You’ve decided to run a hybrid event because you’ve realized their potential as a powerful revenue driver. So what’s next? You must align your hybrid event schedule, features, and planning process with your marketing goals to maximize your hybrid event’s profitability. Hopefully, you’re encountering this guide in the early stages of planning your hybrid event. If not, it’s never too late to start implementing some of the tactics listed below for robust lead retrieval, marketing automation, and more. There are many ways that businesses can use hybrid events for generating revenue. Let’s consider the following ways that you can incorporate your marketing goals during each planning stage so you can boost brand revenue and hit your marketing goals.
The planning stage is the perfect time to map out how your hybrid event will be used as part of your marketing strategy. Sit down with the hybrid event stakeholders and map out why you want to have this hybrid event. If it is to build brand awareness or grow your customer base, you are already tapping into what your event goals might be. Likely, you want to put on a hybrid event to provide value to your customers, find new customers, or grow your business.
Pick a primary goal and two to three secondary goals. Focus on the primary goal throughout the planning process and then see how the secondary goals can be achieved within smaller budgets and less effort. You should also be planning for the post-event marketing goals. Suppose you want to continue with audience engagement long after the event. In that case, you’ll need to be marketing for these things during the event and establishing the avenues for post-event communication and engagement.
Much of the time, establishing your marketing goals for a hybrid event can seem impossible without the right tools. You may be surprised to learn that an intuitive virtual event platform like Accelevents can help you achieve many of your marketing goals. From CRM integrations to mail communications integrations and much more, you can do a lot directly through this hosting platform. The Accelevents platform provides event planners with all the tools they need to host a successful hybrid event.
This platform enables registration and ticketing, including tiered ticketing, sponsorship, and custom branding in the hosted suite, VIP and session rooms, augmented reality for a more engaging event experience, live chat and moderating, and lead retrieval. Of course, Accelevents allows brands to record session presenters with connected audiovisual equipment, which can be live-streamed and/or recorded to be used as downloadable content for future events or courses. Therefore, Accelevents eliminates the need for extra technology like an encoder and simplifies the event hosting process.
Your team must be discussing your hybrid event marketing goals during the planning stage because so much of the event planning process will require marketing. From posting about your event on social media to building an event landing page, you’ll want the goals to be reflected throughout the campaign. Brainstorming sessions for each stage of the event marketing campaign will draw from the primary goal you have established and then seek ways to bridge gaps and create avenues for achieving that goal.
You’ll need to consider how your marketing goals make sense for your target audience, the virtual platform, and how they can help create a positive hybrid experience. For example, if you want to use the hybrid event for lead retrieval, then you’ll need to consider the following:
Require that all participants input their email addresses. Before the event is promoted for registration, make sure that you have set up the processes to handle this on the back-end. An event software like Accelevents will have native features for registration, ticketing, and CRM integration. If you filter all the registrations through the Accelevents platform for both the physical and the virtual components, then you’ll be able to synchronize lead retrieval for both portions of the hybrid event.
Your event brand identity will be separate from your current business’s brand identity. Of course, when developing a subset brand identity, the pieces need to make sense for the overall brand’s goals. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Since you are likely seeking to grow your business through the hybrid event platform, then you don’t want to change your brand icon necessarily. Instead, come up with a tagline or image representing the event and tie this image back into your brand so that users think of the brand as synonymous with your event. From here, you can then begin to flesh out the color palette, imagery, and icons and set up your event website, event banners, and so on. Your event brand identity should line up with both the physical event and the online event.
The marketing tactics that you use for your event will be slightly different than your overall marketing strategy. Part of your brand’s marketing strategy is to host a hybrid event to achieve your marketing objectives. So how is the hybrid event going to do that? If you want to promote your brand on social media and grow your fan base there, the event marketing strategy will want to include social media campaigns on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Consider social media takeovers, influencer marketing, and promotional marketing on various social platforms. Another event goal might be to increase domain authority. In this case, you’ll want to use the content marketing tool to generate more content that reflects things your potential attendees would be interested in. This aspect of your marketing campaign should be targeted back to your main goals. So while this does not necessarily mean that you should be limiting your marketing strategy, you also don’t want to waste energy. Don’t ignore digital marketing and shoot out a traditional press release if that doesn’t make sense for your brand.
Often, the post-event marketing strategies are just as important as the event promotion. Post-event marketing allows brands to continue to build excitement for a brand and foster engagement with the event attendees long after the event is over. Be sure to set up avenues for successful post-event marketing. Prepare your virtual audience by providing them drops of knowledge with post-event teasers.
Ensure that you organize your attendees’ email addresses during the event and set up a schedule for an email marketing campaign immediately after the event. If you want to use post-event marketing for continued attendee engagement, you’ll need a virtual platform that can continue from the hybrid event to this post-event world. If you’re keen to host post-event campaigns, then using a streaming platform wouldn’t make sense because you would have to transfer all of your content to another site. For example, with an event platform, the virtual participants can easily navigate to a breakout session that talks about where and how to participate in post-event meet-ups. Event planning software like Accelevents collects many event data, which an event organizer can use for targeted marketing campaigns later on. Consider other ways that the event data can be used to collect the correct information from the start.
A hybrid event is seemingly hosting two separate events: the physical component and the virtual component. So while your marketing goals will interact with each event style differently, the purposes and strategy should still make sense for the event overall. For example, when developing an event brand identity, be sure that the icon and brand imagery translate between the digital and live events. Remote attendees might interact with the brand or marketing features in a different way than the live audience as well. You’ll want the brand to interact more with the remote audience since that portion of your event is all about creating a virtual experience. In what ways can the brand imagery interact with augmented reality for an improved event experience? If one of your goals is lead retrieval, you will collect all registration for the online audience and the in-person audience through the singular hosting platform. Be sure that the event technology that you are using has an event app option so that live attendees can use this app while at the event.
Putting on a successful hybrid event means that you’ve accomplished the event’s primary goals (and then some). Without establishing goals for your event, you will likely fall short in more ways than one. Without aligning your marketing goals to your hybrid event, you might not have a clear directive or lose out on lead retrieval possibilities. With powerful event planning software, you can hit more than one marketing target. These processes are made super intuitive and straightforward, eliminating the need to connect multiple tools or go through manual steps for basic administrative tasks. Through careful planning, you can host a successful event that grows your brand’s goals and builds revenue!
