3 Compelling ways to market your virtual events!

No matter if you are a business owner, a marketing strategist, or a social media manager,

at one point in your life you have been involved with marketing an event. Whether it is an event that you are hosting or one that you are attending, knowing how to effectively market the event is important.

Marketing your virtual event is a way to tell people about the benefits of your product. This can be done through promotional events or through digital means. It is important to know your audience in order to effectively market your event.

Your marketing efforts should appear on social media channels, digital marketing, and other places where you are present. Once you have identified the channels for marketing, promote selectively on those channels instead of using all available channels at once.

Here are some helpful tips and information:

1) Find Your Audience

You want to know who your target audience is and how they like to communicate. This can help you find the right social media platforms for marketing your event, especially if it’s relevant for them. In order to successfully market your virtual event, you need to know what platforms would work well.

For example, if most of your audience are found from networking or professional events, Linkedin or Twitter may be an appropriate destination to promote your event.

Does your event have broad appeal to a general audience? If so, YouTube would be a great place to run pre-roll ads (A pre-roll ad is a promotional video that appears before the video that the user has selected to play.*)

Facebook groups tend to have more followers who might be interested in your event and you should consider marketing to them, especially if you have your own Facebook groups or you’re a popular contributor to a group.

* Source Cmswire.com

2) Know When and Where to Promote

Instead of spamming or posting too much about your event on social media- you want to selectively promote it in order to maximize the marketing value of each post. Within your own organization, your marketing strategist, or event planner could guide you on the best time and manner to push the promotional content. If you don’t have a marketing strategist or event planner you can always consult with one.

Here’s a Pro-tip, if you have a robust email mailing list, an email blast would be an effective way to spread the word because you have an existing customer base. The email blast could serve as an ice breaker to spread the word about the event.

Another Pro-tip would be to incorporate an online platform such as Eventbrite, to help you organize a workflow for tracking responses and be a centralized place for all communication. You will also need to consider how much time you can spend on marketing. If time is at a premium and you need extra hands and expertise, you could consider other agencies that could help with these tasks.

You want to leverage all the digital channels that are available to create buzz about your event in advance so that people are waiting with anticipation instead of getting bored when they see one more advertisement for an event they don’t care about. When marketing your virtual events, it is important to know who your audience is and what they might be interested in. This way you can selectively promote the event on social media platforms and leverage digital marketing tools such as email newsletters for outreach purposes. Emphasize how you promote your event.

3) Your Face and Voice Matters

The best way to add life to the promotion is by creating a video, whether pre-recorded or Livestreamed, as you will be the face of your business/organization. My co-host Matt Haas and I had addressed the topic of camera presence and offered tips (both technical how you can stand out in front of the camera, Live or Pre-Recorded on Eps 37 of #VerboseWednesdays . We had covered a lot of ground, so for your convenience, the timestamp is in the description if you wish to jump to a particular tip.

Summary

Effectively marketing your hybrid event requires you to put all 3 elements together:
● Finding your Audience
● Knowing when and where to promote
● Being the face and voice of your event.

Remember, hiring an outside agency (or hiring ShaLaLaLa Productions) can streamline the process of having a well-attended virtual event.

Robert Lee

external hybrid events, hybrid events, virtual conferences, virtual events, webinars