Your virtual event is slowly coming up. You have bagged your sponsors, exhibitors, and speakers. You have planned a spectacular event. Now, start thinking about how to increase event attendance.
Convincing people to register for your event is the ultimate goal of any event planner. However, learning how to increase event attendance requires practice.
Here are some of the best practices for increasing virtual event attendance.
Steps on How to Increase Event Attendance
Some of these steps will help you understand how to increase event attendance for a successful virtual event.
Find Your Target Audience
Depending on the goal of your event, which must be to conquer ways how to increase event attendance, these are some of the virtual attendee types you may want to tap into:
1. Your company’s target audience
The people you wish to regularly engage with to draw their attention to your product or service. They are the audience you wish to attract.
2. Current clients, employees and partners
These people are already engaged with your product/service. They may not need much convincing and might require a different marketing strategy.
3. New audiences
You may be looking for a group to attract or tap into. This market has not been delved into yet but may benefit from your product or service.
So, who are you looking to particularly for the reason, how to increase event attendance? Your target audience, current contacts, or a brand new audience you’ve not yet connected with? Is it a combination of the two? Maybe you want to target all three! Your event goals and focus will determine which users you wish to attract. Depending on which one these are, you’ll use different strategies to attract attendees to your virtual event.
Nevertheless, to be certain on your mission on how to increase event attendance, start finding out everything about your audience. You can use tool like Marketo and Sparktoro for achieving your event goals. Marketo helps you set up marketing automation, email campaigns, lead management, and revenue attribution. Sparktoro, on the other hand, helps find popular hashtags and publications. Use keywords your audience will use. Identify them by putting yourself in their shoes or using keyword tools. Create organic content like blogs, social media posts, and ads.
Research to Master How to Increase Event Attendance
Research, research, research. We cannot stress this enough. Without research, you will only be firing shots into the dark. Otherwise, you will not understand how to increase event attendance at your virtual events. You need clear insight for that bull’s eye and to make sure you are on the right track of how to increase event attendance mission.
Even researching will require different approaches. Your current clients, partners, and employees would be easy to research because you most likely have all the data and profiles in your database. The new markets would require more work and educated guesses. Your current target audience would be somewhere in between. You likely have a target profile, some educated guesses about who they might be, and previous sales and marketing will offer better insight into them.
Google Analytics can further assist you in your how to increase event attendance research. Some of the criteria Google Analytics or other analytics platforms can help you understand are:
- Who is your key demographic? (age group, gender, etc.)
- Where do they live?
- What languages do they speak?
- How do they find your company (organically, paid adverts, referrals, etc.)?
- How does your demographic engage with your product (what pages get the most traffic, what content leads to the most conversions, etc.)?
If you have a CRM such as Hubspot or Salesforce, you will know about popular roles in companies that contact them for their product or services. These tools can help you find solid information on current customers, target audiences and how to increase event attendance, which includes new virtual attendees.
CRM systems will provide conclusive and highly detailed information about current customers and contacts. It will help you dive into things like types of content and messaging that resonate best with your audience. You can also learn about engagement levels with your brand over time which will eventually benefit you in your aim of how to increase event attendance.
You will then understand what kind of messaging and content format to use. Such as what times your current contacts are most likely to respond. Popular messaging, content types, and timings for the company’s current database can be used in its marketing strategy.
For the motive; how to increase event attendance, especially new audiences, you might not get enough data to make an educated guess like for current contacts. The best suggestion is to start with a buyer persona. Conduct competitor research to understand how and where they talk to similar audiences. Then, we will conduct lots of testing to see what resonates with this new audience. This will also help you learn how to make virtual events more engaging.
It’s a spray-and-pray approach, but with a lot of evaluation and tools, you can get a pulse on the audience as quickly as possible. Many of these questions and their findings will guide you in better strategizing your marketing plan. They will eventually help you master how to increase event attendance at your virtual event.
Create a Persona Chart
By creating a personal chart you will hone your chances at how to increase event attendance based on your research. To help you map this out, creating a persona chart for your key demographic is always good. We have made one for you to get started!
Strategize Messaging
Now that you understand your target audience better, you can put yourself in their shoes. Begin thinking how to make virtual events more engaging for your virtual attendees. What kind of messaging will appeal to them? Certainly, getting help with virtual event attendance statistics is a good idea, but you can check the list below as well.
1. Find Your Core Value
Firstly, identify the core value of your event. What will someone achieve by attending your event? These should be aligned with your event goals. How can you wrap that core value around the interests or fears of your target audience within their income? For instance, a job fair specifically catering to substitute teachers would revolve around helping those with limited access to find better opportunities easily. Or an automotive show targeting baby boomers who are now retired might circle a core value of luxury.
