📍EEA: Virtual Events Engagement Success With Liam Austin

Interview with Liam Austin

RJ Redden: Hold on to your goggles. It's time for the Epic Engagement Adventure.

Hey everybody. Welcome to the Epic Engagement Adventure. My name is RJ Redden. I am your host. and I get to sit beside, virtually. But I get to sit beside virtual event strategist today. His name is Liam Austin. We met long ago on some networking thing. I have absolutely no I memory except that I have no memory of our meeting, but I do know this guy.

He's wonderful at virtual events, getting engagement in virtual events. How many times have you been to one and you've just put it up in your sidebar and went about your day? If you don't want that kind of virtual event, this is the human to ask. Liam, how are you today?

Liam Austin: I'm Grace. I'm Grace. Excited to be, talking with you and sharing a little bit about my experience in yeah, virtual events and getting more engagement.

RJ Redden: Beautiful. So tell us, tell us we know virtual event strategy. What got you into that? What made you interested in helping people with their virtual events?

Liam Austin: Being an Australian. Being so far away from all the big events, happening in the US Europe we, we get some big events when it comes to music and concerts because your summers are very similar Europe and the us whereas Australia our summer is the opposite.

So we get some of the big bands, some of the big names to come across cuz we've got some big festivals and they wanna spend some time in the beautiful country. But when it comes to Business types of events or other types of events, consumer health events there's not a lot that venture out to Australia or it's not the number one priority.

It's a small country where 25 million people, I think. And so essentially I started my first virtual event in 2015 just to get ex access to the expertise around the world. Which as we all know now virtually is such a simple quick way, low cost way to connect with people especially those hard to reach people.

We can easily fill a room with a thousand people or 30,000 people without having to hire a big hall or a big stadium to. Share our message. Yeah, 2015 was the year we ran our first event and it was ju to really just being an Aussie being so far away from all the information, all the expertise out there in the world.

RJ Redden: Yeah. And I can imagine that 2020 probably changed just about everything for you . And so how did how did that change your business? The pandemic.

Liam Austin: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, when 2020 rolled around, we'd been running this for four or five years now, we'd been running our own events.

Typically the events we're running are like summits, workshops, challenges, seminars boot camps, and. People just started reaching out to us. It was around 2028. 2018 was the first time we decided to lift the hood on how we were actually doing these events. How we were getting 10,000 people even 20,000 people.

One event that we ran in 2016 had 20,000 people register. So 20,000 leads coming into our business. How are you doing this? How are you getting so much visibility? How are you reaching so many people? How are you adding so many? Like prospects to your database, how are you selling tickets to this thing? And making tens of thousands or, hundreds of thousands of dollars from these virtual online events that cost.

Zero really to set up and run. So we'd been getting, cause we'd built our email list to over a hundred thousand in the space of 10 months doing these types of virtual events. People just naturally started reaching out to us, asking us this was awesome. This was cool. I got so much from it. I can see you are getting a lot of benefit from it.

How do I run one of these things myself? , we said no. We just wanna bring in the expertise and have other experts share the expertise versus us sharing our own regarding these events. But 2018, we finally got convinced. Three years later, we lifted the hood. We opened the kind of book and shared what we were doing.

with this. And then by 2020 when that rolled around, it just left us in a really great space to help people who are transitioning from doing in-person events to transition online as well as people realizing, hey, like I'm doing online events, but now I can. . Now more and more people are used to these virtual events.

More and more people are open to attending these events because there's no other choice, right? And now post that era, people are, used to this. Now everyone knows how to use Zoom. Our very first event that we ran in 2015 was using Zoom tested plenty of different technology, but it doesn't have to be difficult.

It can be simple, as I said, low cost, and you can get thousands of people to your event getting to know you, like you and trust you. And I think that is what the most important thing comes from these virtual events. And yes, being in person is, you can connect with people, build that rapport maybe a little bit better, but virtual events don't discount the fact that yeah.

What you lack with the in-person events, you can actually reach a lot more people, which around the world that at time that's convenient to them, which I think is super powerful. Being in an Aussie who's now living in Europe, I live in Malta and most of our clients are in US or Canada, at least that kind of time zone.

So I'm a big fan and I've learned a lot over the years. So yeah, I've opened the book, lifted the bonnet, and happy to share everything.

