Digital Marketing for Virtual Events

To maximise the success of your virtual event you need to re-focus your digital marketing and take advantage of the opportunities which virtual events offer. Whether it be new initiatives on conversion rates, creating new digital marketing assets or exploring post event amplification, this course will take you through best practice in pivoting your digital marketing strategies.

Online course outline

Session 1: Groundwork for pre-event promotion, in-event engagement and post-event amplification | 09:30am–12:30pm (GMT)

• Foundation of digital marketing for virtual events
  • across pre-event promotion, in-event engagement and post-event amplification
  • High level visual of the event promotion cycle
• Audience: Create/update personas to identify expanded audience for virtual events
  • Go beyond historical attendees
    • Broader job titles
    • Wider geographies
    • Smaller companies
  • Create personas based on interviews/ past data
  • Motivations to attend
  • Proposition for each group
  • Database – building a broader database
• Assets: Creating digital marketing materials for why attend and why sponsor virtual events
  • Attendees – audience profile, speaker profile
  • Sponsors – thought leadership, awareness/reach, engagement of audience, lead generation – best practice and case studies
• Content: digital marketing assets
  • Speaker profiles/ Q&As
  • Highlights of past events
  • Sponsor product launches or new research to be shared
• Video, Imagery: bring a virtual event to life
  • Pre event marketing
    • Prior events showreel
    • Speaker interviews/ teasers (eg HR Tech)
  • Post event
    • Clips from speaker sessions/ video panels
    • Extracts from presentations, research, polls
  • Reporting and communicating data and metrics
    • Free registrations
      • Sources of traffic
      • User journeys
      • Conversion rates to live attendance
    • Benchmarks – target registrations, expected conversion rates

Session 2: Driving registrations and attendance | 09:30am–12:30pm (GMT)

What marketing activity drives registrations

• Email, website, social

Event website

• SEO (keywords, relevant content, authority from past events)
• Cross promotions from main content site

Email

• Segmentation
• Speaker content
• Newsletters
• Upgrading free reg to paid tickets
• Examples from B2B marketing, FIPP, HR Tech

Social Media

• Best Practice Reminder: Building blocks, objectives and hashtag strategy
• Leverage social media for marketing your virtual events
• How social media boosts in-event engagement
• Using social media for virtual event feedback
• Advocates

Converting registrations to live attendance

• Why attend live? Building in engagement and interaction (examples)
• Reminders on the day (examples B2B)

Keeping people in the event (over several days)

• Host trails
• Networking
• Polls & Q&A
• Daily highlights and what’s coming up

Promoting on demand views post event

Summary & questions