Practical Tips To Get Traffic To Your Online Event

Hosting online events can be an exceptionally powerful way of showcasing thought leadership and expertise, generating leads, engaging and building further connections with your audience.

For most marketers, the major question is how to get people to attend your virtual conference, webinar or tele-summit.

Here, are a few strategies that will get the right crowd to your event:

Establish strategic partnerships with niche players

Attempting to promote an online event without partnering with niche players is like swimming against the current—it is an uphill task.

Make it easy on yourself by partnering with someone else who is not a direct competitor but a brand that offers a product or service that will be beneficial and relevant to your own audience.

Strategic partnerships take advantage of economies of scale. As you promote the event, your partner will also be promoting it to their audience. This type of collaboration can be very effective at generating buzz and visibility.

Power tip: The goal of strategic collaborations should not be to generate as many attendees as possible. It should really be about relevance and variety.

What makes your content unique?

People attend events for a specific reason: to solve a problem. You might have a wide social media base or a solid email list but without epic, compelling content, no one will want to attend the event.

It goes without saying that you need to find out what your audience really wants to solve at this particular time. What is relevant? What is pressing? The event is about your audience and not entirely about you.

An important aspect of ensuring that your content rocks, is lining up a list of expert speakers who will undoubtedly offer value to your audience.  Show your audience the type of content they can expect by giving them a sneak peek of the list of speakers as well as the topics that will be covered.

Ask your speakers to help promote the event to their own followers.

Capture and retain registrants with a complete landing page

A perfect way to lose potential attendees is failing to capture them on a landing page immediately.

Your Facebook fans or Twitter followers may show great interest in the event but they will likely not attend if they have not signed up or registered. A landing page allows you to not only capture registrants’ contact information; it is also a content asset that lets you highlight the who, what, when, why and how of the event. If you feel you don’t have the technical expertise to create a landing page, outsource it or use a service that has done-for-you templates.

When people provide their contact information through the landing page, it becomes easier for you to engage with interested participants via email. You can send them follow up and reminder emails in the build up to the event.

Dedicate a budget for PPC advertising

Promoting your event organically on owned media platforms such as your blog or website is essential. However, you can also increase your reach by promoting using paid media channels.

In addition to undertaking comprehensive keyword research, you also need to take your time to create ad copy that will attract relevant participants.

It is important to maintain consistency between your ad and your landing page to retain potential attendees who click through your ad to the landing page.

Extend your reach through social media channels

Social media can be very expedient in helping to boost visibility and awareness for your event. It is easy for your fans and the speakers to share the information with their own network across different social media platform. More importantly, promoting on social media allows your fans to start a conversation in the build up to the event.

This will ensure that as many of your fans see the event on their newsfeeds.

Just like PPC advertising, social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter allow you to set your own budget and to target a very specific audience to maximize the impact of your ads.

Online Events

Presently, there is a proliferation of online events. How will you make yours stand out? What value are you offering? The success of an event hinges on compelling content coupled with widespread and strategic promotion through multiple channels.