RJ Redden: Oh, beautiful. Share away what are, what are some of the biggest successes you've had in your industry? What, give us a story about client engaging your people.

Gosh, getting pe 10,000 people to come to an events. Whoa. How do you do stuff like that? So please share some magic.

Liam Austin: Marketing is the key. . I know a lot of people are just like, no, I just wanna share my message. I just wanna be on stage. And then great. Leverage other people's audiences, right?

You don't have to try to market this thing yourself. Maybe get someone else to market for you, get in front of their audiences. I think that's the answer there, but really marketing, like you've gotta market the hell out of this thing to get the visibility you need to get the reach you need.

And you have to be smart with your copy and your tagline, your promise what they're gonna get from attending your event and actually showing up. Cuz that's key, right? You can get lots of people to register, but actually getting them to show up and to build that rapport, build that. Trust factor so that they see you as the number one choice.

You want them to leave the event and just go, I want more of this person. I want more of their teaching. I want more of their systems, their programs, and I wanna have a conversation with them about, Getting access to that. So you're booking appointments and you're enrolling clients into your programs, your services, your offers, and that's really the key.

So how do we get them to show up? But in terms of a good case study and why I decided to really open the lid on all of this We saw the results really early on with our first event. Like we had 15,000 people register for our first event. We had 500 people upgrade paying a hundred dollars, so we made $50,000 just in these low ticket offers which was amazing.

We didn't have any, thing priced above a hundred dollars. Really at that point, there was no like mid ticket offer course membership, no coaching program, no consulting. Like for 10,000, $20,000. There was none of that. It was just $50,000 from a hundred dollars sales. We're getting some great traction, getting lots of people there.

People started to notice and one of those people that noticed was someone who was in my co-working space who was struggling, who was trying to figure out his own business cuz he'd been working on it for months. Really. It was probably years and he just wasn't able to get her off the ground.

He was. Work as a side project, but it was his passion. He knew he needed to make a difference in the world because he was a sufferer himself. . So he suffered from migraine like really debilitating migraines, so he couldn't really hold down a. A proper job, if you like, like it was affecting his work life, his his income ability his, social life.

And so he knew this was a major problem that he wanted to solve, not just for himself, but for, every other sufferer out there. And he'd done the research. He knew there was a lot of people, but he didn't know how to get in touch with 'em or reach him. And he was trying for sure. And he saw that we were.

We were getting 15,000 people to our first event. Then we got, I think, 13,000 to our second, and then we got 21,000 to our third. And he is like, all right, Liam I need this. Like you've been sitting watching me sit here for, the last few months, the years, and I need this. So what are you doing?

Do you think I should be doing one? And so we talked him through it and he told me about a bit about his business and we created a. He launched the Migrant Grand World Summit. That was his first event that he ran. He now runs that as an annual event. So obviously it was a big success when we launched that for him in 2016.

And yeah, he's got now a hundred thousand people coming to his event every year, which is massive in migraine sufferers who get migraines from looking at the screen. Yeah, but they're coming to virtual events, , right? So I think this is one of the keys that maybe I'll I'll just point out for everyone, is that you have to have a strong enough promise, a promise of a result that will change someone's pain into, eliminating that pain.

And get them the result, the desired outcome that they want. And these people were suffering from migraine, they were getting headaches. It was causing major issues. It was a big pain point for these people. And he was able to solve that issue or give the promise of getting the tools and the strategies and the leverage to be able to eliminate or significantly reduce those problems.

So yeah, people who. Suffer from migraines. They get migraines from looking at the screen too young. Long yet they get a hundred thousand migraine sufferers looking at the screen watching his event because the promise, the draw card is so strong. Yeah.

RJ Redden: And that's the, for people doing their first live event or, virtual event, live event, whichever.

It is hard to come up with a promise that is, because people don't like to toot their own horn necessarily all the time. Is that something that you that's part of your service that you help people come up with that draw?

Liam Austin: Yeah, the seriously it's crucial. And there's a lot of people that are just like, oh, this is a fantastic topic, like ai, I'm gonna create a event on ai.

And because it's a hot topic, everyone's gonna love it and they're gonna come. And that's the biggest mistake that we made over the years running our events because we ran them on a few different topics because we were gathering just experts around the world on all these different topics, but it wasn't allowing us to create.

