Costa Michailidis
Executive Director at Innovation Bound
Let's use ChatGPT to pack the house for your next event! Email me anytime at costa@innovationbound.com, or connect on LinkedIn.
Giving your event promotion a massive boost with the latest A.I. tools
Estimated Time to Complete: 10 to 15 minutes
Executive Director at Innovation Bound
Let's use ChatGPT to pack the house for your next event! Email me anytime at costa@innovationbound.com, or connect on LinkedIn.
Marketing can be one of the toughest challenges in producing a successful, profitable event. Let's use ChatGPT to get butts in seats and pack the house for your next big event!
Before we being, what first hand, hard evidence do we have that this stuff actually works?
In early 2023, we were planning an online training event on AI for Learning & Development professionals. ChatGPT had just gotten 100 million users upon release, becoming the fastest growing app ever.
In order to promote our event, we built a ChatGPT-powered demo called 🥊 The Leadership Gauntlet, a scenario based leadership training exercise run entirely by ChatGPT.
It was a hit, and it attracted people to our event and got us some sign ups...
But, it took us 8 hours to make the demo, 3 hours to make the next demo, a 🛍️ Sales Role Play Trainer, and 2 hours to make the next one, a 📚 Personalized Learning Coach.
Despite trying, we couldn't make these demos in less than 2 hours, so we testing out using ChatGPT to help us go faster. Early results were promising, and in the end... We were making demos in 6 minutes! 20 times faster than before, or a 2,000% boost in productivity.
We could finish in a Friday morning, work that before was consuming two full 40-hour work weeks.
Here were some of the demos ChatGPT built with us:
This boosted sales for our event, ultimately tripling our profits.
Since then, we've worked with our clients to produce similar results for their own businesses not just in marketing, but in customer service, fulfillment, sales, back office, and other business priorities. All by harnessing the power of ChatGPT and our strategic framework for working with A.I. I'll show you 3 of our key lessons now, and how you can use them to pack the house for your next big event!
The most powerful way to use ChatGPT is to customize it for a specific task, allowing it to focus on a single goal and dramatically speeding things up for you.
Let's look at an example of this...
This is a customized version of ChatGPT that hosts a leadership training game called The Leadership Gauntlet
embedded right here on our website.
(For the computer programmer out there, we built this with the OpenAI chat API.)
This demo sends your messages to our servers and the OpenAI API. As a preview, it limits the number of messages.
By default, ChatGPT acts as a helpful assistant.
Here we are changing that default, and having it act as the host of a scenario-based leadership training exercise.
ChatGPT presents a fictional leadership situation, the users says how they'd handle it, then ChatGPT scores them and offers some tips on how to improve.
That's cool, but so what?
What I want you to notice is how flexible ChatGPT is. There's an enormous variety of ways we can customize it to produce concrete results for us!
In fact, we have customized ChatGPT to draft client proposals for small business owners, to search the Internet and generate leads, draft industry-related content, analyze large documents, and lots more.
The trick, of course, is to find the point of highest leverage, which we'll come to later in the third lesson.
There are a few different ways to customize ChatGPT. The simplest way is to create your own GPT. Here's an overview from OpenAI » 💻 Introducing GPTs
When you log into ChatGPT, you'll want to click Explore GPTs
in the left side menu, then Create GPT
in the top right corner.
Then, you'll want to click Configure
and fill out each field as needed. We'll cover more and what to put in the Instructions
field next.
Alright, that's why you should customize ChatGPT, and the simplest way to do it, but what do we actually put in those fields to make ChatGPT do what we need?
Let's go to the next lesson.
You need to coach ChatGPT so it can do a really great job for you, kind of like how you'd coach a recent hire who's new in their job.
ChatGPT creates responses based on the inputs you give it.
If you put garbage in, you get garbage out, but if you give thoughtful, specific instructions, with plenty of detailed background information, and show it leading examples of what a good answer looks like... Then you'll get fantastic answers!
⚠️ Warning » ChatGPT only gives good answers if the answer is well represented in its data set. You can think of the data set as almost all of the Internet plus the full text of many digitized books, news articles, and scientific publications.
If the answer you ask ChatGPT to produce is not well represented in its training data set, then it can start to hallucinate.
Hallucinations are when it confidently and politely tells you something that's totally made up and inaccurate. We cover them in our full Custom Training Programs.
Let's see the Good Coaching
we were talking about in action:
This clip is from a keynote workshop I delivered at Entrepreneurs' Organization of Tampa. 48 business owners in the audience represent total revenues over $100 million.
