With approximately 230,000 thousand groups on www.meetup.com around the word and growing about 4,000 new groups a month, meetup.com has become a force to be reckoned with and an amazing place to build connections, market your business and get tons of free leads.
BUT the dark reality is that most meetups fail miserably… and even the ones that stay “alive”… well, they are barely breathing. Most never get to 500 members. So let me share a few crucial tips for meetup marketing that will make big difference.
Btw you might ask who am I to give advice to meetup organizers? Good question my meetup building friend 🙂
I don’t like to brag but I’ve built the biggest business meetup group in Europe with over 27,000 members. (2nd biggest in the world) I’ve run some of the biggest meetup events in London with over 400 people registered. I did it the first 2 years without a marketing budget and basically knowing almost no-one in London.
I’ve now become known as the “meetup master” and have coached and mentored many meetup organizers who in some cases has gone on to build the biggest meetup groups in their category.
So without further ado (and shameless self promotion) here are a few meetup marketing tips for organizers to build their meetup bigger and easier.
Meetup Marketing Tip 1: Promote the meetup group OUTSIDE meetup.com.
If you rely on traffic to your meetup page purely from meetup.com it’s VERY unlikely your meetup group will ever take off. You should have a facebook page, twitter, instagram, periscope etc. etc.
Our Facebook page has over 30,000 followers and has been our most important marketing platform. There are also an abundance of sites that list events for free.. simply google “event sites” etc.
Meetup Marketing Tip 2: The Name of your meetup group should be short and marketable.
The amount of weird names I’ve seen on meetup is simply astounding. People make decisions in the blink of an eye, so if your meetup name doesn’t catch their attention in an instant or they dont understand it, they are on to something else.
SO.. put some serious effort and thought into creating a great name for your meetup.
Meetup Marketing Tip 3: Consistency is key:
I gotta admit… I made a big blunder … not only that, but I made it TWICE. You see , I took some time off TWO summers in a row to write 2 of my books. In this period I didn’t run any meetups for about 3 months. As I said… BIG mistake.
Why… well first of all, to people visiting your meetup page it looks like the meetup group is dead.
Second: When you don’t have anything going for a while, people tend to forget about you and go else where. When I got back on the horse again the second time it was almost like I had to create the momentum from scratch again.
So the ABSOLUTE maximum you should have between meetups is 5 weeks. I recommend no more than 2-3 weeks but if you are going on a long vacation your group will survive if you have 5 weeks in between from time to time. But not more than once or twice a year.
Meetup Marketing Tip 4: You MUST master copywriting.
Copywriting is the science and art of putting words together in a way that inspires people to take action. This skill is THE most important to master in ANY business and is the number 1 reason.
You need this skill to create successful facebook ads, compelling titles and descriptions for your meetup, create emails that people actually read etc etc.
Without this you are dead in the water and will lose to other meetup organizers that have this skill.
Meetup Marketing Tip 5: Invite speakers with a following.
If you have speakers that have a following it will not only be easier to get people to come… people love celebrities… even mini-celebrities. BUT also the speaker will normally promote your meetup event to their lists and following. You could even make this a requirement for them to be invited to speak. This method could really get your group growing if the speaker has a big following.
Finally… Keep on going.
Too many organizers quit way to soon when they don’t see results right away. It takes effort and time to build a meetup group, but it’s worth it many many fold.
Not only is my meetup group now creating an almost unlimited amount of leads, but it has become pretty profitable as well.
So don’t expect it to just go smoothly… commit to making it work, no matter how long it will take. It took us about 9 months before any significant things happened and it took about 3 years before I put the final pieces together and we REALLY started to grow.
Hope this was helpful. Wishing you a mega meetup building day.
Patrick M. Powers
