By John Eberhard

You may have heard of MeetUp. For those who haven’t, MeetUp is a website where you can join and start a group related to some specific topic, and people who are interested in that topic can join your group. Then you can hold events, either in-person or online, and people can attend your events.

There are currently 60 million members of MeetUp, with 330,000 groups in 193 countries. So there is definitely a pre-made audience there on MeetUp. The trick is how to use it.

First thing I’d recommend you do is start an account on MeetUp, then poke around and see what is already on the site in terms of groups and events related to the topic of your business. You can search for groups and events in a specific city on whatever topic you choose.

If you find there are some groups on your topics on MeetUp, that is probably a good sign that you could start a group and hold some online events (webinars) and get some people joining your group and attending your webinars.

But a danger can arise if there are too many people already with groups and holding events on your topic, in your geographical area. Saturation can be a problem in certain cities. In a case like this, you can actually start a group in another city that isn’t saturated on your topic. With webinars it doesn’t matter because people can be anywhere.

Accounts

There are two types of accounts you can choose on MeetUp to create groups and hold events. With the regular account, you pay $30 every six months and can create up to three groups. With a pro account you pay $30 per month for each group, but you can get the email addresses of each person who RSVPs for one of your events.

Whether you have a regular or pro account, you can send emails to anyone in any of your groups, emailing them within the MeetUp system.

Events

OK, now you have created a MeetUp group and people are joining. So what type of event can you put on and what should the content be?

Generally the rules for what should be in a MeetUp event are the same as with a webinar. So what types of things should you do webinars about? It is important to know that people will want to attend a webinar that contains information that is useful to them. They will not usually want to attend a 30-45 minute sales pitch.

You can hold webinars related to:

• News and updates about your industry
• News and updates about your products or services
• Details on how to use a particular product or service
• Some topic related to your industry that you are expert about
• Industry trends
• A new product or service release

A MeetUp webinar is usually 1-2 hours long. The usual format that some experts recommend for webinars is to make it 30-40 minutes of useful information, then 10-15 minutes of a sales pitch at the end, for some product or service related to the topic of the webinar. When you have a sales pitch at the end, you of course want to make some sales. But it is also possible to run webinars that are informational only, where the main purpose is to establish yourself as an expert or keep your company high in their awareness.

I have one group I am working with that is creating MeetUp groups with a pro account, and holding webinars once a week. The pro account gives us access to the emails of everyone that RSVPs for one of our events, so we are putting those identities into Go High Level to create autoresponders to sell those people services. We have a couple very experienced presenters that are doing presentations with Powerpoints, then offering a 1-on-1 consultation at the end.

So is MeetUp a valid marketing tool? The answer is yes!