How To Promote Your Virtual Event
The live event industry has taken a huge hit thanks to COVID-19. The pandemic has caused almost every event to go virtual. This has created a tremendous challenge for businesses, event coordinators, conferences, tradeshows, trainers, concerts, and every other industry that relies on gathering a large group of people in one location to share information or entertainment.
Planning and coordinating a virtual event creates a variety of challenges not typically found while planning a live event. One of those challenges is how to effectively promote your virtual event.
Here are some marketing strategies to use as you plan your next virtual event.
Create A Landing Page That Rocks
One of the most important marketing channels to promote your virtual event is your very own website! Make sure you create a separate landing page on your site for your event. Ensure that the URL you use is as short as possible and matches the event name (i.e. yourcompanyname.com/event-name) – so that it’s easy to remember and easy to share. Provide all the information necessary in a clean and clear manner so that everything is easy to find. Information like pricing, speakers, schedule, etc. should be towards the top of the page. Registration buttons should be easy-to-find and the registration process itself should be simple and straightforward – do not make people jump through hoops to sign up for your event. Ask for the minimal information needed. Call to action (CTAs) buttons should stand out and tell people exactly what will happen when they click on those buttons.
Include photos and videos to add some visual interest to the landing page – but avoid stock photos which will make your event page look less-than-personal.
Use Tracking URLs In Your Marketing Efforts
When you’re marketing your event, you will use online marketing strategies. How will you know which of your digital marketing strategies are working – and which ones are a bust? The best way to track online marketing is to use unique tracking links for every marketing channel (email, social media, display, pay-per-click (PPC), website, blog posts, etc.) Tracking URLs will help you identify which online marketing channels are giving you the best results.
Form Partnerships To Help Promote Your Event
Now more than ever it’s important to get help from others to promote your virtual event. If you have corporate sponsors, design professional creatives, hashtags for your event and other collateral that your sponsors can use to promote their participation at your event. Encourage them to share these creatives on their social media channels and websites. Provide nicely designed creative to your speakers, too! It will not only make your speakers feel proud to be a part of your event, but it will also make them want to share information about the event with their social media followers as well.
If you’re able to, give your sponsors and speakers an event discount code that they can share with their fans and followers. That is also a great way to get loyal people to sign up to attend your event.
Email Marketing
If you have an email list, that is one of the most valuable assets you have to promote your event. Send out an email right when tickets go on sale. If you can promote some sort of discounted “early bird special pricing” to encourage people to sign up early for your event, that is a great way to get attendees to sign up early. Send out other emails during the sign-up period. Be sure to send out another email about a week before the event takes place to encourage any stragglers to sign up for your virtual event.
Make sure your emails explain ALL the benefits of attending the event, talks about the key speakers people are going to be most excited to see, shares how easy it will be for people to hop on the virtual event, etc.
Offer a “Friend” Discount
What better way to get more attendees to your event than ask current registrants to invite their friends and colleagues to attend your virtual event at a discount? Let your registered attendees know that they can invite their friends to attend your virtual event at a discount by sending out a friendly email like the one below:
To create a sense of urgency, set a time limit for when the friend has to register by. This is a great way to increase your attendee list at very little cost to you!
Use Snail Mail
Most people aren’t getting as much USPS mail in their mailboxes these days. Why not surprise potential attendees with an eye-catching postcard or mailer promoting your virtual event? Sending snail mail out to an interested list of potential attendees is a great way to boost your registration using a more conventional marketing strategy. Traditional marketing is a great way to increase the number of virtual attendees to your event.
Promotion. Promotion. Promotion.
To make your virtual event a success, you have to promote your event. Hopefully these strategies will give you some ideas on how to get more attendees to your virtual event. If you need help with the technical details of live streaming your event, we can do that! Contact our team today and we’ll be happy to talk with you about ways we can assist you with your event.