Most event organizers have a thorough understanding of what they host physical events for. Mostly, it is to give their brand or business greater visibility, increase business traction, & generate awareness + demand.
Physical Events are also used to generate leads for the business. Leads, in layman terms, are specific attendees/audience members that have shown interest in the brand’s message/products/services, & thereby are potential customers.
By targeting your marketing strategies towards them in a specific way to indulge them, a business can turn these prospects into actual, loyal customers. And isn’t that just great?
Virtual Events also cater to a lot of these physical event goals, by offering brands increased outreach, visibility, & audience engagement.
However, lead generation through Virtual Events takes on an entirely new meaning & dimension.
The leads amassed through virtual events are generally considered to be more qualified & highly specific, meaning that they have greater conversion potential compared to physical event leads in the consumer conversion funnel.
In this blog, we take a deeper look at some of the most trusted & must-have lead generation strategies to generate qualified leads through your virtual events.
- Audience-friendly event pricing
Since virtual events make attending the event a lot easier for your audience, it pays(literally) to keep the admission price a little lower to suit their pockets.
With virtual events, you don’t have to pay for attendee accommodations, food costs, venue rental costs, or any other costs associated with physical, in-person events.
You can also make attendees from different corners of the world feel comfortable at your virtual event by including multilingual capabilities in it. This helps translate your event content into languages that all virtual attendees can easily understand.
All this allows event organizers to lower the ticket prices considerably so that attendees from all kinds of industries & economic strata can access the virtual event.
This will empower your attendees who otherwise might be facing a financial crunch in their respective industries, to easily attend your event.
Pricing your virtual event in a way that is considerate of all sorts of attendees, helps make your event accessible to a worldwide audience.
A larger audience pool will allow you to get access to a huge database of attendees & thus garner more leads.
- Invite popular, well-known speakers to your virtual event
It’s a well-known rule of the events industry. The more quality content you provide your attendees with, the more likely they are to stay engaged & connected with your event.
This connection automatically translates to an increased interest in your brand/business, which leads to an increased number of quality leads generated through the virtual event.
One way to increase the excitement & anticipation of your event attendees is to invite well-known, revered, & popular speakers to your virtual event.
These speakers will help propel your event’s popularity among your desired audience, thus increasing your chances of capturing relevant & qualified leads through your virtual event.
Ensure that the speakers you invite hold a respectable position in the particular industry your virtual event caters to. Devoid of this, your event isn’t likely to attract serious-minded, quality attendees. This will directly affect the quality of leads generated at your virtual event.
- Leverage event analytics smartly
Virtual Event analytics is a whole another world of big data. You can easily tap into it to create memorable, relevant virtual experiences for your attendees.
Multiple audience feedback tools like live polling, audience reactions, Q&A sessions, etc., provide event organizers with real-time feedback on the event activities & sessions.
This real-time feedback & other post-event data tools capture overall attendee traction & interest in your event. This dataset can help event organizers modify or make changes to certain aspects of the event instantly to make it more engaging & relevant to the audience.
It can also allow you to single out the attendees that have the most potential to become loyal, recurring customers for your brand.
Once the audience witnesses that their feedback is actually being considered & appreciated, they begin to engage wholeheartedly with the virtual event.
Higher audience engagement will help you narrow down the audience pool in your virtual event to the ones that are actually interested in your products/services. Doing so will directly provide you with relevant, qualified leads for your brand/business.
- Integrate specific call to actions & single click buttons in your event
Call to actions help your customers understand the objective behind the activity/campaign/experience that they’re involved with.
Keeping your customers in dark about your true motivations is never a good idea, as it can drive them away from interacting with your brand/business, at worst. At best, it can slightly alienate them & make them wary of trusting your brand message.
Including specific call to actions & single-click buttons in strategic spots throughout your virtual event helps your attendees get a better idea of your event goals & motivations.
It also helps drive greater audience engagement & interaction within the event, leading to an increase in the number of leads generated.
If your call-to-action & single-click buttons take your audience to relevant sites that help them further their event goals. They are more likely to engage with your event & take interest in your brand/business.
These specific call-to-action & single-click buttons can give you valuable leads, which you can further leverage for conversion purposes.
You can also utilize real-time event analytics to track how often your attendees engage with these specific call-to-action & single-click buttons throughout your event.
Based on the trends you observe, you can either modify the call-to-action buttons or change their placement accordingly.
- Push personalized post-event surveys & emails to select audience members
By the time you reach this step, you will have already garnered relevant & qualified leads through your virtual event with the help of the steps mentioned above. Now is the time to actually turn those leads into your customers through targeted marketing & post-event follow-ups.
Design personalized post-event surveys that contain specific questions regarding your leads’ further needs & requirements, & send those over to the event audience pool you’ve narrowed down.
Answers to these questions will help you understand just what it is that your leads are looking forward to, now that they have already shown interest in your brand & products/services.
Sending personalized post-event follow-up emails that contain specific call-to-action buttons to help them visit your website or check out your product/services, is also a great way to turn your leads into customers.
Through this, you can keep your select audience engaged even after the virtual event is already over.
Keep pushing frequent post-event communication that contains relevant information that is useful to them, along with specific call-to-action buttons that direct them to your website or any other digital space.
This is effectively the best way to turn your qualified leads into your loyal, recurring customers.
