7 Creative Ideas for Promoting Your Virtual, In-person or Hybrid Events

It is more important than ever to make sure to stay ahead of competitors by using creative ideas to promote your upcoming event.

1. Using On-Demand Content for Year-Round Promotion

Virtual events can help generate a huge amount of content to be used all year round

• Promote gated, evergreen content throughout the year through paid and organic campaigns
• Gather data using lead generation campaigns on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn
• Run awareness campaigns using ungated content to help drive people to your site throughout the year

2. Awareness Campaigns Prior to Visitor Promotion (Visprom) Launch

• This is a great idea for events that traditionally have a very regional audience but have now decided to pivot to a more virtual format – this will also work well for hybrid events
  • For instance, if you usually rely on a loyal fanbase from New York, it is going to be difficult to attract new attendees from across the world if they have never heard of your event before. 
• To attract these new users, we would suggest that before you even start any Visitor Promotion activity, you run a brand awareness campaign across the Google Display and YouTube Networks .
• By using a combination of Custom Intent and Google’s Pre-defined/Similar audiences, you will be able to get our ads in front of qualified users from across the world who may be interested in attending your event virtually.

Brand awareness campaigns are great for three reasons.

• They are cheap and very easy to scale
• They ensure you have a large and qualified pool of users to remarket to when you launch Visitor Promotion.
• Results for your Visitor Promotion campaigns will be a lot stronger as you will have already done most of the groundwork in terms of generating new-data for the website.

3. Build Remarketing Audiences from Campaigns

We can use past or current campaigns to build remarketing lists for the future.

These alternative audiences can be used in tandem with traditional remarketing audiences such as web visitors or data lists.

• Video Views – people that have watched a video for a certain length of time
• Lead Generation form completions
• Page Engagement – Facebook and Instagram
• Event Responses – You can go back years and build audiences from here

4. Upselling

Over the last 18 months, we have noticed a significant trend in the way that users react to virtual events when it comes to paid vs free to attend. 

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, users have understandably been hesitant to pay for a non-physical event. As a result, many events that were traditionally pay-to-attend transitioned to more of a hybrid pricing model, allowing users to attend for free but pay a price for more premium features, e.g additional seminars or networking privileges.

The Tag Digital team has been helping organisers to upsell the paid-for options by firstly encouraging users to sign up for the free expo pass as standard, and then re-engaging with them at a later date through a remarketing campaign with upselling based messaging. This approach works particularly well on social channels.

5. Facebook Paid Events

Paid online events are an effective way to monetise your live online event through a one-off access charge that is collected when guests register to attend. Enabling an admission fee is done through the event setup process, and once this has been done, you can build campaigns optimised for making these events successful.

Event Ads can be run to increase awareness of the event and help drive ticket sales.

You can also co-host events with partners, which could be useful if you’re running an event in conjunction with another organisation.

This data can be used for future campaigns. If you’re running an in-person event after this, you can target the virtual event attendees with ads. This can help to target users for the in-person event that may not have targeted before if they are in a location that you have not targeted in the past for instance.

6. Audience Extension

Audience Extension is an additional source of revenue for event organisers, providing a new service to sell to their exhibitors.

Audience Extension offers exhibitors access to your event site’s traffic at an agreed CPM. This is an alternative service to Exhibitor Promotion (Exprom) that is more suited to virtual events.

Audience Extension is also an alternative way to monetise your virtual event. This service connects exhibitors with their target audience, by sending traffic to your exhibitors’ websites, using existing data, for example previous show visitors, as well as website cookies. You can ensure high-quality audience exposure for your clients and generate a strong return on investment, purely through digital.

Audience Extension allows the exhibitor to reach the live event attendees digitally all year round.

7. Interactive Social Ads

Both Facebook and LinkedIn have interactive ad types that can help drive up engagement compared to traditional image ads.

• Conversation Ads on LinkedIn
  • A more engaging and effective version of message ads, formerly InMail
  • They have multiple call to action links for an automated conversation, similar to a chatbot
  • Help the user find the information that they need, quickly
  • These conversations can link out to various landing pages, so will be useful if you have multiple passes or are running Exhibitor Promotion, Visitor Promotion or Sponsorship Campaigns at the same time
• Instant Experiences Ads on Facebook
  • Formerly Canvas Ads
  • Optimised for mobile
  • Users can swipe through carousels, videos, products – all whilst you have their complete attention

Let’s talk more about creative event promotion ideas.

28 April 2021