Virtual Events for Lead Generation

Businesses worldwide are looking for better ways to adjust their marketing strategies to account for rising costs. Lead generation is a crucial process in marketing, with countless companies existing with the sole intention of generating leads. Companies have held conferences and tradeshows for years to generate leads and improve their marketing strategies. 

The CoVid pandemic and resulting lockdowns changed all of that. And just as companies feel more comfortable returning to in-person events and tradeshows, interest rates began to rise, inflation started impacting everyone from international corporations to small businesses, and in-person venue costs skyrocketed. 

It’s time to take another look at virtual events for your organization’s lead gen. Here are 3 reasons to use virtual events as lead gen opportunities for your company. 

Dramatically increase your reach

Virtual events, by nature, have a lower barrier to entry than in-person events, allowing attendees worldwide to experience your brand and content. Travel expenses are nullified, and the attendees have the option to watch the sessions when it is convenient for them. This allows for a dynamic nature to your event that offers you several options. 

If you want to expand your audience and drive higher volumes of content and sharing with your attendees, use a ticket type that is free or has a lower cost. This will allow you to maximize your network to increase your potential customer numbers. 

You can alternatively charge a higher cost for entrance to your conference or tradeshow to make it more exclusive. This allows you to market your product or service to a highly qualified group of people, allowing you to increase your conversions rapidly. 

Data

It requires metrics and customer data to create any successful marketing strategy. Virtual events can provide incredible data regarding your attendees, allowing you to adjust and maximize your marketing efforts. 

Here are some great ways to increase the data that you can collect during your virtual conference or tradeshow: 

• Integrate polls to get real-time insight into aggregate information from your attendees. This drives engagement within your event and provides you with valuable post-event information. 
• Monitor drop-off rates for sessions to see which sessions don’t resonate with your potential customers. This also allows you to see any indications that the session did not match the attendees’ expectations based on title and description. 
• Track the download volume of certain pieces of content
• Track which sessions had the highest attendance. This data point will let you know what the pain point of your audience is and will let you know where you need to focus your efforts on creating more content. 

You can incorporate these extra bits of information into your marketing automations and audience segments to increase your engagement rates with your marketing efforts. 

On Demand Availability

Unlike limited in-person events, virtual benefits do not end when the event ends. The virtual platform allows for an extended On Demand, allowing you to host your content with either a time-limited or enduring ability. To keep the momentum going on your marketing strategies, you’ll want to take advantage of this time.

You also own the content, so take the best portions of your top sessions and turn them into 1 to 2-minute snippets. These are great for social media platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and TikTok. Leveraging this can lead to even more leads! 

Virtual events are an integral part of the future of lead generation. They allow you to tap into a larger audience, take advantage of data and automation and can provide you with an evergreen marketing opportunity with On Demand. If you’re not using virtual events yet, it’s time to start. Schedule a demo today to see how vConferenceOnline can help increase your lead gen with this powerful marketing tool.