One wildly underutilized channel for
driving a bunch of leads and a bunch of
new business to agencies is meetups. I
used to run a meetup network back in New
York City, which is actually where I'm right now, that had
about 2,500 people in it. We used to go
out and have these events every single
month and we would generate between
fifty and hundred thousand dollars in
leeds, and most of the time in business, just
from that event. Today I just want to
talk about meetups. How do you start a
meetup? Why start a meetup? How to promote
it? Everything you've ever wanted to know
about meetups. Coming up! So this is the
meetup that I used to have for marketing
managers. Looks like there's 1,100 people
in this now. And then this was part
of a meetup network. So there was another
meetup called Geeks in Suits that we had
as well and a couple other ones. So this
is all that was on here.
NYC marketing meetup, a bunch of brands,
some pictures of some people that we
took at the second event ever ever, before
this was nothing or maybe just my
profile picture. And a very simple
description. That's it. Created it on meetup.
And then in terms of the actual meetup
structure itself. We used to do meetup
events once a month. I recommend just
doing drinks at a bar. We didn't have to
call ahead or do anything like that. And
I'll show you exactly what that meetup looked like
right now. So here's the meetup we did in
June. This was a repeating event. It was the
first Monday of every month 7pm, same bar.
And this was the only description that I had.
So this is it - the monthly meetup. Come hang out
with fellow brand and marketing managers.
Have some tasty drinks and talk about
the latest developments in the space. We can
also talk about books, movies, martial arts
whatever. And this one had 54 people RSVP.
Usually around that much would show up.
People would bring their friends. So that is
how to structure it.
Meetup costs about a hundred dollars
a year, but you'll show an ROI on the
second or third event if you do it
correctly. Now, the second question that
you might have is: how do you promote
your meetup? You've got this meetup,
looks pretty good.
How do you get people to actually go to
it? Well, that is easier than it looks, as
well. The first thing you do is meetup
will actually promote your meetup to
their audience. I remember when we
first created this event and I actually did
a youtube video about this when it happened,
I was so surprised. We started this meetup,
it had zero people in it, just me and
one of my friends was in it as well.
I got him to join and then meetup blasted
it out to the list and we immediately
jumped from two people to over a hundred
in a week. And then within a few weeks it grew
to 300, 400 and it actually didn't take
us too long, maybe four or five months, to
get to a thousand people. Just from
meetup's own promotion. So besides having
meetup promote it yourself. You can also
google events in your city to find
directories. So check this out.
Tech events NYC and if you google
something similar for your city you'll
see a bunch of stuff. So digital.nyc/events,
here's eventbrite, eventbrite,
events.alleywatch,
and ideally, here's what are the best tech meetups,
Gary's guide and
ideally what you want to do is go
through each one of these and find
someplace to submit your events and
submit it. It's that simple. Usually it's free to
list your event and we've driven so much
revenue just from doing this. So here's add
an event on digital.nyc. This was
number one on google for tech events New
York City. So instant number one. Click
here to list your event on AlleyWatch.
Here it is again for free you can also
pay I think, sponsor. New York tech meetup add
event. Quora you can just add an event by
writing it in here and Gary's guide is the
same way.
Add new. Very very simple to promote your
event and usually that's all you need in
New York, at least, which is a pretty big
market, but San Francisco's the same way
for driving traffic and you will be
surprised how few people or how few
good events are on these lists. So by
just having a good simple drinks meet up
I found that people will come to it
almost every time. And then the final
section of this is how to get an ROI
from meetups? How to actually get an ROI?
So everyone that I've met that
owns a meetup and has done it, has
been doing here for more than six months
has gotten a positive ROI. One of my
friends runs
Startup Grind in New York City and it's
opened up all these opportunities for
his tech consulting business. Another one
of my friends runs drinks and coding or
maybe just coding boot camp. I
interviewed him, Eugene Yee on the podcast and
it got him a $100k plus job at
Capital One as a coder. I only reveal
this because he revealed it on the
podcast itself. So you will get an ROI
just from the meetup, but what I
actually found works best is meeting
everyone, acting like the actual host
shaking hands, saying hey thanks for
being here
what do you want to get out of this
event. Just being very open about it and
asking what they do. What I found is what
you can usually do is mention that you
do app development if you're an agency owner or
design or whatever you do. And most
people will have an app idea in their
stomachs, in their brain somewhere. Whether it's for
their company or whether it's for
whatever and as soon as you get that
idea
you know be interested in it, ask more
questions, get their business card and
then you email them the next day with an
email that says something like something
simple like: no subject line and then
hey Mike great seeing you at the meetup
yesterday.
Let me know if you're around for a call
or coffee to keep talking about the app
idea. Either way, stay in touch. Thanks,
Alex. Got more meetings out of this email
then even those long cold email scripts
that we talked about.
Thanks for watching the video. Are there
any other questions you have about
putting on a meetup? Leave them down in the
comments. I will be sure to answer every
question you have. Like this video to
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more B2B sales training and if you need
marketing support for your digital
agency, if you want us to run a series of
meetups for you check out experiment27.com. Thanks.