Digital marketing is one of the best ways to advertise your brand and attract new clients. Additionally, digital marketing solutions are crucial for publicizing and assuring the success of virtual events.
After the COVID-19 era, virtual and online events are more prevalent. They give companies access to a large, diverse audience that is present in many locations and at various times. A virtual event must be planned, advertised and hosted with the same care as a real-life event. However, for virtual events, specific event advertising tactics guarantee that your online program won’t go overlooked in the digital clutter. But knowing where to start with the vast array of digital marketing strategies available can be challenging.
In this blog, we have provided you with a set of digital marketing strategies that will guarantee the success of your virtual event.
Effective Digital Marketing Solutions for Virtual Events
1. Utilize Social Media Marketing to Its Fullest Potential
Social media is an effective tool for raising awareness of your event and establishing connections with potential attendees. Use social media to communicate with prospective guests, distribute intriguing content and make frequent updates about your event. Use appropriate hashtags and target your content to ensure the right people see them. Additionally, you may increase your reach and advertise your event to a larger audience by using social media ads. This is one of the excellent online marketing strategies that will really benefit you.
Make an event calendar that details all the various post formats and types you’ll publish before, during and after your event. The different kinds of posts can include promoting your event, speaker updates, sponsorship and partnership banners, important statistics about your sector, an agenda, highlight videos, schedule updates, promotional offers, or giveaway competitions.
Create a coordinated, 360-degree marketing plan that spans all pertinent social media channels. Make sure you have a strategy for developing, publishing, marketing and evaluating organic activities. Start these well in advance of the big day and appear at regular intervals on your calendar.
2. Employ Email Marketing
Another excellent technique to advertise your online event and inform guests is email marketing. To entice people to come, send frequent updates about the event, share pertinent content and employ compelling calls to action.
You’ll need to keep in continuous contact with a variety of audience members as you advertise your online event, including your invitees, confirmed registrants, presenters and others.
In addition to making sure your early bird registrants remember to attend, you should, at the very least, address any significant changes in programming in your event emails as well as the most frequent queries from your audience, such as how to access the event software, how to take part in any exclusive networking or sponsorship activations, and how to view the system requirements of your software.
You have a lot to say, and your audience will not likely be patient with pointless communications. Therefore you need to strike the right balance between educating and spamming your audience. After the event, you can follow up with participants using email marketing to express your gratitude for their attendance.
3. Use Content Marketing
In order to promote your brand and increase conversions, content marketing relies on creating and disseminating helpful material. Create blog entries, infographics, videos and other sorts of content that will appeal to your target audience to promote your virtual event. Use compelling calls to action to add links back to your event website or registration. You can also employ email marketing to facilitate your content and entice visitors to visit your event website.
For the audience, content is an essential component of an event. Otherwise, why would they attend? As per a survey, 80 percent of participants who participated in virtual events did so for educational reasons.
This means project managers and marketers can’t just provide generic content and hope for the best. It won’t matter at all. You must use your goals and target audience to better understand the attendees and create buyer persona-like profiles. Then, content can be made to appeal to these personas.
However, creating content for events is not a simple process. The content, marketing, and design divisions must work well together because various types of content are required. Content marketing becomes far more effective with the proper content being shared on the appropriate platforms.
Social media is the most popular channel for virtual events. Eighty-one percent of event planners use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites to increase registrations.
With the help of this procedure, marketers can spread the word about their event to a larger and, more crucially, to the appropriate audience.
4. Implement Paid Advertising
An excellent method to increase your audience and spark interest in your virtual event is through paid advertising. To publicize your event and encourage people to visit your registration page, you can use Google Ads or social media advertisements. To draw visitors in, be sure to include relevant keywords and make eye-catching ad designs.
5. Make a Compelling Event Page
At most, you have about 15 seconds to grab the interest of your visitors. If you don’t, you risk losing a potential participant. This is the reason why website design is so crucial. A professionally designed page can give your customers a favorable image of your company. In contrast, if you have a busy landing page with an outdated design, your signup rates can decrease because of this.
Web design can influence whether a visitor clicks the back button after viewing your page or stays to learn more about your event. According to Website Setup, dark-themed websites and landing pages are one of the most popular current design trends. And some of the best online events out now are leveraging this design trend.
Your event page will be one of the most crucial components of any digital marketing plan. Include any pertinent details regarding your events, such as the time, date, presenters, subjects, and any unique elements. To make your page more aesthetically appealing, including high-quality pictures and videos. Use compelling calls to action to get people to sign up for your event.
6. Send Out Marketing Emails
Promoting your event and encouraging registrations via email is a terrific idea. Use email marketing to advertise your event to those who may not be aware of it and to a larger audience. Include a link to your event page in the email’s body, and make sure the subject line is intriguing.
As one of the top digital marketing techniques, email marketing has proven to be effective over time. It needs knowledge and the ability to execute it properly. Employ a digital marketing expert that offers efficient digital marketing solutions and can efficiently carry out email marketing on your behalf.
7. Create a Podcast or Video Blog
You can advertise your online event on venues like YouTube and podcasts if you have either of those. Include all the pertinent details, such as the date, time and registration link, in a video or podcast episode created especially for your event. You can use this content as a sneak peek into what attendees might anticipate from your event.
8. Send Promotional Postcards
Sending out promotional postcards is an additional strategy for promoting your online event. Your postcards can be designed or purchased from a printing shop. Include a call-to-action that explains how people may register together with all the pertinent details about your event on the postcard. A discount coupon can also be provided for early registrants.
9. Partner With Other Companies
Consider working with companies targeting the same market as you to reach a larger audience. On your respective websites and social media platforms, you can advertise each other’s events. Additionally, you can work together on material like podcasts, vlogs and blog entries. This is a fantastic chance to meet new people and develop connections with companies in your sector.
10. Hold a Competition or Giveaway
Free goods are quite popular. A contest or giveaway is a fantastic method to spread the word about your event. Make sure the prize is appropriate for your target audience and that the entry restrictions are simple. This is essential to ensure the success of your contest. You can use email marketing, social media and your website to promote your content.
11. Employ Hashtags
Using hashtags is a fantastic method to broaden the audience for your event and meet new people. Make sure the hashtags you create for your event are applicable and simple to recall. To discover trending hashtags in your sector, utilize a program like Hashtagify.
12. Design a Landing Page
A landing page is a fantastic method to gather all the details about your event in one location. Include important information like the date, time, place and registration instructions. Additionally, you can advertise sales or limited-time specials on your landing page.
13. Consistently Advertise Your Event
Consistency is the key to effective event marketing. To ensure that people don’t forget about your event, you need to promote it frequently. To keep things new, experiment with different marketing platforms and change up your material.
14. Use User-Generated Content
User-generated content is an effective marketing tool because it is genuine and reliable. Encourage participants to use a specific hashtag when posting about your event, and then publish the finest posts on your social media channels. This will make your event more engaging and help generate excitement around it.
Conclusion
Digital marketing solutions are crucial to promote virtual events. You may reach a wide audience and guarantee the success of your event by employing the appropriate tactics. To keep things interesting, try different channels and vary your content. Remember to employ user-generated material to increase engagement as well. Virtual events can be promoted using a variety of digital marketing strategies. The secret is to combine the correct methods to be effective for your audience and your event. Try several things to determine what works best for you. In order to gauge your success, always keep your goals in mind.