5 Ways To Market Your Virtual Event

Developing a marketing strategy for your virtual event is quite similar to building your website. You have to marry both sides in order to achieve that optimal performance. For example, you cannot solely focus on building your brand voice and completely ignoring your sales funnel. Similarly, your virtual event is not complete without pushing it to the potential guests and pumping up the attendance numbers.

Planning a stellar event is important and is also what will greatly boost your brand image. But before that, if you don’t have anybody to even experience your event, all that planning would have been for nothing. If you’re still not convinced, think of marketing for your event as the first step to converting a huge audience as the awareness of your brand grows.

When it comes to marketing your event, don’t be shy and limit yourself to one or two approaches, you really have to push your brand out there. If people don’t know you at all, there is no chance that they would attend the event.
With that, here are 5 common and easy to implement strategies to push the awareness of your event.

Landing page

A landing page is often known as a “lead capture page” where you direct every single person who goes on to your website to a certain page. This page will contain what you want your audience to see before proceeding with what they are there for. This is a great opportunity to promote your event because of the traffic that you will get.

This focal point of your marketing campaign serves two purposes.

1. It helps you to tell people why they should care about this event (like an elevator pitch)
2. Helps capture the details of interested visitors that have yet to make their decision.

On top of these, use your landing page to convey the theme to the visitors. Things like the agenda of the event, a brief overview, date, time, exhibitors, and images ought to be well thought out to set this tone.

Email Marketing

As a continuation of the previous point, one of the ways to do this is to have a landing page that collects email addresses. That is because we also want to remind our fellow followers that an event is coming up. Over the next few weeks or months leading up to the event, send them updates or teasers to get them excited and reminded. These email subscribers are often seen as the most loyal audiences and will be crucial for the event.

Think about your:

• Ideal guests
• Number of emails to send
• The overall plan for email marketing
• Subject line
• The goals of each email
• Call-to-actions

Ideally, there should be a heavy focus on the guests that are interested in joining the event. However, you might also want to consider creating different campaigns for different categories of your subscribers depending on how keen they are on joining. Plan it out ahead of time and definitely don’t overdo the emails.

Using specific email marketing tools like MailChimp or ConvertKit will be our recommendation.

Social media

Social media is a weapon that is at your disposal. The reach on social media is one that you will never get anywhere else.

The obvious way is to keep posting relevant and teasing content on your page about the upcoming event. Build hype around the event and own a hashtag. Have this overall plan that encompasses the different methods to get audiences to engage with it.

But if you want to take that up a notch, consider paid promotion. You might value the organic reach that you have, but a paid promotion can reach the audience that you otherwise wouldn’t have.

Just a little bit behind the algorithms for paid promotion, you can specifically target those visitors who have visited your website before or are on your email marketing list for a second attempt at converting them. This web technology tracks the behaviour of people and what they clicked on. If done properly, you will have targeted the entire sample of your ideal audience.

Leveraging your sponsors

Getting sponsors and closing that deal is the first step to this. Then, leverage them. The biggest reason why sponsors would want to work with you is that they also want to build awareness around their brand. They want your audience to also see their brand during the event and they are okay with it. Therefore, you can also ask them to help you promote the event from their end.

• Encourage your sponsors to promote it on their site, social media channels, and their web content.
• Send emails to their subscribers

It really does benefit both sides when your sponsor decides to step up to the task. Nonetheless, ensure that both of you get the messaging right by working closely together. The better the marketing copy that they are promoting and the cooperation between your brand and theirs, the greater the results will be.

Content marketing

Our favourite.

Content marketing is always “provide value first” and “ask after”. In today’s age, content drives more engagement and any other form of marketing strategy. It is known as one of the core pillars of a strong inbound marketing strategy. Combine this with proper SEO techniques and it would be hard for your event to not get noticed by the public.

Alternatively, do a guest blog post on other authoritative and reputable sites. Then, use the right keywords and link them back to your web page. This is one of the quickest and most effective ways to start ranking for these keywords and generate organic traffic.

If guest blogging is out of the picture, then you can always create an infographic or a blog post on your own web page, talking about some of the aspects of the events. Consumers and audiences always want value, so make your content worth their time and they will willingly proceed to the next step.

Promoting your virtual event takes time and patience. It’s just not one of those things where you can wait until the final hour to do but the result is well worth the effort. Remember that the online event landscape is competitive and your rivals are not just other events but also every other video content online. Even if your event is helpful, informative, engaging, and you have the secret recipe for making a million dollars tomorrow, you still might not get the attendee numbers that you’re looking for.

Treat marketing for your virtual event as an art. There are no perfect ways or strategies that can guarantee the numbers. So find that sweet spot where your brand is comfortable with and make that your core.

If you’re looking for an event organizing company and a production company to help you with your event, look no further. Annaba Resources is built upon the marketing and production of events. Drop us a message down below and let’s talk! 

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