Event Marketing & Experience

How To Make Marketing Automation Work For Your Virtual Event

Mike Khorev
December 1, 2022

Table of Contents

Online resources like ebooks, videos, and articles have been popular for a while; however, they don’t replace human interaction. Virtual events erupted in 2020 as they filled the void for in-person events, and they seem to be here to stay. Recently, the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry hosted a virtual event that reached around 7,000 students across the state of Missouri. 

People will attend your event because they are already interested in your brand, but they have to know about the event and your business in the first place. Marketing the event will help you warm and retain customers; nevertheless, someone has to do the job of designing and sending out ads. Automated marketing can initiate and follow-up with customers without having to devote your marketing team to such tasks. 

Why marketers need to embrace automated marketing to deliver a modern customer experience

Advertisements are no longer just in magazines or on billboards. Instead, ads litter the sides of web pages, are scattered into social media feeds, and run between videos and/or T.V. programs. But with such high exposure to advertisements, people become desensitized and give less attention to the ads they scroll past. 

To attract and retain customers, it is paramount to evolve into the modern era of advertisement. Automated marketing will increase the time your marketing team has to develop marketing campaigns while attracting and enticing potential customers. 

Automated marketing can also pick up on what types of items customers are interested in and update them on deals, events, or items that supplement their purchase(s). For a virtual event, this may be offering an up-sale like a VIP event with a special guest while a follow-up may include a coupon code for the next event or discount on a store item for attending. 

How to use data to segment audiences and strategize the right topics 

There are many strategies for event marketing, and gathering information can help you to understand your audience. If you recognize your customers’ needs and wants, you can more effectively engage them. Some clients spend more time on their email while others tend to scroll through social media. 

You can figure out the best way to reach customers through ad campaigns, and learn what types of things they are interested in seeing from your company. This information can help you develop different events and ad campaigns to target niche audiences within your market. A marketing automation platform can be used as a tool to reach these audiences. 

Knowing your audience can also allow you to construct more appealing events, and the more appealing an event is, the greater the attendance, and more revenue can be gained. 

It is important to consider what topics your audience would like to learn more about, and how they’d like to explore those topics. Some participants are out-going and want more interactive entertainment while introverted clients would prefer a subtle way to engage with the material. 

Also, you must make sure your clients know how to access the event. The agenda of the event can range from explanations and demonstrations, or you could include guest speakers and question and answer panels. It may be lucrative to develop an ideal customer profile that helps you understand what types of clients would be most interested in your business, what they want from your company/event, and help you identify trends so you can adjust your campaigns as necessary. 

You should also consider marketing pre, present, and post-event(s). Automation can support client retention by keeping your business on your client’s minds and follow-up for you instead of having to devote someone to the task. Why has an employee sent out emails to each individual on your contact list, when you can have a system that does it for you?

Virtual events come with expenditures – including marketing. On the other hand, they also produce revenue, and accounting software can aid in streamlining this process. When selecting software, look for services that come with critical features like bulk transaction updates for quicker bookkeeping or unlimited income and expense tracking. 

How multi-channel automation can support effective virtual event marketing 

Preparing for an event is time-consuming – even just the marketing for the event can take up a lot of valuable time. People use multiple social media platforms along with other tools like email in their daily life. Think about how much work it is to develop and deploy ads to all of these outlets. Multi-channel automation consolidates these tasks into one. 

How to maximize engagement with online events

Have you ever been in a lecture to realize you weren’t listening for the past ten minutes? The same thing can happen at your virtual event if you don’t come up with enough ways to engage your attendees. Brainstorm different questions you can ask to get your clients absorbed in the material and think about how you can get your audience to interact – polls, small-group discussion, games, and more. 

Some hosts even use virtual blackboards so participants can have their answers displayed. For some of these programs, the more common an answer, the larger the text appears on the screen. Also, it is vital to keep sessions at a reasonable length because if a session is too long, people will begin to disengage. 

Exclusive deals, special guests/guest speakers, and fun activities can set your business up for post-event success. The content created for virtual events can be recorded and uploaded for future viewing. 

Attendees may want to rewatch segments from an event while clients, who were unable to attend, can watch at a convenient time for them. You could also include post-event resources, so your audience has to follow up to see what you’re offering. All of this information can be deployed through automated marketing like emails or text messages. If your website has account capabilities, you could have a message pop up when they log in after the event. 

Hosting a virtual event means having to handle customer data. Growing cyber threats make it difficult to maintain client trust and security, but ensuring PCI compliance can improve your and your client’s confidence that their sensitive information like credit card numbers will be safe from scammers. Another way to build and maintain good rapport is to avoid developing ads that look similar to social media ad scams.

Conclusion

The virtual world is expanding, and marketing campaigns must adjust to the ever-changing landscape. Flyers used to be a sufficient way to let others know about your business; however, modern technology and the expanding web of the internet require more and more ways for an advertisement to reach an individual. 

There are also millions of more potential patrons to interact with. Multi-channel automated marketing can simplify this chaos to guarantee business interaction and virtual event attendance. Remember, continuous communication always aids in customer retention and participation. 

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Mike Khorev
Inbound Marketing Consultant

All-in-one event management software