How Teaching Workshops Work

When I was first starting to build my own digital marketing agency, I had been working as a project manager at several digital marketing agencies (of course owned by others). In-between those positions I’d work as a freelancer building websites, programming in the correct SEO for clients, adding branded and matching eCommerce, writing content, adding internal and external links, creating matching logos, creating newsletters (which I hate doing) and so on. Over time I built a five step procedure for project development or “roll out” that I’ve documented elsewhere here in this blog.

Trying to build a small, agile agency of my own required that I follow the logical processes and procedures for client matriculation that larger agencies had used when I worked for them. From screening potential clients for the right fit, to explaining budget, to setting boundaries and explaining contracts. Larger, competitor agencies led by their example and I would have been foolish to ignore what they offered to learn by.

Workshops Help Create a Client “Farm”

One of the processes I needed to put into place, I realized, was a way to “farm” for new clients. In marketing agencies a “farm” was a process or series of processes (that always had to overlap for maximum value and time / energy / financial ROI) you would use to attract, nurture, screen, and onboard potential new clients. And again, to be clear, this “farm” process could be just one thing that works for you well or more likely it would be a series of processes you would eventually learn to automate or do without much stress or pre-planning easily enough on a regular recurring basis.

For the sake of brevity, I’m going to focus on one such technique here; that of teaching workshops for business expansion and growth.

Since I’d worked as a teacher before and later as a college professor (English and Journalism, egad!) I was fairly comfortable presenting workshops, bootcamps, seminars and related material. However shy I might be, presenting and explicating a topic I felt knowledgeable about and informed upon and enjoyed practicing, helped bridge that gap. So I would regularly teach workshops on SEO, eCommerce, branding, content marketing, project development, design standards, content repurposing, and different aspects of those topics (such as Off Page SEO or how I was able to outpace larger digital marketing agencies with a holistic home-grown approach that worked just fine). Essentially what I blog about herein, I would teach workshops on regularly.

So let’s dig into the reasons why teaching workshops can help you expand your business’ reach and scope.

Be the Expert In The Room

One of my favorite expressions when mentoring struggling freelancers or startup founders or even just regular business owners new to marketing in general is “be The Expert In The Room.”

For freelancers this means be knowledgeable and super-informed on all aspects of digital marketing and be fully prepared to answer their most common questions and concerns.

Of course the chief question is always focused on price (not value of achieving goals since that’s more intangible and often undefined by those who need marketing the most).

For new business owners, being The Expert In The Room means knowing your Customer Acquisition Costs (or CAC for short), your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators or how you specifically measure success and by what metrics – hint, banks and credit unions loaning you investment capital might ask you), your anticipated spend rates on social media paid advertising (PPC for short), organizational structure and more.

So it means being prepared in advance and rehearsed to answer their own concerns. The business owner, it should go without saying, needs to have their total digital marketing plan seen through inside and out with full SWOT analysis completed (again, banks and credit unions will ask you before just tossing money at your) and SMART goals.

If you clam up or scoff at their questions, you can usually kiss their capital goodbye.

When you teach workshops you are perceived as The Expert In The Room by those in attendance. This gives you tremendous opportunities to correct misinformation spread on the web (about as common as COVID these days, sadly). It also enables you to explain your “value proposition” to them.

This allows you to articulate how your services and Unique Selling Proposition benefit them long-term. You want to relate your experience and knowledge to solving their needs without “getting techie” on them and watching their eyes turn to huge round bulbous glazed-over eggs rolling up into their heads when you talk about plugins, widgets, categories, and themes. The role of the Expert is to guide through a thought-out and tested process that is simplified and known.

Being The Expert lets you offer attendees free giveaways, free initial consultations via Zoom or Whereby or some other video conferencing system, it lets you meet and greet potential new clients at the end of the day. So you need to have a process to screen, enroll, nurture, and keep in touch with or onboard potential new clients. Workshops let you do that and fine tune these processes as an agency would.

