Business conferences and in-person seminars were known as remarkable lead generation event ideas in the past. However, in the post-pandemic world, the containment measures like social distancing and lockdowns gave rise to a new norm for lead generation. This new norm is virtual events lead generation.
For now, virtual events like a webinar, podcasts, and online conferences are gaining popularity as businesses continue to opt for virtual events to thrive in the post-COVID-19 era. Whether these events are webinar sessions, podcasts, socializing events, etc., they have proven to be an effective way to generate hot leads for businesses.
This blog post will address some practical and proven virtual events lead generation strategies that businesses of all scales must consider to generate high-quality leads.
Importance of Hosting Virtual Events for Lead generation
Sparing time or schedule to attend an in-person event is becoming difficult for people due to inflexible and busy routines. Therefore, virtual events offer remarkable opportunities for businesses to attract and hook their target audiences.
Not only virtual events are more budget-friendly than in-person events, but they also offer another notable perk for businesses who want to generate leads for their businesses — complete and useful lead data. Compared to the in-person events, where the only source of attendees’ information is scanning a QR code or getting a visiting card, virtual events like podcasts or webinars allow businesses to track and analyze every action of event attendees and convert them into leads. It results in hot leads for their sales funnel that eventually increase conversion rates and boost ROI for their business.
How Virtual Events can increase lead generation
Virtual events make your lead generation campaigns more effective by producing high-quality leads that require less nurturing efforts to become a sale. High-quality leads mean more sales opportunities and higher profit margins. Below are some primary aspects of virtual events lead generation that makes this process highly effective for generating leads with online events.
Reach Global Audience
Not everyone has time or flexibility to attend a physical business event or conference and those who somehow manage to attend the in-person event may refrain from giving their demographic or contact info. A virtual event lead generation allows you to engage a global audience that you’d never be able to engage at the in-person event. It increases your brand awareness and improves the lead generation process by allowing you to attract and hook the global audience.
Meet your potential prospects
Instead of an unfamiliar crowd roaming in a conference hall or public meeting, virtual events allow you to quickly scan lists of attendees and engage your potential prospects more effectively. In addition, it can help you acquire valuable insights into the attendee’s intention and background that you can leverage to strengthen your relationship with the prospects who are more likely to become loyal customers, clients, referrals, or affiliates.
Smoother Nurturing Process
A smoother lead nurturing process is vital to convert leads into sales by effectively addressing their pain points throughout their buyer journey. You can choose from various virtual event formats like webinars, conferences, Q/A sessions, product tutorials, podcasts, etc., to nurture your leads.
Faster Conversions
Effectively engaging and nurturing your prospects help you push your prospects further down the sales funnel. Virtual events help you optimize your lead generation funnel by reducing time to conversion and customer acquisition costs. In addition, it enables you to skyrocket the ROI of your lead generation efforts to a significant extent.
Lesser Hosting Cost
Attending an in-person event usually demands travel, accommodations, and office leaves, which cast a considerable burden on a budget of businesses and individuals, especially in the middle of ongoing economic crises throughout the world. Additionally, you must consider the cost of acquiring physical space and all the relevant resources to arrange a physical event. With a virtual event, you can easily dodge all these expenses on your business end as well as attendees’ end.
10 Effective Tips For Virtual Events Lead Generation
Below are some proven tips and strategies to generate leads with online events:
1. Know your audience
The primary requirement for a successful virtual event lead generation is to know your audience. Create a well-researched buyer persona for your business to keep your webinar or conference centric around the interest of your potential customers. In addition, it helps you better understand and address the pain points of your prospects and develop a trustworthy relationship.
Learn more about how to build a buyer persona.
2. Create an Optimized Landing Page
There is no point in losing leads that land on your landing page and leave without converting. Instead, create an optimized landing page for your virtual event. A landing page must be optimized for a search engine, have relevant and engaging content, and have a clear CTA.
3. Devise an interactive content strategy for virtual events
Leveraging content is another effective lead generation strategy for virtual events. Strategize your blog posts and social media posts to promote your virtual event. It doesn’t necessarily mean just producing content regarding a particular online event; this is an essential aspect to consider. Your content marketing strategy must offer something related to your event.
For instance, if your company is going to arrange a webinar session on email marketing, produce a dedicated blog about a trending topic related to email marketing and ask your readers to join your webinar for a more engaging and insightful conversation.
4. Promote virtual events on social media
Promote your webinar on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. If you are a B2B business, you will find most of your target audience on LinkedIn. Find groups and forums on social media platforms like Facebook that belongs to your niche and ask people to register for the event. Must consider leveraging LinkedIn’s direct messaging utility. It allows you to send messages to your 2nd or 3rd connections on LinkedIn.
5. Use Paid Ads
Paid advertisements are one of the most effective virtual event lead generation strategies. Social media Advertisements like LinkedIn or Facebook Ads enable you to create highly customized and targeted sponsored ads that are intended for the audience who is more likely to attend your virtual event or online conference. Therefore, consider the budget you will spend on paid Ads as a fruitful investment.
6. Email marketing
Another remarkable lead generation strategy for online events is email marketing. Email marketing is the more personalized approach to generating leads for virtual events. You can use email marketing automation tools like HubSpot and create a personalized email marketing campaign to outreach the prospects. It would be best if you kept the engagement intact by sending email reminders to keep your potential attendees updated and interested regarding an upcoming virtual event.
7. Partner with Industry Experts & Influencers
Collaborate with the influencers and famous industry experts and ask them to voice your webinar sessions or conference through their channel. By doing so, you can drive their audience to your virtual event and generate hot leads for your business. In addition, it gives you the wider exposure necessary to engage a massive audience for the event.
8. Follow up after the event (nurturing)
As we have discussed above, lead nurturing is the core of any lead generation campaign as there is no magic wand to produce leads and expect them to become a sale without nurturing. Once you have followed all the lead gen tactics for online events, and your event has completed successfully, the next thing to do is follow up.
Keep your attendees engaged by following an engaging follow-up strategy. For instance, you can keep nurturing the fresh leads you generated from your webinar by sending eBook subscriptions, updates about the latest blog posts, etc.
9. Track your attendees
Reporting is a vital aspect of any virtual event lead generation campaign. It helps businesses to track each attendee. Gather details about your attendees like demographic data, interests, buying patterns, and behavior. For example, analyze how long attendees watched your virtual event, what is the most viewed part of your event, how many of them visited your business website after the live event, etc.
All this information gives you vital insights into your attendee’s intent, behavior, and the likelihood of becoming a customer. You can craft your lead nurturing strategy based on these insights later.
10. Outsourcing lead generation
You can also consider outsourcing a lead generation service to craft and arrange a promising virtual event for lead generation. If you don’t have enough time or resources to create an impactful lead generation strategy, outsource lead generation services like ScaleYourBiz. We have a proven record of serving fortune 500 businesses and a rich experience in generating leads for a range of industries.
Conclusion
All the aforementioned strategies are known for producing great results in generating leads for online events. Start by building the buyer persona of your business and set up an effective lead follow-up strategy to nurture your leads after the live event.
