Heidi Easley recently sold out ALL 120 tickets for her upcoming live event… in less than 10 hours! How did she do it?  She used a proven marketing “trick” and in this episode I’m going to share how you can do the same!

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Big Ideas

The Power of Anticipation [0:56]

Envision your audience waiting for you to open the cart because they cannot wait to purchase. It is possible! But what is this tremendously powerful force that I am talking about? It is anticipation, and using anticipation to create a buying frenzy when you open the cart. Heidi Easley, who is in our TRIBE, wanted to host her first ever live event. Her goal was to sell 120 tickets in total, and her goal within the goal was to sell 40 tickets in the first 24 hours. She didn’t hit her goal of 40 tickets in the first 24 hours, instead she sold out the entire event in the first 10 hours.

How Did Heidi Make Her Event A Success [3:30]

Here are Heidi’s takeaways and tips. Number one, she kept the location a secret for two months and actively created excitement before revealing it. Number two, she told her membership that they would have a two hour head start to buy the tickets. With almost 900 members and only 120 spots, Heidi wanted them to have first dibs. Number three, she made sure she communicates how much time they invested into this event, and that once it’s released to the public, her email list and Facebook page would also have access to it, so they needed to buy fast. And number four, she gave them the price about five days before so they would have a chance to talk it over with their family.

Creating anticipation for your offer is so easy to do. It costs you nothing and yet, it is one of the most powerful ways to create a buying frenzy. I’m going to give you three quick tips to create massive amounts of excitement and anticipation for your next offer.

Pick A Date [5:56]

Step number one, start with a date. The date for us last year was April 23rd, because that was the beginning of our launch. I’ve been telling everybody to mark down that date on their calendar, I even got t-shirts made that say April 23rd. People have that date ingrained in their brain. If you don’t have a date, it’s very hard to create anticipation for something ambiguous that we don’t know when it’s going to be revealed.

Create The Elements Of Tease [7:20]

Number two, think about your elements of tease. What details can you tease out? One of the people who does a phenomenal job of this is Jayson Gaignard. He has a high end event called Mastermind Talks that’s limited to roughly 120-130 people, and because of that a large number of the tickets are pre-sold to people who have attended the events previously. So there’s an even smaller number of available tickets to anybody on the outside. Yet despite that, Jason does a great job of teasing out the details of the event all year long. He’ll tease out things like packages that he’s ordering, or the progress he’s been making on the final touches, such as meeting with venue and AV team and finalizing roundtables. He uses all of the behind the scenes elements to create anticipation for the event. When you tease those elements that go into producing your offer, it creates more value, because people see all the thought, the blood, sweat and tears that have gone into creating this amazing product that you’re about to offer to the world.

You Are In It For The Long Game [12:05]

We are in this for the long game. And when you realize the value of creating anticipation, you are going to create it further and further in advance, which is going to help you produce a bigger and bigger result.

This year for our TRIBE experience, we’re doing some new innovative things. We’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, refilling the whole course, re-engineering the experience and the way in which we’re incorporating Searchie throughout this. There are all kinds of ways that you can tease and anticipate, you just have to put it into action. You have to start talking about what it is you’re about to offer, and when people will be able to get it. This is not something that you do one time, this is something that you’re going to be doing continuously as you work and build towards the actual date upon which people can take action. And when you do this right, you’re going to have people chomping at the bit to buy your offer.

Memorable Quote

“Creating anticipation is one of the most powerful ways to create a buying frenzy” – Stu McLaren

Resources

Heidi Easley
Episode 62 – Long Runway Works Like Crazy
Jayson Gaignard

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