What Interactive Content Can do For Your Event Promotion
Event promotion is a common cause of concern for many event planners. Fortunately, digitization has simplified event promotion, making reaching untapped audiences and finding event sponsors easier.
Promoting your event requires sharing relevant information about the event online. But results can be even better when this content involves input from your audience. This is known as interactive content, and it effectively piques audience interest in your event.
Here, we’ll explore the basics of interactive content and how to maximize it for event promotion purposes.
What is interactive content?
Interactive content is any informative content you design to trigger the audience’s active participation. For instance, rather than simply listing out alternatives to Zoom phone, interactive content would ask the audience what they use instead.
The main idea behind creating interactive content is to drive more engagement and promotion for an event by giving the audience a more active role. You can do this by using design branded social media posts to grab your audience’s attention and then include a poll or invite them to write their opinions in the comments section.
Why interactive content?
Interactive content is an improvement on the one-sided static content that often only speaks to the customer and doesn’t listen in return. Today, most people find static content quite dull and unengaging. Plus, viewers’ short attention spans mean they’ll quickly lose interest in boring, informative pieces.
On the other hand, interactive content grabs and holds the viewer’s attention. That’s why it’s appropriate for promotional efforts. What’s more, it applies to any industry, business, or niche. You can use interactive content for ecommerce event promotions or B2B virtual events.
Here are a few other benefits to using interactive content:
- Provides a low-cost, quick, and efficient way to promote an event
- Makes it easy to obtain information about the audience and get to know them
- Allows you to generate leads and create a follow-up list for future promotional efforts
It goes without saying that event promotion is tricky. It can be a double-edged sword. If you do it right, it can bring massive publicity for your event.
Conversely, if you mess it up, it may still bring publicity, just not the type you had in mind.
Free to use image sourced from Unsplash
Using interactive content to promote events
Interactive content ideas are multi-faceted, and you can use them in diverse ways. In fact, the number of avenues you can use to apply interactive content comes down to your creative ability. Cultural Places has an innovational platform for cultural institutions which gives access to digital tools that provide additional content as you move through heritage or cultural sites to increase the levels of engagement. A great example of this is an audio guide.
The best place to start is considering the three phases of the event and what type of interactive content will be appropriate at each point.
You should begin from when you conceive the event idea till your last participant feedback. The primary purpose is to engage the audience at every point.
Before the event
In the preparatory stages of the event, you’ll primarily be creating hype around the program. And, of course, how you begin matters a lot in promotional efforts. If you start solidly, it’ll save you a great deal of stress further down the line. As you prep assets for an event, it’s easy to waste time using legacy tools like Dropbox. Dropbox takes up a large amount of hard drive space as opposed to existing in the cloud like many alternatives, it has a bloated and unintuitive workflow, and it is expensive compared to its competitors.
Ensure you’re using the right tools for the job, such as social media, blogs, email marketing, and podcasts. (Incidentally, if you are new to podcasting you may want to learn more about what podcast gear you need to get started.)
Additionally, it’s a widespread belief that an excellent start to promotional efforts for your event takes care of half the problems that can show up as you progress.
But then, how do you get that solid start? Consider the following ideas.
Use a pre-event poll
An excellent way to create a buzz around an event you’re planning is to engage your audience and get their views on it. There are few better ways to get mass opinion than a poll.
Polls are short, functional, flexible, easy to create, and easier to analyze. Polls have preset answer options, so viewers are answering multiple-choice questions. That simplicity is one of the features that’ll encourage viewers to interact with such content. For example, if you are promoting an upcoming event that will be going out on a live streaming platform, you could ask your audience which topics they would most like to be discussed.
That said, you can push a poll containing questions on what people think about an event even before you send out a formal announcement for it. That way, you can use the poll to check if people would like to participate in such an event and, if not, what kind of event they prefer.
Screenshot taken from Twitter.com
Try surveys too
Aside from creating a poll, you can also take it further with a longer survey. Ask a few questions to get to know your audience and their general preference about the event subject as a way of creating interactions with them.
For example, say you’re creating an event about the best digital solutions for businesses. In this case, your survey may contain questions such as:
- “Do you use hosted VoIP solutions?”
