people hear it over and over and over and over again, it's like permeated into their brain. And I can't even begin to tell you how many people have said it's on their bucket list because they've just heard me talk about it forever.

So are you just intentional at all times? Like everything that's coming out of your mouth, you're like, I know exactly what I'm saying.

Oh, I wish I were more intentional. I mean, if I was more intentional, I would be doing it more often. But sometimes I'm very intentional. It just depends, you know what I mean?

Like, I didn't know when I had you on my show that I'd be inviting you to the conference. Sometimes that, you know, I can't know that.

But when I am intentionally bringing on people that I know will be speaking at the conference, I do sometimes inject it naturally into the dialogue.

Yeah. Okay. So I need to be more intentional about everything in my life, about what food I eat. I mean, come on, I gotta step it up.

All right, so let me ask you a question.

One more thing.

Yeah.

Social posts.

Yes.

When you're writing and doing stuff in social posts, you can just kind of work it in there. So, like, I naturally write really detailed posts once a week that are stories about what's going on behind the scenes.

So, for example, one of them was, hey, my crew and I just got back from San Diego. We were. We were there imagining what the new space was going to look like. And here's a lesson for social media marketing world. And here's a lesson.

You see how he just dropped it in there? Just a little thing in there. But it's, like, buried inside of a story, and it's in there over and over and over every single week.

And nobody complains about it because it's wrapped in a story.

Right. It feels, like, organic. It's part of the content.

Yeah.

So let me ask you this again. I'm off script, but I don't care. And you have good info. You look for the best speakers.

And a lot of listeners here forget, if they put on a big event, maybe they put on a webinar. They're trying to figure out the right speakers and the right things. What. What is.

What do you look for in a speaker that you're like, yep, that's who I want. Because they're going to crush it. Like, what do you look for?

Okay, first of all, they have to know what they're talking about. That's the first, most important thing.

So there's plenty of people that claim they're an expert at something, but they have to be an expert, and there has to be demonstrable knowledge that they are an expert. Which means that they have been on a lot of other podcasts talking about it.

They've written a book on it, or they've done YouTube videos on it, or they've got their own podcast on it, or they write regularly on it. That's the first thing.

Second thing, which is even more important than the first thing, is they need to be a clear communicator, because there's nothing more important from an event perspective than having someone say, that was amazing. I took something from that. The worst thing, and you've experienced this, Jay, is when people walk out of a session because the person's babbling.

They might be brilliant, but they do not know how to educate or inspire. That is absolutely essential. It's really hard to find both of those, which is why not everybody that I get on my show gets invited to speak.

Because they have to be exceptionally articulate.

And that comes with, you know, typically the people that have agencies or consultancies that work with lots of different diversity of clients have a deeper bench of knowledge, or people that have courses or memberships where they're constantly working with all sorts of different people. Those are the people that typically the savviest, because they're in the trench doing the work.

You know what's amazing about what you just said? Because I think it's actually the opposite of what a lot of people do with their webinars and their events.

Everybody's always on the hunt for the big brand. Give me the big Brand, so I could stick it in. An email said, we got X, y and Z. Co. That's speaking there, and they try to leverage that.

And then people show up and that. That person from that big brand, they stink. They happen to have a great job, but they stink. What they do and people don't. They avoid the.

The consultants and the agency players and all those people. But to your point, those are the people that have most experience, right? Is that what you find?

100%, yeah. Now, it's not all of them, it's.

Just some of them.

Right. They have to. They have to be good at it. They have to know their craft, and that requires work. And that's why not a lot of that's.

When you have something like that, you create a great experience. So that, let's say 75% of the sessions people walk into, they walk out of it saying, I learned something. They've got sheets full of notes.

That's when you know you're on the right path.

Yeah, I totally am on that. I totally agree with that. So let's talk about promoting your events. And again, for anybody listening, you don't need to have a big conference.

You have a little webinar. You could do whatever. And these tactics matter. So right now, where are you promoting event? Are you doing videos on LinkedIn?

Are you avoiding TikTok because it's not a good place for business professionals? Are you doing this, that, whatever. What is the secret sauce of how you're driving awareness?

Okay, first of all, we don't really ask a lot of our speakers, and that's important. A lot of other events ask something of their speakers. We ask almost nothing of our speakers.

And you probably have recognized that, you know, because we want to be the ones that make it so fun for the speakers that they'll want to come back and they'll naturally talk about it. That's the first thing what we do do is we leverage email extremely heavily. We have a big advantage because we're a media company.

We have a really large email list. But email is absolutely essential for us to ultimately sell tickets.

And the way that we craft these emails is typically they contain usually a really good headline, a short little opening that maybe triggers a pain or a challenge that they face. And then here's how this could get solved. For example, let's say AI, right?

Everybody's really concerned about AI and they're like, they don't know which tools are the best ones, Right?

So we'll come up with something creative, and then we'll Find a quote from someone who went to a session that said, the AI stuff blew my mind, which we happen to have.

We'll find a picture, doesn't have to be the same picture as the other person of maybe a speaker who's an AI speaker on the stage, and we'll craft something together. And boom, we're good, you know, but we get a lot more creative than that. Like, for example, we're starting to use AI a lot.

So AI just inspired me to come up with something today, which was a Back to the future themed message. So I wrote an email saying, hey, it's me. Yeah, you, Jay, I'm writing you from the future.

And you're not going to believe it, but you made a really smart move when you decided to buy that ticket at Social Media Marketing World. And here's proof. I'm here, and it's a bunch of people from behind with their hands up. See, there's your hand.

And then I say, you know, here's a quote I met from my. Here's my friend Ellen. This is what she said to tell you. And there's a customer testimonial, you know what I mean? And trust me, you got to come here.

