Despite the naysayers, summits still work! If you are solving a problem, people will come and get the information they need from your summit.
Krista Miller, owner of Summit in a Box, teaches people how to run Virtual Summits that are profitable for them and everyone else involved.
Read to learn about the benefits of hosting a summit and how summits can grow your business.
How summits can grow your business
Monetarily
The impact summits can have on businesses is never ending. The first thing you might think about is the money side of things. If you’re going to do this big project that’s going to take you months, you need to profit from that or at least make your money back.
Audience Growth
The next thing that tends to come to mind for people right away is the list growth. When you bring on, let’s say, 15-20 speakers onto an event you’re hosting and ask them to share it with their list. It doesn’t matter if you bring in 500, 5,000, or 10,000 people, your list will grow. If you have an email list of zero and you have to summit with 500 people, you’ll have 500 people on your list. That growth is real.
Audience growth is the gift that continues to pay off moving forward, even if you don’t have anything to launch immediately. When you do later, it’ll be a huge win for you. Krista hosted a summit about summits in September 2020 that has folks still joining her program a year and a half later, who originally found her through that summit.
Expanding your network
Additionally, the speakers and connections you make through summits will continue to pay off. Now you have friends and potential collaborators. People who could do webinars or people who share your Instagram posts. You might have a question or you need to hire someone, now you know who to go to and they know to come to you, too. Those connections are the most powerful parts. You can launch anything after a summit.
What you need to host a summit
You don’t need a whole lot when launching a summit. If you have a website, especially if you’re selling something, you have the majority of what you need. You can probably host a summit for a few hundred extra dollars if you’re going to do it by yourself. Tech-wise, you can use the tech you’re already using.
Also, you don’t need to be a big deal to host a summit. You just need to be able to focus on a project for an extended period of time – give yourself 90 days and care about your audience. So if you want to host a summit, you can do it. Just stop doubting yourself, stop making excuses, and it’s time to take some steps.
Figuring out who you’re targeting is key to picking a topic
You need to start with who you’re hosting your summit for before trying to figure out what you’re hosting about. So whether that means you’re targeting creative business owners, moms, professionals, or course creators.
When figuring out who you are hosting for, that means identifying who you are targeting for your business. What smaller groups of people can you pull out from there? For example, maybe you target designers. You could niche down to brand designers, website designers, Squarespace web designers, print designers, and other smaller categories. Then you look at who buys what you sell, opts in for your lead magnet, responds to your social media posts, or who you want to help. Pick one group and it’ll be easier to figure out what your summit will be about for that specific group.
When you get really specific with your target group, that’s where you can get transformational.
How to find and invite speakers to your summit
Search Instagram and Google
When you have a specific audience you’re targeting, it makes it so much easier to go out and find speakers. Finding speakers is as easy as going on Instagram and doing a search for people that have whatever niche or topic you’re looking for in their Instagram bio. Now you have hundreds of options to sort through. You can do the same thing on Google, just put quotes around the topic and search from there.
Ask your audience
If you do have an audience or existing network, you could also just ask them. Send a quick survey to your audience and ask – Who do you love learning from? What do you want to learn about related to whatever summit topic you’ve chosen? Who do you know that I should invite? If other people are recommending them, that means they like them and they’re probably a great fit. People don’t recommend people they don’t like.
Get out of your own head
It’s scary to pitch people, especially if you are new to the scene. If you are hosting a summit for the audience/topic that your potential speaker targets, it’ll be a definite yes for those speakers. And that’s without the extra connections they’ll make, the list building they can do, or affiliate income.
So, don’t get down on yourself because you have a great opportunity for your speakers at a summit. If people say no, that’s okay. It doesn’t say anything about you or your event.
How many days should the summit last?
One day isn’t long enough. Day one is the day with the highest sign-ups you get of the summit. So if your summit is only one day long, all those extra people that sign up on day one are like, oh, it’s over already. The three to four-day option is a great idea because people are still excited, but you’re stopping before the point of exhaustion.
Two main obstacles you may encounter when hosting a summit
Not getting specific enough with the audience and topic
The biggest mistake people make is not getting specific with their audience and topic. The summit that you’re hosting, the name, and the tagline need to click for your people. You don’t want them to be like, Wait, what? That will cause even the most experienced business owner summit to totally flop.
Not giving yourself enough time
The second big mistake I see from people doing it on their own is just not giving themselves enough time. You don’t give yourself enough time to plan the process, get through it, and enjoy it. It’s stressful for you, the speakers, and it’s a mess for your attendees. So give yourself more time than you need, especially if you’re figuring it out all out on your own. Don’t fall into the trap of scrambling last minute. If there are any tech hiccups that happen, it will throw everything off because you didn’t allow yourself extra time.
How to combat the notion that there are too many summits
You hear people say this about webinars, challenges, or emails being sent. They say “none of this works anymore.” But you can’t say that webinars, challenges, emails, or summits don’t work because the results are still there for the people that use them.
If you’re using that excuse to doubt yourself and your own ability, you have to get over yourself. If you’re solving a problem for your people, they will love your summit. It’s free. Of course, they want you to solve their problem for free.
They don’t care about the format. If you’re solving a problem and feel like a format is overdone, do something different. Change out how long it is, get different speakers, do an audio summit instead of a video summit, or make a private podcast with tele-audio. It doesn’t matter how many summits are out there, they work.
Resources
About Krista
At Summit In A Box, Krista helps entrepreneurs 3x their monthly revenue through virtual summits without wondering where to start or what to do next. Her method is focused on strong connections, collaboration, and making a difference in the lives of everyone involved.
The best part? She makes it easy! With every strategy, copy template, website template, script, tech tutorial, and resources you’d ever need, your summit prep just got a whole lot easier!
