Driving Attendance to Virtual Events

Quotes

• “We were, like a lot of B2B marketers, had 40% of our marketing spend in events, and in Q1 and Q2 of this year, we had to switch gears. We have also seen a couple of trends, one is, some people started spinning up webinars and it’s like fatigue for that, at some point.” -Daniel“Other companies started spinning virtual events that mirror physical events. So there’s networking mechanism, there’s virtual trade booths, speaking stages, there’s guest speakers and some even have DJs.” -Daniel“But the most successful we’ve seen was a mixture of the engagement piece, so people go to events to network in the first place, and to learn so the content still matters a lot. And traditionally they would travel, so since travel is now restricted you have to be thinking a lot around a person’s day and what their distractions are in their own home and making it more consumable.” -Daniel“There is not a ton of changes and the big content shift that I’ve seen is that traditionally at physical events you can have interaction points, and now what I see are teams getting more creative in how they are asking what people want in the first place.” -Daniel“I think you’re actually in a place where people are willing to tell you what a good event would be and you can craft thatexperience for them.” -Daniel“I view a digital event as nothing more than a content point or call to action that we would be using to engage our target audience. For us, when I look at the digital event, obviously it’s important how many people signed up but I know that not even 50% are going to consume the day of the event but they did sign up because they want to engage and that some of the content is useful.” -Daniel“To me, it’s almost 5X more important to actually take that content after the fact and get back out to the audienceso that they are consuming it and you’re actually getting the engagement and the conversion that you’re looking for in the first place.” -Daniel“You have to be looking at the event holistically like you would the rest of the content across all your channels basically.” -Daniel“To me, it all comes down to segmentation. Let’s say you’re trying to drive 10,000 people to your event, there’s your one-to-one, one-to-few, one-to-many strategy. I would segment out the one-to-one and one-to-few and then I would assume that is 20% of the audience and for one-to-many, I would just be doing the typical digital air cover email marketing trying to incentivize them through the speakers to get their butt in the chair.” -Daniel“The other high-value accounts where Iknow if I can get the CMO not only attend our digital event but also maybe attend our virtual happy hour we’re having the night before or the day of, by spending 50 bucks and sending them a cocktail kit ahead of time. That’s where I spend my traditional ABM one-to-one personalization in dollars.” -Daniel“It’s still a competitive landscape we’re just playing on a different board and we are all trying to re-evaluate our own marketing mix.” -Ben