Or refine our niche and be known for something really specific. So we had a lot of people that were on our email list that were unsubscribing, that weren't interested and weren't able to upgrade to our other offers. Once we offer them, like our client coaching programs that we have to help people generate more leads, sales get more clients online they weren't upgrading to that because it wasn't in alignment like they came in for something else.

Big mistake to just think that okay, I know the topic, I know the actual. Focus of this event, like the promise and really defining that promise. There's a there's a strategy to it, right? There's some things that need to be done to make that the best possible attraction mechanism for your business, right?

It's a massive laid magnet. It's. It's a nurture program, like if you design the event correctly, so you can see that. It's if you can attract leads and you can nurture them, what's the next step? They're, they buy the event, does the attraction, and it does the nurturing. The le next thing is they're just ready to buy, right?

They're booking appointments with you and you're just enrolling them. So the way that you design these events, like however much time you spend on generating, , like this is how much time you should be focusing in on, designing your attraction mechanism for your event. And then the nurture what's the actual program look like once they come into the event?

This is your nurture campaign, your funnel, like how long have you spent on your building, your funnels and your nurture campaigns, your sequences. Spend that much time on your event because it will make a massive difference to your business and your ultimate. It makes

RJ Redden: a massive difference.

It is. It's everything. For me it's everything because if you spend 90% of your time pre-event, working on pieces of communication, mass communication is vital. But if you don't spend any time thinking about how you want people to feel during your enduring your event and how you're going to get there, you're almost wasting your time because I guarantee you, people have seen landing pages before.

They've seen emails before. What they want is to have a different experience while they're with you. Yeah, I couldn't agree more, Liam. It just it's astounding and most people out there just don't know that they don't have that. Gosh yeah. And migraine World would never have thought about that.

But what an interesting thing that he's getting people to a screen that it's hard to see the screen how valuable is that? That is a lovely secret. I'm so glad that you've, you've shared that one with us because you're your focus these days. I find your focus these days has to be razor.

It just really does. And if anything doesn't serve that focus and serve how you wanna make people feel, and what is the experience you want them to go through, whatever doesn't serve that, I throw it out personally, but I'm, I'm smaller time than you Liam. I have never gotten 10,000 people to an ne vet, but but yeah, so that's amazing.

How much time then you know, when you're doing planning and stuff? Cuz I know that a lot of people have said to me, I don't wanna do a three day event. I work with coaches. I don't wanna do a three day event because it takes so much time to plan that I have to sacrifice. Working with the clients I already have because it's like such a ramp up experience.

What, how have you dealt with that in the past with people who have brought that question to

Liam Austin: you? Yeah. There's so many variants of events that you can run, right? So one end of the spectrum, you've got your, yeah, your multi-day. Events, those three day events. On the other end, you've got your 90 minute events, or even shorter, right?

30 minutes. You're even seeing like VSLs out there that are like five minutes, 12 minutes. So yes. Okay. The, it's a vsl, it's a video. Liam, that's not really an event, but like, When it comes down to it, like we we run our events for the first time live and then it's a massive asset that you've built that you can use the recordings for, repackage it and sell it continuously.

I was running an event weekend. Yeah, last weekend. And it was a three day event. And during the event, I got a sale from an event. The very first event that I ran back in 2015, I had a, I made a sale and that sale I brought up on my phone and I showed everyone look at the power of this.

I ran an event. . But yeah, I spent a long time setting up and it was an investment, but I wanted to make it right. It got a lot of value for people. It's still delivering value for people because it's still relevant for them. They still want to get that promise. We talked about that promise before that, of that re that result, that outcome, what they're gonna walk away with at the end of the event.

Like people still want that. It's powerful. So I'm making sales from an event I ran seven, eight years ago. Yeah, I am. And I've got plenty of these events running that I've ran for the first time over the years that are now on autopilot, generating leads, building my visibility, generating more reach generating sales, booking appointments for my sales team.

And they're enrolling as high ticket clients coaching clients. This is an investment. You've gotta, yeah, put a bit of time and energy and effort. Doing the event, doing it well, doing it right, but focusing on, yeah, like what's the promise of the outcome? Is it something that is just a one-off?

Is it something that's gonna live out there forever and generate me passive income? But when we're Yeah. Working with a client to figure all this out. Yeah. It comes down each one, each person is different. Each business it's different. Each market is different. So we need to work out what it is, what is the outcomes?

What is the end goal ultimately, that you want to achieve?

