And let’s not forget that the marketing period will largely affect the attendance and engagement at your virtual/hybrid event.
Here, are a few fundamental keys you need to stick to before you begin marketing your event:
1) Understand your audience -
To market your event, first and foremost you’ll need to understand your target audience. Once you identify the ideal audience and their content preferences, drawing up a comprehensive marketing chart is going to be a child’s play for you. For example, the marketing strategy and platform of a B2C education event will definitely be different from a B2B event one.
2) Create an Attractive Landing Page
The Landing Page of your virtual/hybrid event is the face of your event. It is the destination where your audiences reach while looking for your virtual event. Hence, an attractive landing page has to be designed carefully keeping intact the essence of your organization as well as the best features of your products and services. This kind of convenience and expertise is possible when you partner with the right events platform that offers landing pages integrated with the platform.
3) Use PromoZ
How about marketing your event through your event stakeholders, like your exhibitors, sponsors and other influencers & partners? And what if they all promote your event to the most relevant audience that you have been trying to target free of cost? Yes, this is possible! Through our event promotions app called PromoZ. Get in touch for a quick demo.
4) Market your event organically
First thing first, promote your virtual/hybrid event. Without the right kind of promotion, your virtual event will lack attendee footfall that you’d want to attract. This means you’ll need a smart promotional campaign to promote the USP of your event.
Here’s how you can
- Marketing your virtual event organically i.e., through a social media campaign consisting of social media posts, LinkedIn, tweets, and Instagram stories.
- Identify popular industry personas – the influencers who can talk about your event to their followers. This kind of influencer marketing is an effective way wherein organizers approach most-followed individuals on a certain social media channel to promote events. Activities like cross-postings or group postings on Linkedin, Facebook and Instagram will also help you further promote your event.
- In addition, you can ask your influencers to engage your audience on industry-specific messaging groups. Identify an instant messaging application popular in your region – like WeChat, Telegram or LINE and send your messages or event reminders there!
- Introduce a simple trend relevant to your event and take it viral. This way you’ll be able to venture out further to the other group of audiences that can in turn increase your attendee registration.
- Do you have great speakers/resource persons at your event? Introduce them to your attendees beforehand. This brings in their followers too, who might visit your event based on their connection with the particular speaker or resource person.
- To create a sense of thrill, a countdown post prior to your event will help your audience remember and turn up on the day of your event. Start the promotions early, make sure you post frequently, to remain relevant among the target audience till the final day.
- Another great way to pull in an audience would be to tag the resources persons, speakers, exhibitors and sponsors involved at your virtual event whenever you post about them on social media.
- Last, but certainly not least, is to create your own event-related hashtags. This will provide a quick search option for the interested audience. And for that to happen, try to find a unique, yet simple hashtag that focuses only on your event and helps attendees to chuck out the other information that typically emerges on social media platforms.
4) Paid Marketing
The ‘Paid Marketing’ way is a great option to drive more traffic into your event. It will bring in great leads and definitely allow you to conduct your virtual/hybrid event successfully.
You can start by
- Remarketing your virtual event to the existing audience who had attended your event previously. Consider them your loyal attendees and target your virtual event towards them.
- Content is king. And this is what drives your virtual event to a successful one. Promote it, and make a foolproof strategy. Set aside a budget and push the USP of your virtual event on relevant social media platforms.
- Know your social media platforms – be it Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn. Figure out how they work and what are the various ways in which you can promote your content on these channels.
- Go ahead and utilize the other features of marketing like promoting the virtual event through text messages, e-mailers and WhatsApp Messenger. Use these channels to stay in touch with your audience by sending them regular reminders. At ibentos, we believe in reaching out to our audiences on the most preferred platform- WhatsApp. Know more about authorised WhatsApp reminders using EventsNotify.
- Use photos and videos from your previous events. For your previous attendees, this activity will help in building a connection whereas, for the new ones, it will give them an idea of what your events are like! So, do not leave them hanging and keep reminding them of your event via various social media channels.
- Most of all, keep tracking your social media campaigns – evaluate what works and if there is something that doesn’t try to rework it while you still have time. Sometimes fixes work wonders.
When you choose ibentos as your virtual event partner, you get access to a dynamic backend that has marketing tool integration as well. These tools help you measure your event campaigns and take the right decisions before the damage is done.
5) During the LIVE virtual/hybrid Event
This is the most crucial time at your virtual event and projects the months of hard work and investment you have put into it. Despite this, do not for once think that there is nothing you can do once your event is LIVE. You can perform some major activities like boosting your campaign on social media channels, going LIVE on some of these, keeping a track of your event traction on your hybrid events platform or asking your influencers to spread the word about your LIVE event.
You can also start posting your LIVE event on relevant groups or communities that you had analysed right at the beginning of your social media campaign. And incorporate LIVE streaming on multiple platforms, this will help you gather an audience from there without much difficulty.
The Marketing of your virtual/hybrid event, if done right, will help you achieve higher ROI out of your conference/exhibition/fair.
Get in touch with us for the right marketing solutions for your event.