Key Marketing Strategies to Market Your Virtual Event

Today, virtual events have become a rather common sight. Over the years, marketers, businesses, and brands have started leveraging the virtual route to interact and network with their attendees.

Virtual events enable attendees to join the event from any part of the world and from the comfort of their homes. Moreover, it saves on the traveling time, costs, and other expenses, making it a much more preferred option over a traditional event where you have to be physically present.

However, conducting and planning a virtual event is not as easy as it looks. It requires proper planning and execution. Apart from this, the most challenging part when it comes to organizing virtual events is creating an appropriate marketing strategy.

Luckily, there are some effective marketing strategies that work really well that you can easily implement to successfully promote your virtual event.

 

Four Best Marketing Strategies for Your Virtual Event

 

Here’re some of the best marketing strategies for virtual events:

 

1. Create an Engaging Webpage for the Event

 

First things first, you need to create an engaging and stunning webpage for the virtual event. Through the website, you can enable visitors to register for the event.

Incorporate elements like eye-catching infographics and visuals, snippets of the last successful virtual events you conducted, a creative itinerary of the event, noted speakers invited for the event, highlights of previous events, and much more.

You can also give extra focus to the date and time of the event along with a brief introduction of the topics to be covered by the speakers.

Also display a photo and brief bio of the keynote speaker and each of the notable attendees to familiarize them with one another and with the attendees. This can be a good ice-breaker for everyone.

 

2. Leverage Word of Mouth Marketing

 

Word of mouth marketing is one of the most effective ways to spread the word about an event. For the most part, it can be done with little-to-no budget, and the results it produces are completely organic (and incredible).

Before the internet, word-of-mouth spread through conversations between friends, family members and colleagues in person. Today, people mostly spread messages and spark conversation about brands and events among themselves via digital methods and channels.

Encourage people to spread the word about your events online. You can do so by adding a social media share buttons on your website, event webpage, and even offering affiliate links to visitors where applicable.

Give people extra points and reward them for every link share, review, or positive mention of your event or brand they give. For example, you can collect and set the number of points they can get for honest reviews or social media shares to unlock a coupon/voucher or some other kind of treat or surprise.

Additionally, you can offer special discounts to the visitors who manage to bring, say, 5 -10 people to register for the event.

Moreover, you can request your event attendees to make use of a specific social media hashtag while mentioning the event to their friends, family, and colleagues on social media. This is a great way to organically generate buzz on social media about your event.

 

3. Feature Attendees On a Social Wall

 

A major concern when hosting a virtual event is how to increase the engagement level of the attendees. This can be done effectively by using a social wall.

A social wall for virtual events is an amazing interaction and communication tool that is especially designed and meant to increase the engagement of the audience. Most people like being featured and having their voice heard. We enjoy the limelight, and a social wall can help you give people just that.

When promoting the event, you can conduct a hashtag competition and ask a creative question about your event. You can then tell the audience to be as innovative as they can get while answering the question and to answer using a specific hashtag as the best answers will be featured on a social wall during the event.

Collect all the user generated responses and content using a social media aggregator and display it prominently on a social wall during the event. The attendees will be delighted to see their content featured on the wall and in return engage more with the event. It’s a great way to boost engagement in your events.

 

4. Use E-mail Marketing to Promote Your Event

 

The latest statistics show that as much as 87% of marketers use email marketing to disseminate their content and spread marketing messages—and for good reasons too. More and more people are opening emails on phones and tablets than ever before.

Even though e-mail marketing may sound like a boring strategy, it can be quite beneficial to market your virtual event.

Sharing email newsletters while giving an inside glimpse of what is going to happen during the event may excite your audience and raise the urge within them to attend the event.

You can also send emails to registered attendees and subscribers on your company’s mailing list to give them interesting updates and announcements about the event, or even to provide readers an insight on how the event will be beneficial to them or their business/brand/life.

Additionally, you can send marketing emails to mention a few discount codes to those subscribers who have acknowledged the emails and expressed interest in your event.

However, be careful that you do not go overboard sending spam emails in bulk as this is very irritating and can have a negative effect.

Be mindful of your audience always. Ensure you meet them at their point of need and deliver real value always during your marketing processes and during the event itself.