Whether you’re hosting virtual events, in-person events, or a mix of both, content plays an important role in audience engagement. By leveraging your content strategy, you can increase your reach, influence and conversion opportunities. There are many variables to keep in mind while creating content to engage with your participants. However, to be effective, it’s important to get to know your audience and understand when to share what type of content with them. In this blog, we share a few key considerations for sharing the right content before, during and after your marketing events.
Audience Engagement Before the Event
Promoting your event to attendees before the event is an important task. Social media is a versatile tool to use for marketing your events. While organizations host events to generate leads, events also serve as a great brand-building tool. There are many channels you can use to share your content so that registrants can consume it before, during and long after your event – from anywhere, anytime. Some of the key platforms to promote your event are LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. Study your demographics and target audience and focus on the handles you believe reach your followers the most. Use hashtags, frequent posts, and collaborations to ensure the details about your event are easily available.
There are a number of tools for event registration. Event Apps are an important place to get your event started. Attendees rely on their mobile devices for just about everything. The same applies when they attend your virtual or in-person events. Registration websites or apps, for example, are ideal for a one-day seminar or a series of events being held in the same physical space. They typically contain easy to understand information about the event and encourage the audience to register.
Sharing Live Content During the Event
In-person audiences consume information live with guest speakers, breakout sessions, or training sessions. To engage a virtual audience, be sure to determine how this will be aired to them. Assure an exceptional online viewing experience by having particular “livestream” session rooms that are pre-equipped with any necessary items. By sharing live content in a specific room, you can engage the virtual audience with the in-person audience. To connect these audiences, use an event management system that incorporates important content sharing features.
Follow-up Content After the Event
By continuing the conversation after an event, you increase attendee engagement with attendees. It shows that your company understands their challenges and wants to help solve their problems. Sending your participants a “Thank you” email is a great way to keep the engagement going even after the event is over. Take time to send an email to those you engaged with (in-person or met virtually) and tell them how great it was to meet them and learn about what their needs were. Make the email personal and relevant. Talk directly about the event you met at, address the recipient by their first name, and overall be genuine.
Making your Content Available On-Demand
By making content available to your audiences to consume anywhere and at any time, you can reach to more leads. One way you can achieve this is to publish a great “key takeaways” post and share it with your registrants post-event. This can be the most important part of the entire event marketing strategy as it promotes engagement (through content) long after an event has ended. Summarize the session coverage you created during the event, highlight some of the themes that came across overall, and link to some of the other takeaway blog posts being created. Once it’s published, include in an email along with a link to your past event recording or video to those mentioned in your takeaways. Send a copy to the influencers. Help it start spreading, use the hashtag, and see what happens.
Another great tactic is to tap into your (already published) thought leadership content (such as white papers, playbooks). You can promote or highlight the features of a solution, product, or service that may be related to the topics that you covered during your event. Sharing a white paper post event reminds your target audience of the event and content which can help trigger action on their end. Post-event content keeps the channel of communication open between you and your event attendees. Regular post-event content keeps your attendees engaged with what you are doing now and in the future, making your promotional activity a lot easier for the next event you run.
Whether you need to focus on registrations, data collection, or the generation of meaningful leads that are likely to be profitable, Certain offers an end-to-end platform with everything you need to succeed. Contact us today to meet with one of our event experts!