While one of the key benefits of virtual events over their offline counterparts is how they allow businesses to reach a global audience without being limited by geographical locations and venue sizes, it doesn't mean you can automatically attract attendees from all over the world just by launching the event.
With that being said, a clear marketing strategy to help you properly promote your virtual event will be crucial, and in this marketing guide for virtual events, we will discuss how.
Discover Effective 8 Virtual Event Promotion Strategies Here
1. Optimize Your Social Media Marketing Game
In this digital age of social media, it would only make sense to promote our business on social media where our target audience is.
The question is, how?
- Organic: building our own followers and spreading our message. The most cost-effective, but also the most difficult and time-consuming
- Paid: using various paid options like Facebook Ads, LinkedIn InMail, and so on. The most expensive, but can guarantee short-term results.
- Influencer marketing: partnering with influencers and asking them to promote your virtual events with their audience.
It’s crucial to find the right balance between the three channels to ensure cost-efficiency but at the same time balancing between short-term and long-term results.
2. Create a Professional Event Website and Boost It With SEO
Your social media profiles are not a direct replacement for a professional event website, not even a Facebook Event Page.There are various free and affordable tools you can use nowadays to build a professional, well-designed website. Include a lot of interesting images and videos, and make them exclusive on your website to keep people from wandering away.
Your website should include in detail the time/date of the event, speakers/exhibitors’ details, sponsor information, registration/ticketing, and secure payment options.
Optimize this page with SEO by targeting the right keywords according to your event’s objective and your target audience.
Attract as many people as possible to this website, and optimize the page for conversions.
3. Email Marketing
Even with all the newest channels and technologies, email marketing remains one of the most effective marketing channels with one of the highest ROI.Send out email newsletters to build awareness about your next virtual events, and also to maintain relationships with attendees of your past events by sending post-event surveys and offer limited discounts for your upcoming events.
4. Optimize Your Registration
Even with all your marketing and promotional efforts, you won’t get too many conversions if it’s too difficult to find out where to register for your event and purchase your ticket.You should make it as easy as possible for your target attendees to register, and this is where having an adequate virtual event platform is crucial.
Eventtia won’t only help you with a seamless registration process, but also help in your team’s internal collaboration and event execution with various features like attendee tracking/management, email marketing management solution, and more.
5. Video Promotion
Nowadays having attractive, well-produced video promotion materials is a necessity.You can create a short video trailer to showcase the virtual event and share this video on your social media profiles. Consider including the appearance of your speakers and exhibitors, and ask your speakers and partners to share this video on their accounts.
You can also combine this video with other promotional tactics, for example by offering a special discount code at the end of the video to attract people to your website.
6. Event Press Release
An effective event press release is another crucial marketing strategy for your virtual event.By sharing the information about your event to media outlets, press, and influencers, they can help spread the word to the public, which in turn can help you attract more attendees.
7. Ask Your Sponsors for Promotion
Remind your sponsors (and vendors/partners) that by promoting your virtual event, they will also indirectly promote their products/services. Make it as easy as possible for your sponsors and partners to do so: prepare the marketing materials for them (tailored for their brand) so they’ll only need to click “share”, provide affiliate links, and so on.Don’t be shy to ask your sponsors and partners. In fact, they might appreciate you for doing so.
8. Referral Marketing
Referral or word-of-mouth marketing remains very effective for promoting anything, including your event. You can:- Provide links for those who have registered for your virtual event if they can invite their friends and peers.
- Ask your social media followers to use your social media hashtags and/or event name whenever they mention your event.
- If necessary, offer incentives like discounts or freebies for those who can bring their friends to register (i.e. you can offer a cheaper group discount for their tickets).
Closing Thoughts
An important thing to consider when marketing and promoting your virtual event is to maintain consistency. You’ll need to be consistent in your promotion efforts up to the day of the event since if you can’t maintain engagement, they won’t show up, especially if your event has free registrations.Keep sharing your event’s content on your website and social media accounts to keep the event top-of-mind, and you may also want to announce giveaways and door prizes for actual attendees to maintain the interest rate up to the event day.