How to Attract Local People to Your Training Events

Hosting local training events for your online audience is an excellent opportunity to include your local community in your business. If you have mostly done everything online or with long-distance people hosting, a training event in your local area can be just the thing to enable you to start getting known locally as an expert too. 

* Give Yourself Enough Lead Time – For a small workshop, you don’t need more than a few weeks. About six weeks is a good lead-up time to find a location, get ads in the local paper, and let enough people know about your local training event. If you plan to host hundreds, though, consider giving yourself a year lead time.

* Develop Awesome Promotional Materials – Focus some of your promotional materials on your local audience. When you laser focus on who you want to attend, it’s going to help them find out about the event and sign up for it. If you don’t focus any of your marketing locally, you may not get very many locals.

* Focus on Benefits of Attending – Remember that for all your advertising and marketing, you want to focus on the benefits the attendees will receive for attending your event. When you do that and think only of them for all your marketing materials, it will be clear to them why they should come to your training event because they’ll know what they’re going to learn and why they should learn it.

* Use Many Types of Media to Get the Word Out – Don’t stick to online marketing for local events. Include many types of advertising and marketing to get the word out, from local newspapers, local TV, local radio shows, and more. 

* Partner Up with Someone Else – Sometimes you can get more people to attend an event when you partner up with someone else who is also an expert in your community. Remember that there is no competition, only completion when you partner up with others who offer complementary products and services to yours. 

* Set Up a Simple Registration System – Even though your event is local, you can still allow for event registration via online methods. But, it’s also a good idea to allow people to phone you to sign up. Not everyone locally will be technologically ready to sign up online. But, you can also use this as a wedding method if you prefer trainees who are more used to online tech.

* Network at Other People’s Events – Even though you’re busy preparing for your own event, it’s not the time to slow down with networking and going to other people’s events. Giving people information about your event when you socialize is an excellent way to get more locals to attend.

* Follow-up – When someone sends a question about your event, signs up for your event, or engages with you on any level, it’s imperative that you make it a habit to follow up. If they get on an email list, ensure you have a follow-up series in place. If you meet them in person, get their info so that you can arrange more meetings. 

Opening a few seats to get local people in can help set you up for future (mostly local) events and workshops, building your expertise profile while you do it. Local training events are one of the best ways to break into the local small business community as an expert.