Ask any B2B marketer what their top goals are, and they’ll tell you - creating brand awareness, building credibility and trust, and generating demand and leads. 

Over the past few years, virtual events have become a top-performing channel for generating revenue and driving demand, letting you engage your audience and boost your pipeline.

According to our audience of marketers and event planners, the biggest challenges they face when planning virtual events or webinars are getting butts in seats and driving audience engagement.

To learn even more about how to leverage events to drive demand, here are the top takeaways from our recent webinar that will help you build an immersive digital experience.
 

Event Content Strategy and Promotion Plan 

Now that events are going back to in-person, how do we continue to drive engagement for our virtual audience?

Having an audience-driven content strategy can help you retain that viewership or get new eyeballs by figuring out what kind of content your audience wants and what their learning styles are. To do so, you must determine the most valuable content is that is relevant to your audience. 

This is done by getting to know your attendees and their likes, dislikes, and learning styles, so you can build an experience that keeps your audience engaged from before the event, to long after the live broadcast. 

There are 3 types of event personas that your audience members fall into:
 

1. The Learner – Attends for education.

2. The Networker – Attends to network.

3. The Newbie – New to the industry and looking to learn and connect.
    

Once you learn where most of your audience falls, push content of interest to that audience - rather than what you want them to hear. When you give your audience a seat at content table, it allows marketers to connect firsthand and bring the voice of audience into conversations. 

Some questions you should be asking to get to know your audience include:
 

• Is there a common pain point they are experiencing that you can solve?
• What’s the attendee’s reason for attending your event? 
• Are they staying for the community?
• Where does your audience engage? 
• How do they engage with you as a brand?
  
   

Event Engagement Strategy

When it comes to your audience, members of your community don’t like to be talked at - they enjoy being part of the conversation. 

How can you use digital event features to engage them? Use the chat to pull info and understand dialogue from the participants that can shape and change the flow of the conversation. When speakers comment on what they’re seeing, people feel like they’re being heard. 

The journey even starts within your promotion – if you want people to attend and to participate, you must engage with them. Instead of just sending reminders, create moments that make them want to engage with their events that will be meaningful for them. Offering incentives helps get people talking and engaged. 

Event Data, Lead Qualification and Nurtures 

The data you collect from your events is a powerful tool and must be used to understand your audiences wants and needs. 

Sales and marketing should align to identify shared goals and build a more targeted and efficient pipeline. Digital events allow for smarter decision-making on how to follow up and in turn, can help you improve and optimize pipeline acceleration – you can either attract net new leads or build pipeline within existing an account. 

Marketing must Identify goals in alignment with sales, leveraging data to define follow up plans then drive that dialogue with sales to break through the noise.

To build qualified leads, steps you can take should include:
 

1. Education
2. Trust-building 
3. Sales-ready actions 
    

Based on your audiences’ goals and objectives, you can plan accordingly for follow up. Maybe they require additional nurturing, or they mentioned something in the chat that you can pass to your sales team to make their follow up more personal and targeted to one specific person. 

Remember, don’t limit yourself to the scope of the webinar – look beyond and how a lead engaged with your brand overall before and after the event. Then, analyze that data and pass it onto sales for more engaged follow ups.
 

Check Out Our Recent Webinar

Virtual events and webinars provide you with multi-touchpoints to connect with your audience and gauge their interests and needs. 

With digital, everything is tracked and recorded. You can see those who registered, those who attended, those who participated and recommend leads to sales based on warmth and priority.

Watch our full webinar for more practical tips to implement into your digital events to help drive your demand generation pipeline.

Enjoy!