And I know you're skeptical. I remember that about, about us, Me, you. You know what I mean? But. But go ahead, trust me. Go buy the ticket.

So that was an AI, one that I just came up with today, you know, using a back to the future theme. Another one was a detective theme. We had a case number and the AI helped me write this one. This was the case of the.

The missing reach, you know, and it was how marketers are struggling to get reach. And it had a case number and it had, it had the sequestered experts that we brought that have testify, you know what I mean?

And, and one of them was Mari Smith and another one was Matt Wolf, who's an AI guy, and it was written as if it was a legal brief, you know what I mean? And. And it was, should you choose to accept this case, you know what I mean here.

So we try to get really creative using AI, using stories, justify triggering pains and ultimately sewing testimonials into the whole thing and having fun with it.

I love how deep you go into social proof. I think that is so cool. First of all, I love the creativity.

And let's just talk about email for a second because I'm curious because everybody, whatever you're promoting, people always get nervous I'm sending too much email. And I always believe that's the dumbest thing of all time. Because if you send less, it doesn't mean it's going to do better.

You're just sending irrelevant garbage. So do you. How often?

At least 100 emails over the course of a year.

100 emails, okay, so that's multiple a week.

At least two a week. Sometimes five.

You see, I'm on your team, by the way.

Here's how you get away with it, okay? Number one, there's always something to talk about. Okay? We have sales that end on sale weeks.

We send sometimes two or three or four emails in one day when there's a sale ending we might be introducing. We have different variances of tickets. We have all access marketer and virtual tickets. Right? So these are. We have convinced the boss.

Stuff like, hey, we know you probably can't get the boss. We put this resource together for you. Oh, here's a. Here's a sample, right?

We have all these different things that we have figured out that we can email and we can use, obviously certain times of the year, like Thanksgiving, you know, and all this stuff to kind of trigger people to have fun. Different things with it. But we have found that we have to use this.

And by the way, if you don't want to do this over email, you can do this with ads. You can do this with organic social.

But the idea is you got to keep banging the drum because if you can't get people to the sales page, then you're never going to get them to buy the ticket.

Listen, I am so glad that you said that because I totally agree. I hate when people think, okay, we'll send out less and we'll do better. Just send out better stuff. Yeah, I mean, that's. That's the way it goes.

All right, so. All right, before we wrap up here, I got a question for you. When you go to other events, okay. Are you there, like, oh, this is all so great.

Are you judging everything? Like, this is the worst food I've ever seen at a conference. Their AV is terrible. The audio is terrible.

Are you, like, good for you guys, you're trying. Way to go, you.

First of all, I go to events all the time. I generally do not ever attend sessions. And the reason I go there is because I'm a scout. I'm a talent scout.

So I don't care if I'm speaking or not, I go to these events. I have a hit list. I'm going to see them in action, and I'm going to decide whether or not I want to invite them onto my podcast.

Knowing full well that I'm going to develop relationships with these people. And then when I want them to speak at my event, should I choose them, they will say yes 99% of the time.

Wow. Talking about being intentional, like, you know, you're like, out there. Somebody sees you at the thing and they try to talk to you.

Like, don't talk to me. I'm locked in right now.

No, no, no. I mean, like, no, it's. No. I'm there to talk to everyone. I just. I only go to network and socialize and get to know these people.

Because, you know, there's a truth about marketing, Jay. People do business with those whom they know. Like, and what's the last word? Trust.

There it is. Trust.

Right. And if they don't know you well, they're going to say no when you ask them to come speak at your event.

And if they don't like you, there's definitely not going to do that. And if they don't trust you, that's not going to happen either. So I'm all about providing value.

When I meet people and I get them on the show, I spend a lot of time with them trying to understand what. What their big dreams are and their visions are. And I develop real friendships and they're authentic.

And it doesn't matter whether they're going to speak with me or not. But this is really my superpower is networking. And this is why I'm able to get people like UJ to come to say yes. You know what I mean?

And I've always been able to get some of the biggest names in the world coming to my event because I work really hard to make sure I understand what these people want. And, you know, most speakers, what they want is they want to get in front of an audience. That's their customer base.

And they want to be able to walk out of there with prospects or leads. Right.

Which is why these agencies and consultants are such great people, because their desires are so unified with my desires, and they already know what they're talking about, and it turns out to be a real win, win. But I go to, like, maybe three or four conferences a year across the AI space and the marketing space and the YouTube space.

And sometimes I'm working years in advance. I started going to VidCon, like, so many years before I.

Before YouTube became a thing, and I developed all the strategic relationships with all the people so that when I could call huge people like Zach King or Darren Rouse or, I mean, Darrell Eves or Sean Cannell, you know, like, we were already friends by then.

But I'll tell you why. When you asked me, I was like 100%, yes, instantly.

Because when you invited me onto your podcast and we were just getting to know each other, we had a call before I came on your podcast and the prep call. I learned so much from that prep call about how you go about preparing to do a podcast and help you.

To be successful on the podcast.

It helped me to be successful.

I'm like, whatever this guy's doing, whether it's his conference or his podcast, I want to be a part of it so I could learn how to kind of do what he's doing the right way.

So I know this sounds like a commercial, everybody, but I'm telling you, if you want to learn about social media marketing, digital marketing, yeah, go to Social Media Marketing World. But if you're an event person, go to Social Media Marketing World. Because the, the attention to detail that Michael does for his event is in. Is wild.

Okay? It's wild. So we're going to put it all in the show notes, but you have to be there. I will be there. March 30th, April 1st. Michael, what else?

How do they find you? What should they sign up for? What's going on?

You just did it all for me, my friend. Thank you.

Well, and also sign up for the newsletter, social mediaexaminer.com it's amazing and I love your content and thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me.

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