How To Successfully Promote Your Virtual or Hybrid Event

Promoting and planning is a crucial part of running a successful virtual event. Marketing isn’t always top of mind when planning an event. Sometimes when putting tons of work into your virtual event, you can forget the most important part, getting people to come! 

When creating a promotion plan for your virtual event, there are some things you might want to keep in mind so that your event is a huge success! We have put together some of the most important aspects of creating a virtual event’s promotion plan so you can make sure you are getting the most out of your marketing tools, and growing your attendee list! 

Start With A Plan

We know that you’re excited to start promoting your virtual event and getting people signed up, it’s exciting! Before we jump ahead into anything, you need to make sure you have a thought-out and practical promotions plan. 

Although it may be obvious that your promotion’s goal is “get sign ups” or “make money”, we want to be clear on what those specific goals are. How many sign-ups would you like to get? How many sales do we need to make to hit that number? This turns those main goals into objectives. 

You also need to know exactly who you are trying to get to attend your virtual event. Are they men? Women? Doctors? Stay at home moms? Knowing who your target audience is will help decide where you should be allocating your promotions budget. 

Budget Your Marketing

Although budgeting may be the most boring part of your promotions plan, it is the most important! Putting money aside from the main budget to promote your virtual event doesn’t always have to be expensive. There are many ways to promote your event with a small budget, with social media, emails, sponsors, influencers, ad spend and more! Which we will go over more in this post. 

Who Do You Need To Help?

Clearly, you can’t do all of this yourself (or maybe you’re superman and you can)! Finding some manpower to put your promotions plan into place will help tremendously with your time. Plus, you may not have the most experience in all things virtual event promotion! 

The key is to identify first what you’ll be needing help with exactly. For social media, you may need someone on your team to be in charge of scheduling social media posts and engaging online with attendees. But you might need to outsource a freelancer or agency for other types of promotions like running online ads, or building out websites if needed. 

Most importantly, don’t leave promotion items to someone who isn’t experienced in running them. This creates stress for both you and your team, as well as possibly your future attendees at your virtual event!

Also, consider what assets you may already have to help promote your virtual event. This could be a large social media following, an engaged email list, an extensive network of people, or someone on your team who is skilled in marketing and promotions! 

Create A Promotions Calendar

Now that you have a base strategy for your virtual event, you can start planning the who, what, where and when of your promotions plan. A good timeframe of your calendar should be around 6 months before your virtual event. This means starting everything we talked about above a couple of months before this step. 

Creating a physical calendar can help you and your team stay on track with your promotions plan. These answer the questions of when certain promotions will be running, team members need to start working on items, and keeping updated on any changes. 

Utilize Your Email Lists 

You have been growing your email list for years, so why not use it? Your email contacts will play a large part in the growth of your virtual event attendees. You know who attended last year’s event, so ask them if they would like to come again! 

Using your email list for registration is the obvious one, but also sending reminders, sneak peeks (speakers, entertainment) and day-of/day-before emails can keep your attendees excited before your virtual event.

Consider your email plan. Email marketing can be a great promotional tool, but you need to be careful not to pester your future attendees by sending too many or too much. Keep it short and simple every time! 

Promote Your Virtual Event Through Social Media

Most times social media isn’t always top of mind when planning a virtual event, but it is extremely important! Since your event is virtual, we recommend putting social media as number one on your promotions plan. Below are some tips on how you can promote your virtual event online. 

Leading up to the event, remember:

• Schedule your updates in advance so you don’t have to worry about it.
• Assign someone that is helping with your event to stay on top of comments, messages, and questions people may have, and post live updates on social media.
• Share posts and engage with posts from future attendees, speakers, sponsors and entertainers joining your event.
• Use a unique hashtag and share it with your followers to use as they post about your event.

Social media isn’t just important for promotion leading up to your event, it is also extremely important for after your event! And getting ahead of your social media is the best way to not forget about it, and make sure that it is done without the last-minute stress! 

Following your virtual event, remember to:

• Post about your event on social media (use those professional event photos we talked about earlier!) 
• Thank your attendees for coming to your event via email, social media and on your event landing page or website.
• Look over how your event went compared to last year and how you can do better next year.
• Ask your attendees, speakers and sponsors for feedback with surveys and monitoring social media (using your hashtag) to see how people engaged online.
• Consider posting a post-event release of your event on social media, website and email list that covers the event highlights and discussions.
• Check in with your event team to get their thoughts and what can be improved next time. 
• Celebrate all of your hard work! 

These guidelines will help you combat an easy, yet effective promotions plan for your virtual event. For more information on planning a virtual event, check out The Event Planning Checklist  You Might Have Missed or sign up for our newsletter list below.