- “What’s your experience level with digital solutions?”
- “Do you do digital marketing for your business?”
- “What is your favorite digital marketing tool?”
- “Are you familiar with cloud native application examples?”
Content in this format helps to get more detailed expressions of the potential audiences’ opinions. It also gives them something to talk about while raising a buzz about your event.
Surveys provide insight into the best way to structure the event since you know what the potential audience would like. It means you’re no longer creating an event based on your idea. Instead, you would use these insights to create an event based on prospective attendee preferences.
Create a call to action
Polls and surveys aren’t the only interactive content formats you should consider for promoting your event in the planning stages. Depending on the event’s nature, you can also roll out articles and blogs with interactive CTAs or use teaser questions to create awareness.
Such promotional methods can also bring significant results and get more people to show interest in your event. Not to mention the number of leads they can generate for you.
Free to use image sourced from Pexels
During the event
The most critical publicity and marketing efforts should happen before the program commences. However, that doesn’t mean you should stop your promotional efforts during the event itself.
You must keep up the promotional effort even while the event is live. Why? Not all prospective attendees will be aware of or sign up for the event before it starts. But you can still reach them and get them to participate as the program is happening.
Furthermore, you should find additional ways to engage the audience beyond the lectures or keynote speeches from the event’s speakers. Audience engagement is as important as event promotion. In fact, 82% of B2B marketers see attendee engagement as an important indicator of event success.
An excellent idea for this is to conduct spontaneous polls during the program. Allow participants to voice their opinions of the event and what they need clarity on.
Imagine your event’s main discussion is an enterprise cloud computing subject. Asking people to state their use case opinions on a specific topic, such as cloud PBX for small businesses, is an excellent way to encourage interaction.
Additionally, you can schedule sub-events around participant feedback. For example, you can give prizes to attendees that answered some questions right or contributed the most. That way, you give them more incentive to be involved and drive engagement.
After the event
You may think there’s no point in promoting an event that has ended. But unless you have no plans to create an event ever again, you need to continue promotions after the event.
However, your promotional efforts may not be to draw attention specifically to the concluded program. Instead, it may refer to the completed event as a precursor for the next one you intend to organize.
That said, sending a thank you message to participants after the program is not enough. You must find ways to engage your audience post-event. You want to get them excited for the event’s next edition, regardless of their experience with the one you just wrapped up.
So how can interactive content help you do this?
- Use content such as surveys, polls, and questionnaires to get feedback from the participants. More importantly, you should use them to get the audience’s perception of the value you provided and what they would like to see in future editions.
- Contests and assessments are another great interactive content strategy post-event. For example, suppose you held an event where you discussed software crowdtesting. Post-event, host a contest for the participants to showcase how they can apply the things they’ve learned. You can then choose a winner and reward them with a prize.
Employing this kind of user-generated content will help bolster brand awareness and set the tone for the next event you organize. Moreover, it increases your credibility with your customers and audience. So, it’s a healthy practice for your continuity plans.
Free to use image sourced from Unsplash
Tips to create good quality interactive content
The following recommendations will ensure your brand is creating top-quality interactive content for the next event.
- Prioritize great visuals. Good image quality will catch the eye and hold your audience’s attention. Adding relevant images alongside interactive content will get those engagement numbers up. You could even hire a custom logo designer to create a special logo for your event.
- Ensure it’s relevant. Your audience is likely tired of processing unimportant information. Interactive content shouldn’t just be relevant for the event; it should also be information that provides value to your audience.
- Shareable content is better. Design your content to be enticing enough to be shared. You can even include prompts asking the audience to share this information.
- Keep it brief. The longer your interactive content is, the less likely your audience will engage with it.
Add interactive content to your event promotion strategies
Interactive content invites the audience to participate in your promotional efforts. It prompts the audience to invest in the event, increasing the chances of engagement and attendance.
Consider the interactive content strategies described above for your next event. Your audience is willing, you just have to ask them first!
This article was written in collaboration with Jenna Bunnell is the Senior Manager for Content Marketing at Dialpad, an AI-incorporated cloud-hosted unified communications system that provides valuable call details for business owners and sales representatives. Check out her LinkedIn profile.
About the Author / Akeem Okunola