RJ Redden: That's amazing. I have never spoken to an event organizer an event strategist before who talks about how to use, how to repurpose, repackage, and reuse the stuff after the event is over.

Liam Austin: Just interrupt you on that one. Sorry. But we're live now, right?

This is live event. People are gonna attend live, but I'm sure you are gonna use the recording, right? This is gonna live out there for a long. . . And that's what it's all about. It's just working smarter, not harder for a lot of these things.

RJ Redden: And I, I know an awful lot of coaches who.

They do an event like a pre pandemic, but they do a three day event twice a year. Or some of 'em even more frequently than that. And they were always starting from scratch. What you're saying is don't make that investment work for you for years.

That's pretty amazing,

Liam Austin: Liam. Yeah, so our. Program. If you decide to work with us, you come in and the program's called Predictable Income Freedom. And the reason is that we want predictability in our life. In our business we want income, we want predictable income, like consistent clients coming in through the door, consistent leads, traffic that's predictable.

That's not, relying on the launch and the rollercoaster that comes along with that, right? Cause events The first few years of our business was a rollercoaster, right? We're launching all the time, and only if we launched would we generate traffic, leads, sales, revenue, right?

You don't need to do that anymore. , you're creating these assets. It lives out there forever. Let's leverage it consistently. So predictable income and then freedom, right? So the whole idea of predictable income gives you the freedom. , go do whatever it is you wanna do. The financial freedom, the time freedom, the location freedom.

Like my, we didn't really talk about this, but I mentioned before, I'm Australian but I'm living in Europe because my partner is Swedish. And the reason we really started this business was because we wanted that freedom. We wanted location independence because we wanted to spend time in Sweden with her friends and family, as well as in Australia with my friends and family.

We ended up in Malta, , but that's another whole story. So the idea is, Look at your what's your ultimate outcome for things? For us, it's we wanna travel we wanna make money online. We want to work less and less over time. So yeah, we put in effort, energy, time, resources early on so we could start working less and less over time.

And so if that's your goal, all right, how do we design the business? How do we design the events around your ultimate. , right? So there, there's so much to elect to this. This is a whole business setup that we're talking about here. It can be a lifestyle business. It can be a business that grows into a major multimillion dollar company if you wish it to be.

It's powerful. It's powerful. Like you're reaching people for every corner of the globe. We're not just narrowing into a specific. Location anymore, like virtual events. I like, yeah, it excites me. I could talk about this all day long, but yeah. Happy to just answer any specific questions you might think, yeah.

Your audience would be interested in.

RJ Redden: I think I think they're very, next question would be, how do I get ahold of this human? How do I connect with Liam? Can you have a link, you.

Liam Austin: Yeah. Yeah. Before, before I share that, have we got a bit of time? Is that okay if I Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. So the, one of the biggest kind of my secret one that worked really well for us and our clients over the past few years is when it comes to engage. Is that promise? Absolutely. But that promise of a quick win. So a quick win is actually a result. So they come to your event to walk away with a result.

It's not theory. We don't want theory. This is practical. They're implementing, they're walking away with an outcome. We call that outcome like a quick win because in our 90 minute events, we can deliver this quick win for people. And this is. Gets people super excited about you and your ability to get them results, cuz everyone else they've heard out there has just been theory.

It's just been, yeah, it's worked for everyone else, but I'm not sure if it'll work for me. Now they come to your 90 minute workshop. They work workshop, they implement, they get the result within the 90 minutes and they. I wanna spend more time with you because I want more of these quick wins. That was amazing.

But I want bigger wins as well. I wanna make more impact. So how do we work together further? So they're booking a call in there discussing with you okay, what programs, services, how can we work together further on this? And I'll just give you an example. Like an example would be three referrals in three minutes.

That would be the promise would be the title of the 90 minute workshop. So three referrals in three minute. Three minutes is quick, right? And the three referrals is the win. And it's a quick win because it's three referrals in three minutes and it's powerful cuz three referrals. As a small business owner, like if we're selling a 5,000, $10,000 package, we could sell say one of those referrals.

I dunno what it is. You might think in your own business as you're listening to this. Yeah. If I got three referrals I'd close one, two, maybe even three of them at $10,000. So it's potentially worth $30,000 to you. So in just 90 minutes you. Get a strategy that gets you three referrals in just three minutes.

