People are going to remember how your video production business responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. Did your business roll over to the circumstances, or did it fight to serve your audience’s needs? If your video production business is a fighter, virtual events are an incredible opportunity to promote your expertise and services. In addition to growing your business, virtual events allow you to expand and engage your audience.
Fortunately, there are plenty of easy-to-use platforms to host your next virtual event. At Videomaker, we use Zoom Webinars. Other popular platforms include Cisco Webex, Adobe Connect and ON24.
Hosting a virtual event will show your audience and industry that your organization is ready and willing to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. With video production experience, you already have the foundational skills needed to create an impactful virtual event. However, a virtual event can’t be impactful without attendees.
4 low-budget tactics to promote your virtual event
Hosting a virtual event doesn’t need to be an expensive endeavor. In fact, you can create and host a successful virtual event at a low cost. The following tactics are effective and budget-friendly methods you can try:
- Create a website for the event
- Curate a community around the event
- Share your content, show your authority
- Offer low-cost, valuable perks
1. Create a website for the event
The first step to take in creating your virtual event is to create a website. An event-specific website doubles as an information hub and a tool to convert visitors into registrants. Unless your organization is highly recognizable, the number of registrants will be significantly lower without a website for the event.
If done correctly, a website will be the most efficient promotional tactic for your virtual event. By providing registrants with relevant and convincing information, they will be fully informed and in the loop. Once the website is created, all you have to do is update it with developing information.
All of your promotional materials should direct people to your website. Within your website, all visitors should be directed to your registration page. So, how do you create your website?
Creating a website
Creating a website for your event may sound daunting, but there are plenty of tools and websites that make creating a website easy, even if you have no experience. We suggest the following sites:
We can vouch for Wix, which allowed us to create Videomakerevents.com. The process was simple; all we did was populate the template with our content, with minimal design changes.
What do you put on your website?
Once you’ve created your website, it’s time to put up some pages. There are plenty of different pages you can include on your website, it all depends on your goals and what you want viewers to take away from your page. Here are a few ideas:
- Blog posts
- Agenda
- Speaker profiles
- Highlights from past events
- Gallery
- Sponsor offers
- A page for brands to sponsor your event
- Information on your company
- Registration page
Not only will your website save you time and effort, but it will optimize the user experience as well. Make sure to include only relevant information and keep it intuitive to navigate.
2. Curate a community around the event
One of the main reasons people attend events is to network and interact with other attendees. If you want to bring a sense of connection to your virtual event, you need to create a community specific to the event.
Now, more than ever, people crave a sense of community. For many people, virtual communities are their only option to easily meet and interact with new people. If you don’t curate a community around your event, what differentiates your event from an informative video on the subject?
Communities as a funnel
Curating a community will benefit your organization just as much as it will benefit your audience. When people belong to a community, they are more likely to engage in behavior that the community supports.
When you create a community for your virtual event, you create a funnel that will drive traffic to the event. The community also provides a group of people that you know are interested in a specific topic and/or virtual events.
Where to host
Host the community where most of your audience is, which is probably social media. Facebook event pages and groups are the easiest way to create a community page. If your audience is more active on a different platform, host it there.
Setting up the page
It’s up to you to set the tone for the community page. Do this by clearly explaining the page’s purpose in the description. Tell your audience as blatantly as you can, “This is a place for you to communicate with one another.” Once you’ve set it up, it’s probably best to take a mostly hands-off approach from this page. Feel free to intermittently seed the page with updates, interesting information and polls. But it’s best to let the community interact naturally.
After the event
Once the event ends, you’ll have to decide what to do with the page. If you create the page for a specific event, rather than a series of events, you’ll have to create another page for the next event. The best move is to let the page live on its own after the event concludes. You can always direct this page to the new page for your next event.
3. Share your content, show your authority
Your organization chose the virtual event topic because you have authority in that area. Use that authority to your advantage. It is important for people to understand that you have inside knowledge and useful information in your field, which they will benefit from if they attend your event.
Why wait until the day of the event to provide useful information? Sharing your content before the event will help prove your authority in the space.
The time before the event is a great time to direct your audience to content based on the event’s topic. You can also convert organic visitors to registrants by linking to your virtual event website in the content.
If you don’t have much content on the topic, create it. Your event registrants are an audience that has already shown interest and engagement.
For previous Videomaker virtual events, we created a “prep kit”, a curated collection of content, to give to registrants before the event. This allows us to prepare more inexperienced registrants for the topics of the event. We also offered “exclusive” content, courses and eDocs that are typically only available to paying members.
Creating a prep kit as well as other content is a great opportunity to provide or create a high-quality video that covers content related to the topic of the event. Video gets much more engagement and you can utilize snippets of this video in all of your promotional material.
By creating content that is tangential and not specific to the event, you can use it at any time.
4. Utilize low-cost, valuable perks
Nobody wants to leave a party without a goodie bag.
If people take the time to attend your virtual event, reward them with something more than just the event itself.
Utilize low-cost, valuable perks that you can offer as an incentive to register and attend. This is also a great way to show appreciation and reward attendees. This is a great opportunity to expose your target audience to what your video production business does best.
An appropriate perk will be entirely dependent on your organization, the topic and the audience.
Key traits of a perk
- Exclusivity
- Relevance to the event topic
- Easily accessible/actionable
Perks for video production businesses:
- Discounted membership/subscription
- Consulting
- Software downloads
Conclusion
Without successful promotion, the quality of your virtual event is irrelevant. But, with these 4 tips, you have the tools to create and host a successful event.
