You’ve run a successful virtual event and you’re feeling high on life! Your participants were actively engaged in your brand, your presenters were on point, and you really feel like you hit the mark. So what now? After a successful virtual event, you want to make sure that you are nurturing the leads that you recovered and keeping your brand top of mind. After all, the entire event might be considered “pointless” if you didn’t take the time to nurture the sales leads you obtained. Unsure of where to start? Here is our briefing on the different ways to nurture sales leads after a virtual event.
Sales leads come in a variety of sizes. Virtual event sales leads will be defined by the versatility and functionality of the virtual event platform that you use. If you use a tool like Accelevents, then you will have a broad range of data when it comes to sales lead generation. This means that you will know not only low-level information like the participant’s name and contact information but also high-level information pertaining to their interests and preferences. Because of the versatility of the Accelevents platform, event organizers are able to work hand-in-hand with their marketers and sales team to properly identify the sales funnel, the potential level of interest of event participants, as well as their likes and dislikes. Since the data shows event organizers the presentations and breakout sessions attended and other interactions that the participants had, this gives useful information to the sales team. Instead of reaching out to your potential leads to obtain more data, your sales and content marketing team will be able to approach their sales efforts more effectively and with confidence. Sales teams can build out customer personas and then organize participants into specific hubs using CRM software. They can then reach out to each target audience through a customized campaign that speaks to the participant’s unique interest and potential pain points. By knowing more about each participant through their attendance data, you will better understand what each participant was looking for when visiting your virtual event. In approaching your lead nurturing campaign, be sure to identify these authenticity hubs as well as the goals around the nurturing campaign itself.
Your post-event planning should include marketing landing pages, dashboards, or even full-on webpages as a way of hosting the post-event information, follow-up details, and sales information. These details will depend on how you decide to follow up with your participants, but they might include:
Prior to the event, work with your event marketer to develop a post-event lead nurturing program. Even before the event starts, you should have in place a post-event strategy that considers outreach and marketing following the event.
The “thank you” follow-up is a given by now; we don’t need to tell you that. If the sales team is taking over at this point, though, be sure to communicate with the event organizers so that you have insider information on how to redirect the thank you email. This shouldn’t be a generic thank you email and should touch on some of the intimate aspects of the virtual event. If you have the foresight, try to allude to more communications as well, such as the follow-up questionnaire, the recorded content library, and attendee communities (see below). This way attendees won’t be annoyed when they see more emails and instead will look forward to these emails.
Like the thank you email, your virtual event should follow up with a questionnaire. While not all participants will fill out the questionnaire, you still want to offer the questionnaire to those who like to give feedback. After all, some of your attendees will have good things to say about your virtual event, as well as constructive feedback. Try to send this email out close enough to the event so that they remember what happened, but not directly after as they might be busy, tired, or miss the email completely. Analyze your distribution channels for the appropriate timing so you know that your attendees will be able to set aside some time to complete the questionnaire. Additionally, make sure this questionnaire is mobile responsive so that attendees can complete it while they are seated comfortably at the couch or during a small break in their day. If you’re not sure how to create a virtual event questionnaire, see our other articles on this topic. The post-online event survey should be short and sweet, while still able to gauge the receptivity from the participants. Include at least one open-ended question for random input.
The recorded content library of your virtual event is one of the main reasons why some participants attend virtual events in the first place. It’s not necessarily that these participants don’t want to engage with those presenters and participants who attend the event, but they are likely too busy to attend themselves in real-time. This might be because of time constraints or internet issues. In either case, you should have marketed post-event access as part of your virtual event. Be sure to plan for enough time following the event so that your team can prepare the recorded files. You’ll likely need to host these files on your webpage. If so, plan to host them on the post-event webpage and behind a login. That way, only those who had attended the event (or registered and paid for the event) can gain access. Be sure to set access limitations so that you have control over when people can access the content, who can access the content, and what users are allowed to do when viewing the content (i.e., can they download the content).
Your virtual event participants will be excited about your brand for a while to come. Your brand will be top of mind because they just went through a big virtual event. Some of your participants will want to talk about the ideas from creators, presenters, and participants. If so, you’ll feel this as a boost in your social media presence. Be sure to allocate a portion of your marketing team solely to social media. This is one of the best long-term strategies for lead nurturing. This encourages participants to think of your brand more often when doing more things in their everyday life. Make them feel like you care about them even after they have left your event.
As mentioned in the previous tip, some subsections of your participants will likely be very excited about your brand, fellow participants, and ideas that emerged from the virtual event. Attendee communities are a great way to foster continued engagement and nurture sales lead for the long and short-term. You can likely put these communities on the webpage, and behind the login that you set up for the pre-recorded content. Consider allowing comments on the pages for the pre-recorded content. You can even set up hubs based on themes or forums.