And now you've got that strategy. You've got that tool that you can use in your business every single day to generate three leads every single day. Or if you wanna scale it, don't spend three minutes, spend 30 minutes, and you're making now 30 referrals every single day. So a super powerful strategy that we can teach people in one of our workshops, we give them this.

Quick win, right? It's powerful. Big impact, quick win. That's how we create, I think, the most amazing show up rates. Engagement where people are actually taking action and they're getting the results as well. Saying all of that I've got a whole checklist that would teach you how to get one of these quick workshop wins set up for yourself and your own business.

It's really quick, Ashley. It's just like you can get it launched in seven days. Creating the content will take you only a couple of hours. Delivering it takes 90 minutes. So you spend the remaining six and a half days marketing this thing, right? Getting visibility. And we share a bit of that as well.

In that checklist. The checklist, you can go grab it@quickworkshopwin.com, quick workshop win.com. It's a free checklist. You can download it. And if you decide you can actually get our workshop on workshops, it's a paid upgrade. I think it might be a hundred dollars, but it might be a special discount, I think for your audience.

So go and check that out. Quick Workshop win.com. Entering your details like name, email, address, to get that checklist delivered to you. And then yeah, there's the opportunity to go even deeper with the strategies on this with a whole workshop on how to create these quick win workshops for yourself.

RJ Redden: See there it is. That's amazing. I will be downloading it myself, Liam, just know that's happening. I give, I do workshops all the time. And to be able to sharpen that skill, to be able to reach more people I don't need a billion followers. I don't need mass numbers.

But if there's anything that can help me sharpen my message, it has a business owner and get to more people, I'm automatically interested. And I just wanna thank you on behalf of the audience for that gift because what do you have to lose? Absolutely nothing. Quick workshop win go grab it, everybody because it's worth your time.

It's worth your time. Maybe you've been doing workshops forever, but maybe there'll be one thing that allows you to, really sharpen up. I know that I have heard a bunch of gems on this podcast. Liam's here. Completely. That's the conclusion I would draw anyway. Do you have any any final kind of words of wisdom for anybody out there thinking about putting on a live virtual event?

Liam Austin: Yeah, I think with, if you can deliver a quick win, like a result for people you'll be amazed. Like the amount of people that want more quick wins from. If you can have just even six or a dozen people on your workshop, you're able to get them all that quick win that result, they're gonna want more results just like that, right?

Those six 12 people are gonna be, How do I asking you like, how do I take this next step? How do we spend more time together? Cuz I've got big plans, I need to accomplish a lot of things in my world. You don't need a big audience, you just need the right promise. Like three referrals in three minutes is a great example of an event that we've run that works really well.

And you deliver, make sure people get that result. They can see that you care about getting the result, and you can actually deliver on your promise. I was able to get this quick win. . Yeah, of course. I want more of it. I don't want it to end here. Just 90 minutes together.

No, I wanna spend three days, three months, like three years with you because I've got such big plans ahead of me. So I just suggest that you go out there and you just get started, start running your first event in the next seven days. If only 1, 2, 3 people who show up or register. Awesome, great. Practice with them.

Run it again the next week. You can run this thing every single week. Record it once it's working really well. Continue selling it on autopilot forever and generate passive income. Get leads, sorry, leads coming in, the traffic coming in, but also appointments being booked for people wanting to work with you further.

And I think that's the biggest message from this. Go out there and just get your first few people into your quick workshop. Absolutely.

RJ Redden: I wanna thank you for I just wanna thank you for coming on. I know it's late at night for you. I know I'm your last stop of the day and you saved some energy for us today.

We are so grateful. This boy I will have you on again, Liam, because I can't hear enough stories about how you are helping your clients touch people's hearts with these with these workshops and with these live events. Awesome stuff, man. Thank you for coming on.

Liam Austin: Yeah, no worries. This has been great.

You've, the question's been great. I've been sharing like a lot, and I think that's to do with, you asking the right things. And yeah, this has been great. And thanks for allowing me to, share all of this.

RJ Redden: Beautiful I will say goodbye to our audience audience.

You're the best and you know that you are again, hit that link up. It's absolutely worth it to sharpen those skills, virtual events or where it's at these days, my friends. Get that going and I will see you here, same bot time, same bot channel next week on the Epic Engagement Adventure.

That's it for me. See you in a bot.