Day 402 - Reset Your Markers

almostfitz (32)in #progress • 6 years ago (edited)

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Day 402 - $8,733 made, 25 events held, 6 products designed, 48 twerkflows made. Coming to the end of a three-event week. Frigging around and procrastinating on an expensive order I need to put through.

Throwback to Day 37 - 0$ made, 0 events held, 0 products designed, 6 twerkflows made. Drawing the conclusion from absolutely no evidence at all that 60% of my revenue would be from wholesale of fabrics and 40% would be from running workshop events.

Run any kind of events? Well, what can attendance at our events tell us about our need to advertise or not. Disclaimer, I prefer to create content rather than run an ad, but it should be acknowledged that ads are just another form of content. It's all trying to get eyeballs.

I don’t use attendance as the only measure of an events success. Level of enjoyment of my audience, net promoter score, how much I learn and follow up purchases are all more important to me than pure attendance numbers. Quality over quantity in the learning stages. If you’re discouraged by an unprofitable event, you’re going to get walloped sooner or later. For example, I run events for kids, at $2 or $3 a head. I’m not making any money but money isn’t the goal. Promotion, perfection and experimentation are the goal.

During the first 6 months of my events, I didn’t spend 1 dollar on running ads. Doing nothing more than putting up a few flyers around town and sharing my event on Facebook had me at sell out events. But it’s very possible likely that those were the low hanging fruit and the ally adopters. There was the crowd that was mostly likely to attend my event no matter the cost.

The first time I ran an ad it was actually just to test our reach and response. My event was already doing predictably well. Facebook allows you to tailor your add to prompt a particular type of response - start conversations, buy tickets, website visits, etc. But you have to monitor which of these actually convert in to sales for yourself. Conversations are sales and click-throughs definitely aren’t sales. The most positive campaign I’ve run was focused on starting conversations. Still only about a 1 out fo 10 conversations led to a sales, but that is great compared to 1 purchase for 60+ clickthroughs. (for the data driven it was about $0.28 per clickthrough and about $0.30 per conversation.)

Enrolment/attendance is a big marker. In year 1 you may subvert attendance to a more long-term focused marker. But at some point, it should become the main marker. After you have the process down, the flyers and factoids all written out and perfected it has to become about how many people show up consistently to eat what you’re putting on the table.