Teaching Workshops Permits You to Reach Untapped Markets

By presenting workshops you reach untapped markets you might otherwise never encounter. You can chat with business owners or entrepreneurs (and yes, many wantrepreneurs as well who will forever be stuck in one of the stages of denial no matter what you do or say), who are non-technical (most) to moderately technical but who still need guidance in one way or another. The more tested and relaxed you are in presenting, the more easily you’ll be able to vet, onboard, and work with appropriate leads and enroll them into your newsletter via free downloads, special offers, or free consultation or social media posts.

Examples of this would be when I taught workshops on digital marketing (or aspects of digital marketing) to interior designers, graphic designers, small business owners, startup founders, nonprofit administrators, SEO basics to a group of lawyers (which was like herding cats), and include teaching workshops online to new nonprofit founders with minimal business experience, and mentoring through various nonprofits as their digital marketing Expert In The Room in-residence through the US Small Business Administration and other similar organizations.

Teaching workshops also permits you to create content that matches up with the three silos of marketing content mentioned elsewhere here. After a few workshops, you’ll be more relaxed and capable in producing workshops that meet each one of these three silos to reach potential new clients in each category and in each stage of development professionally.

Marketing Your Workshops

So, as a teacher, I was very familiar with creating presentations using PowerPoint or Canva and then writing out keypoints to discuss around those presentations.

I would create free giveaway checklists or special offers targeted to the group I was presenting to. So if we look at the example of interior designers, I would create a checklist for interior designers on best practices for their digital marketing efforts. For example, interior design is very visual.

The last thing you’d ever do is work with an interior design firm with a slovenly website that won’t work on mobile devices, that looks broken or crazy or has unappealing design; so for them design is even more important than for the typical business owner.

Their SEO needs to be highly local since most will start local and grow outward from there. Their font needs to match their own logo, and their branding needs to be on-target with their cards, pamphlet, and how they present themselves to their own clients. Again, it all has to fit a larger holistic whole. You can’t have an interior designer who wears all yellow but it’s never seen in their website design, logo, branded marketing collateral, proposals, stationary, and so forth. They’d need a Style Guide, as part of a larger holistic approach.

Another example would be creating special offers for restaurant owners. So in their case I’d include information on Point Of Sale systems (also called POS systems) that allow bars and pubs and restaurants to process payments easily and safely either online or in-person or both.

They’d also need systems to measure waste, balance their books, keep and automate receipts for orders, stagger order placement for the kitchen, have eCommerce on their website to sell custom blends or restaurant swag (t-shirts, ballcaps), and an event calendar to sell tickets for concerts or take special rentals or reservations.

You’d create special offers and downloads depending on your services and their services. It’s mutual.

Charging for Workshops

In online forums, I’ve often been asked to give even more detail on how to teach and present workshops for new client enrollment but much would vary based on your demographics, your area of expertise (or lack thereof), time of year, and the length of what you offer and need.

When I was starting out teaching workshops I’d offer one hour or less workshops for free as a means to get my name out there, meet new leads, promote my agency and services, and kickstart my “farming” process.

Where to Teach Workshops

Most libraries will gladly let you teach workshops for one hour especially if you assure them it’s open to the public at large, does not promote yourself in some heavy-handed way (you may have to take it easy on this until you learn how to navigate bureacracies) for free. Co-working locations, large restaurants, office parks, coffee shops, cafes, all often have places set aside for meetings that you could use to teach workshops. The larger the facility, the more likely they are to have a nice venue for workshops space as well. Be careful when charging and make sure you don’t violate a Term Of Service but usually if you pay to rent a space for a workshop you can freely charge just as equally. After a while some sites such as Meetup may recommend locations to host workshops or you could simply take the “piggyback” approach by studying larger, more profitable competitors to see where they offer workshops. Also wherever you see WordCamps or WordPress events on Meetup or Eventbrite are usually great locations for your own workshops so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to find spaces – just take productive action.

Of course, you can always use Meetup and Eventbrite and other tools to teach online workshops but know in advance that attendance for in-person workshops, however digitalized we may be now as a modern culture and as much as I personally love the web and all it can (or could) do for business growth, most people still prefer on in-person workshops. Attendance for online workshops will be dwarfed by in-person attendance almost every time unless you heavily and repeatedly promote them well in advance.

