Log In
If you’re attracting a new audience, they’ll need time to build familiarity with your brand and your event’s key messaging. The more brand touch points they experience, the more familiar they’ll be. However, most attendees for virtual and hybrid events won’t register two or three months before your event, like they would for an in-person event. Instead, you generally see a sharp increase in registration two weeks before a virtual or hybrid event.
Think of this in three phases; awareness, commitment, reminders.
Six weeks before your virtual event you want to promote your keynote speakers and agenda to raise awareness about your event. Your goal is to make it easy for interested attendees to save the date and time on their calendar for your event.
Two weeks before your virtual event you want to emphasize networking opportunities and other key benefits for attendees to drive FOMO (the Fear Of Missing Out). Your goal is for them to complete registration and commit to your event on their calendar. Using deadlines and a sense of urgency can help during this stage of promotion.
Two days before your event, and especially the morning of your event, you want to remind your registrants that your event is happening. Without these reminders you may lose a significant portion of your attendees.
After your event takes place you have a tremendous opportunity to promote the content, learnings, and attendee feedback generated by your event.
If you have a pressing topic that you want people to engage with urgently, you should consider only making it available during the live event, with no possibility to watch later. This will create a sense of FOMO for your audience. Making them more inclined to attend your live event.
If your content has a longer shelf life, you can create video sound bites from your event to promote on-demand. These are especially helpful for promoting your next event and will help people understand what they can expect, in terms of speakers, ideas, and discussion topics.