Virtual events bring with them a host of benefits, both obvious and non-obvious. While the obvious benefits include convenience and lack of travel, the less apparent benefits are just as apparent. These include the potential virtual events present for brand advocacy.
What is Brand Advocacy?
Brand advocacy refers to actions people who love your brand take to promote your products and services to more prospective customers. These advocates continuously support your business and promote it on a regular basis. There are four types of brand advocates, as follows:
- Employees
- Business partners
- Influencers
- Customers
You can use virtual events to leverage all four types of brand advocates in various ways. It boils down to giving them some sort of incentive or benefit for promoting your brand consistently. The first step to encouraging this loyalty is making sure you offer products and services worth promoting. You cannot compromise on quality, and must do your best to showcase it. This will help you convince more people to become your brand advocates, without running exorbitantly expensive public relations campaigns regularly.
Nurture Employee Brand Advocacy
Employees are your best resources for advocacy purposes. This is because they have thorough knowledge of your products and can explain them clearly. Furthermore, your employees will collectively have much more reach than your brand. Therefore, it makes sense to have them advocate what they help create.
Offer Incentives
You can have your employees man your virtual event booths and promote your products. Then, you can motivate them to bring in more customers by offering commissions or some other reward for bringing in a certain number of website visits or page following.
Rewards can include:
- An employee lunch with their department head
- A gift card
- An afternoon off
- An award or company-wide shoutout
Make sure you present this award in a virtual ceremony after the event, so that other employees can take cue.
Keep Them Informed
Even if a large part of your staff is working remotely, you need to make sure everyone is well-informed about your product. This will help them promote and push it to potential customers more convincingly.
Hold consistent internal events and training sessions through a virtual platform so that everyone can attend, no matter where they are. You can even record webinars and make them available to your employees in virtual conferences for a set period of time. This will eliminate time zone issues and let you make sure your employees are well-versed about your business.
Create Engaging Internal Campaigns
You need to make your own content look interesting enough to share for employees. For this purpose, you need to use a variety of methods. Have everyone interact using virtual events to create engaging, real-time situations.
You can also boost your company’s reputation by creating the right environment for your employees. So, leverage virtual events to hold company wide events like scavenger hunts and game days to showcase the best parts of your business.
Promote Brand Advocacy With Business Partners
Business partners can play a major role in promoting your brand. This is because they will have access to audiences you may not easily be able to leverage. In addition, you’ll have a much wider reach. However, you need to make sure your partners are getting something out of it too.
Run Affiliate Programs
Affiliate programs are a great way to promote your brand. Find potential affiliates which suit your needs and have them attend a virtual briefing for your brand advocacy purposes. You can even hold a full-fledged virtual event where they get exclusive access to products or VIP-level services.
This will attract more affiliates, and help you get more businesses on board with your affiliate program. Make sure you have them share and promote your products and services on their social media and other marketing platforms.
Make Mutually Beneficial Marketing Deals
You should hold marketing events which benefit both you and your business partners. These can be in the form of virtual industry conferences, marketing campaigns, or a collaborative social responsibility programme.
You can market your partnership through virtual events, and turn it into a big splash. This will generate conversation around both your brands and fulfill your purposes.
Share Content
You cannot convince other businesses to promote you if they are not fully certain about your brand. Therefore, you should invite them to physical or virtual conferences to share all the content they need to be convinced.
These events can be the launching pad for thriving and highly beneficial relationships, so you must focus on giving the other business all the information they need to promote you better. You can use our virtual briefcase feature for this purpose as well. Furthermore, you can use webinars, exclusive chat rooms, Q&A sessions, and product order sheets to inform your potential partners in a comprehensive manner. Try to include an element of exclusivity, so that other companies are attracted to your virtual event.
Build Influencer Brand Advocacy
In this era where social media reigns supreme, influencers have become an important part of the marketing ecosystem. These people have considerable power when it comes to recommending brands to people and pushing sales. These days, all levels of companies involve influencers in their marketing campaigns, to significant success.
Invite Influencers To Exclusive Events
Influencers demand exclusive content and events from brands. You can hold an online influencers’ meet-up, and give them early access to features you are planning to launch. To make the event even more appealing, invite someone famous to perform virtually, like a comedian or singer.
Involve Them In PR Campaigns
PR campaigns are great ways to build brand advocacy and raise awareness about your product or good causes. Work with influencers and run a virtual conference to launch your PR campaign. Whether you’re launching a product or are running a social responsibility program, you can start it off with a couple of informative and interactive webinars.
Leverage Their Reach
What really makes influencers valuable is their reach and following. You can leverage this reach by having your influencers bring on followers to your virtual events and showcases. You can incentivize them by offering rewards for bringing in a certain number of followers.
Encourage Customer Brand Advocacy
Customers are the most essential part of a business. They are the ones driving the sales and are the target audience for your marketing campaigns. Word-of-mouth is also one of the most effective forms of marketing. In addition, if your customers talk about you without you paying them to, you’re making sales and getting free marketing. What more could you want?
Offer Event-Only Discounts
One way to encourage customers to advocate your brand is to have them attend your virtual events and talk about them. You need to make sure you get solid event attendance. Offer event-only discounts and exclusives.
This will generate hype around your event, which you should leverage. Have people use your hashtags and tag you in their social media posts. This will spread the word about your brand and make you visible.
Run Special Contests
Another way to leverage customer advocacy is by running contests and giveaways. You can launch these using virtual events, and encourage them to use certain hashtags and share certain posts to be eligible for the contest. Then, you can reward the highest performers with the most reach with special prizes, tickets, or a meeting with a celebrity.
Include User-Generated Content
You can use vFairs integrations like Wall.io to promote user-generated content. Visitors will be quite interested in seeing their own posts publicly displayed at the event. Promote this kind of content, so that your customers also get some traction out of your virtual event.
In conclusion, there are many ways you can leverage virtual events to create brand advocacy. Most of these ways are quite achievable and you can use vendors like vFairs to organize your virtual events for these purposes.