Learn about my keynote: 💻 Using ChatGPT for Massive Business Growth »
In short:
If you give ChatGPT all three of these things, it is far FAR more likely to create great output for you.
All three of these things go into the Instructions
field we looked at earlier for making a Custom GPT.
You do this once up front, and now every time you need your custom, coached ChatGPT, it's ready to go!
As you go about your job producing and promoting events, you'll discover powerful new ways to use ChatGPT in your work. Each time you do, build a new Custom GPT, load in a few paragraphs of coaching that tune it to produce good answers for you, and use it to get results fast.
And, of course, as you use your GPT, you can come back to those instructions and tweak them, improving and tuning your GPT as you go.
You may build a new Custom GPT for:
Alright, that was how to coach ChatGPT to product great results for you. We have one more lesson...
The final lesson is to concentrate on your top event promotion challenges, the points of highest leverage, but...
You're going to want to leverage ChatGPT's strengths, and avoid its weaknesses and risks.
ChatGPT is profoundly good at language tasks, which is why it's so often used for crafting content.
ChatGPT's strengths include:
Knowing these strengths, allows you to better plan on how to use ChatGPT.
If you know ChatGPT can produce large quantities of ideas faster than you, you may use it to brainstorm huge quantities of ideas for marketing tactics, and then just cherry pick the ones that are most suitable to you.
You should concentrate on using ChatGPT's strengths, but you should also concentrate on the top challenges holding back your event promotion and sales.
You can, of course, work to improve all of these, but it helps to know which one or two things are holding you back the most, so you can focus there first.
Let's bring it all together with a few examples!
Imagine you have a small, intimate, and powerful networking event, where you typically speak one-on-one with each attendee before they make the purchase decision to join your event.
What would help you the most, is to have plenty of booked calls with qualified prospective attendees without having to Google around and search LinkedIn by hand or pay one of those terrible lead generation services that sends you really bad leads.
Instead, you can build a Customized GPT that can search the web way faster than you can, but use your coaching, so it can qualify leads the same way you do.
You can also have your Custom GPT focus on specific industries, locations, time frames, or other criteria, and once it finds a good lead, you can have it draft a personalized initial outreach message to your prospect, which you can make a final edit to, and send.
Using a Custom ChatGPT in this way, you can likely triple how much initial outreach you do, or perhaps even more, without losing quality in your work, ultimately leading to more sales and a more profitable event.
Let's go to the other end of the spectrum for the next example.
Let's say you run a really big, multi-day conference with 25 keynote speakers, and tons of breakout sessions and workshops, and a dozen big sponsors with their own exhibits.
Your customer's buying journey is quite different than the last example with the intimate, small event.
Here, your customer might click on your ad somewhere, or hear about your event from a friend. They'll visit your website, and they'll browse around, reading a few keynote speaker bios, and your event description, maybe watching a video testimonial or two.
Then, they'll have to make a purchase decision of potentially hundreds or thousands of dollars based on that extensive, but not very personalized information.
This can be tough, and if someone chooses not to buy... They just disappear, and you never get to find out what held them back from buying. What were their objections to making the purchase?
Here's where ChatGPT comes in to make things personalized and capture objections.
You can build a customized version of ChatGPT that greets your website visitors directly on the homepage. Your Custom ChatGPT can have all of your event information including keynote speaker talk descriptions, the full agenda, schedule details, past attendee testimonials, and lots more all loaded into it.
Then, your Custom ChatGPT can simply ask the website visitor what they're number one goal is in attending your event.
It can then make tailored recommendations on which keynotes to attend, which workshops to join, perhaps even which sponsors could be the most interesting, how best to prepare for the event given that customer's unique goal, making your marketing hyper personalized to that customer and their specific goal.
Imagine what you will learn about your customers at precisely the moment they choose to buy, or NOT to buy.
Alright, let's review how you can use ChatGPT to pack the house for your next event or conference!
You are going to build a Customized ChatGPT, loading in the coaching in needs to do a great job for you, concentrating on ChatGPT's strengths and your top event promotion challenges.
It's been my pleasure to present this crash course on getting butts in seats for your next big event!
AI is very cool, but I also appreciate a human touch... Email me anytime at costa@innovationbound.com. Please don't hesitate to reach out. I am here to be of service to you and your event participants.
🎞️ Keynote Speaker Reel » Check out my keynote speaker reel, references, and workshop overview at www.innovationbound.com/keynotes.
We've delivered ChatGPT training at this point to thousands of people, across hundreds of companies, and dozens of countries. Our clients have seen the same kinds of 500% and 2,000% boost in productivity that we have, and we cannot wait to help more small business owners do the same!