What do you think is the most crucial step when it comes to hosting online events? Ideating, Planning, Delivering, and Managing. Of Course, every step has its effect, and they all have their significance in the execution of the event. However, what about virtual event marketing? Do you think an event can reach its maximum potential without an efficient marketing strategy?
Event Marketing Strategy is what helps organizers spread the word about their online events. Contrary to popular belief, event marketing is a clean-cut process, where the crux of the process lies in building and nurturing relations with the audience.
In this guide, we will go through the meaning and how you can implement an effective marketing strategy without overcomplicating things for you.
What is Virtual Event Marketing?
As you can understand by the name, virtual event marketing is simply a strategy that organizers use to promote their online events through engagement.
With virtual event marketing, the intent of the organizers is to generate value and connect with the right audience and, of course, expand the reach of the brand.
Apart from it, the main purposes of event marketing are:
- Expand the reach of the brand.
- Hitting the right audience target.
- Get more organic leads.
- Make your target audience aware of your brand.
- Knowing the target audience better.
- Build a long-lasting relationship with the audience.
What is the Importance of Virtual Event Marketing?
With an effective and well-planned event marketing strategy, you can change the dynamics of your online event. Other than that, here are some ways how Virtual Event Marketing can be beneficial to you.
1. Expand Your Brand’s Reach:
The first and most significant advantage of using a well-planned marketing strategy is that it helps organizers expand the reach of your brand. How an organizer lets the world know about their upcoming event decides its success rate drastically.
2. Generate More Organic Leads:
With virtual event marketing, you get to target the whole of your audience group, which automatically multiplies the probable number of leads on your virtual event and the brand.
3. Understand Your Target Audience:
If observed closely, event marketing is more than just promoting the event and brand. It is a process of understanding the requirements, expectations, and interests of your target audience in a better way. Apart from it, virtual event marketing gives you several opportunities to build connections with your target audience.
4. Introducing a Product or Service in the Market:
Online events allow organizers to introduce a product or service in the market. Since event marketing enables users to engage with the audience, introducing a product boosts the chances of the audience showing interest in it.
What Are The Main Types of Virtual Event Marketing?
The term Online Event Marketing is a vast umbrella term that covers a plethora of subjects, concepts, and terms. When it comes to the meaning of virtual event marketing, some users perceive it as promoting the virtual event, others perceive it as hosting events to promote the brand impactfully in the market. While a chunk of organizers first create a marketing strategy and then plan calendars accordingly, others create a different event marketing strategy for every different event.
However, here are the most common types of online event marketing strategies:
- Email Marketing
- Event-Based Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Advertising
- Search Engine Optimization
How to Plan and Execute an Effective Virtual Event Marketing Strategy?
The impact of virtual event marketing lies only in the way organizers plan and execute it. Here is a detailed step-by-step guide you should follow to implement your marketing plan strategically.
1. Set Goals That Are Real and Clear:
To plan things, you need to set goals. In the same way, if you wish to create a virtual event marketing plan, you need to set clear goals. The goals you plan for your virtual event depend completely on you and the outcome you wish to have from the event. However, as an organizer, you should not limit your objectives to merely getting a certain number of attendees.
Be they financial goals, expanding the reach of the brand, or generating organic leads, know that everything is going to impact your sales and ROI.
2. Set a Theme and Try to Stand Out:
Given the popularity of online events, almost every other organization is hosting online events. Therefore, you won’t make any difference if your event doesn’t stand out. Hence, set a theme for your event; use your creativity and try to stand out. It is necessary to gain your audience’s attention, which can only be achieved if your event is unique.
3. Leverage Multiple Virtual Marketing Ways:
One of the biggest mistakes that organizers tend to make is not making full use of multiple virtual event marketing strategies. What they do is restrict themselves, which limits the reach of their event.
As an organizer, never bound yourself to one particular way of promoting the event. Experiment as much as you can. For example, while using email marketing, don’t overlook the importance of social media marketing. Different techniques have their advantages, and using them in your strategy will help you with the execution and success of your online event.
4. Nothing Beats the Importance of an Online Event Platform:
No matter how cool techniques you use, nothing beats the impact of an online event platform in the execution of your virtual event marketing strategy. Hence, ensure you never compromise the quality of your online event platform. Always choose the best online event platform available.
Also, when it comes to choosing the virtual event platform, there are a lot of factors that one can consider to pick their choice. However, you can keep your event objectives in mind and start off. Mixhub is the best online event solution you can use to deliver your event seamlessly and successfully.
5. Select Your KPIs to Measure the ROI:
Getting considerable and generous amounts of ROI is the ultimate goal of every online event organizer. However, calculating the ROI can be a bit tricky unless you have your KPIs decided.
Some KPIs you can consider are:
- Number of Attendees, Engagement Rates, and Other Basics Parameters:
Calculating the basics of your online event is the first and most considered parameter of calculating the ROI of your event. You can start off by calculating the number of attendees, their engagement rates, retention rate, and other things.
- The Number of Organic Leads:
Thinking from a marketing perspective, track the number of leads you generated during the online event. It will tell you the number of organic leads you can pursue and those you can consider spam.
- Sales Pipeline:
Calculate the number of sales pipelines. Moving further, be extremely strategic while pursuing them. If pursued in a proper manner, you can easily convert them into organic leads.
Final Word:
There’s no doubt in the fact that virtual event marketing plays a substantial role in deciding the success of your online event. However, we understand that reaching out to a new audience group can also be overwhelming sometimes. But, acting smartly, you need to pick the right online event marketing idea for your event and work on it.