Workshop Examples

One lawyer I consulted confessed to me that his divorce practice was failing miserably. He just wasn’t enrolling new clients at any steady clip. When I looked at his website with no SEO at all, and saw that he had no “farm” system of his own I offered him the same advice I’m offering you here: Create a custom farm through the use of deliberate workshop marketing.

I told him to draw up a contract for us where he would help me create contracts for me in exchange for advice worth tens of thousands of dollars. He agreed. I received my custom contracts and then offered him this advice that blew his socks off.

I told him to go to Meetup and create a divorced singles group and schedule weekly events at al local restaurant with lots of space for private meetings. Once a month he was to bring in guest speakers to address divorced singles issues such as property sales after divorce, dealing with the stress of divorce, financial planning and all the other fun things divorcees must go through (he said sarcastically).

Now before each divorced singles get together he would introduce himself, discuss his services and experience and (again) his value proposition to them (easing divorce, helping post-divorce through his group), hand out cards and brochures and require sign-in so he could subscribe everyone attending to his newsletter and send special offers and coupons to. He would close out each meeting with next week’s agenda, special offers, guest announcements or schedule changes or address issues in the group.

Soon he started charging nominal fees for the group to have a more “velvet rope” policy and bring in more discerning professionals. Then he soon opened another such group in another neighboring city, then in a third neighboring city until he had three groups total. He was literally surrounded by potential new clients daily and hosting workshops several times a week as new, highly productive “farm” for his legal practice.

I suggested similar workshops for interior designers to bring in new leads that would center around design, décor, furniture, and take place over catered luncheons. Over time, they too brought in more leads regularly through the workshop farming approach that worked wonders for them as well.

Summing Up Workshops for Business Growth

I could go on for pages upon pages with examples, but I think I inculcated my point here: It works if you work it. And like that seminal very short self-help classic “It Works,” visualize who you want to attract and why, see yourself using workshops smartly to attract those clients, see yourself ably nurturing those clients, and then working with them easily.

While replaying those images in a narrative process you repeatedly visualize, work on presentations, your free offers, explaining budgets and value propositions, and everything you know you’ll need. If you feel blocked simply attend workshops taught by students of Zig Ziglar or other known sales gurus. Focus on integrity, being authentic, and customizing to suit your own demographics and market niche.

How I Used Workshops to Grow

In my own case, I would blog about each presentation I gave and linked to the events. I’d also promote my workshops in Chamber event calendars, local grocery store event calendars and on their physical bulletin boards. I’d promote my workshops on association websites and invite them get involved. I’d promote my workshops through co-working facilities and offer to teach similar workshops at their locations for no charge so I could reach their targeted membership (remember here , these were rehearsed one hour workshops so I wasn’t exhausting myself).

I’d get photos, video, use those on Youtube, Vimeo, BitChute, and repurpose material for webinars, podcast appearances, to create stunning infographic like the ones all over this site. Then I’d link to all of these in each blog post about each presentation. In those same blog posts I’d link to scholarly references. I’d submit and resubmit these posts to all major search engines on a regularly recurring automated schedule using HootSuite or Buffer so they’d be resubmitted to social media with completely new hashtags and search terms (social media SEO at its finest, my friends) and keep it going. I spoke at a law firm on SEO that I could’ve done in my sleep. I spoke at a huge Microsoft conference at one of their headquarters and encouraged those struggling with building agencies or freelancing careers to reach out for consulting services. I taught an extensive workshop on using content marketing with social media (content repurposing) for a city’s new business and startup expo that attracted several hundred attendees. I taught WordPress workshops to countless office managers and administrators, offering to help them one-on-one with simple to advanced issues, all while teaching workshops. If I could do it, others can as well if there’s a will to do so.

Create the schedule and approach to meet your needs, fine tune it, and enjoy the fruits of your labor that will surely come once you get it rolling.