2. Build a Story
One way to foolproof ways how to increase event attendance is to build a story around your event based on your demographic research. For instance, does the story of how your business started appeal to your audience? The struggle and inspiration might appeal to entrepreneurs who are also struggling and could use your expertise.
3. Highlight The Benefits
Make sure you highlight the benefits of your event to that particular persona and include your Unique Selling Point (USP) compared to your competitors. Explain why a virtual event is useful and will bring them value. Market the benefits of the speakers you have invited and any gifts or prizes. Maybe your audience is interested in health and wellness, so you have included breakout sessions with yoga or meditation experts. Sell that as much as you can!
4. Sell the Fun Stuff
One way to master how to increase event attrandance for your virtual event is coming up. Finding different activities to engage your attendees is crucial. Make sure to include engagement through event gamifications. Sell these activities as much as you can during your marketing campaign. People are fatigued with the virtual world. What can you offer that would make coming to your event enticing?
Firstly, you want to sell that this event offers all the experiences of a physical event. You want to share that there is an entirely virtual environment specially curated just for them. Depending on your event type, you can do several things.
Here are some more virtual event ideas to keep your audience hooked.
5. Early Bird Prices, Discounts and More
Is your event ticketed? Why not offer early bird prices to those who sign on early? Or what about offering discounts for those who share the event by adding email addresses during registration?
One fool-proof way to ensure success in your how to increase event attendance steps is to give discounts to your attendees. Everyone loves a discount!
Can you offer tiered tickets? For those who pay a premium, they can access the whole event. Others can pay a little less and have limited access. It would be great if they did not intend to attend the entire duration of the event. Not everyone has the time, but that doesn’t mean they must miss out entirely.
You could even have different pricing for students or access to exclusive content like keynotes or certain sessions. Maybe a separate ticket for the live event and one for those wanting on-demand access only. There can also be complimentary access for veterans or people with disabilities.
How to Increase Event Attendance and Promote Your Virtual Event Through Promotional Channels
Once you are done with the initial steps for how to increase your event attendance, it is time to jump to next.
Now that you might know a little bit more about your audience. It is time to start evaluating various promotional channels. You will have to see what best aligns with your virtual event promotion.
- The audience’s preferred method of consuming content.
- The ‘story’ that you have developed around your event and what content types help you communicate best.
You should be able to map each piece of content to a specific message. Start setting goals for each piece.
Don’t forget your website. If you know which of your website pages generates the most views, it will help you understand what pages you can feature your event on as well. You can do this through popups or new content blocks. This will help you get more views for the most pages with the highest traffic pages. This could get more conversions.
Plan Your Content
Research Your Content
If you want to be the best when it comes to attracting event attendance, you will have to do some research when creating content. Here’s how:
1. Existing Research
There might already be existing research on this demographic. Just need to dive into market research tools such as Gartner and Forrester. They conduct research across all industries worldwide. SEO tools such as Ahrefs and SEMRush help show interest worldwide through search queries..
2. Conduct Your Research
Not all existing research answers your questions. Trends are changing very fast. For this, you may want to conduct a few polls or questionnaires for questions not yet answered in existing research. You can do this through your social media platforms. Alternatively, you could hold a focus group to whom you pose targeted questions. You can use websites such as Voxpopme to conduct online market research.
3. Previous Event Information
How to increase event attendance can also be determined by how they engaged with your previous event. Look into the KPIs from your previous events. Questions you can ask yourself:
- What was audience feedback? Is there room for improvement?
- Was there something that worked well?
- What was the number of registrants vs the number of attendees?
- What were the conversion rates on your event’s landing page, social ads and emails?
- What were your email open and click-through rates?
- What was the number of leads generated?
- How much revenue was generated?
4. See What Search Engines Show
A simple strategy to work towards how to increase event attendance and content research is to type your keyword into your search engine. See what results are displayed, i.e., the kind of content and images. This is what the audience engages with most or is the most popular. Tap into this kind of content. If many images show up, put more effort into creating beautiful and informative content with clear instructions on becoming an attendee.
Create Your Content
You must begin creating a content repository. However, you must be aware of some of the best practices for content creation.
1. Think About The Audience
Remember, it is them you have to satisfy. You can do this by answering a question, bringing entertainment value, and encouraging them to buy a product and fulfil their needs.
Consider what they are looking for and why you’re creating the content. Ensure every information within your content relates to this and fits this purpose.
2. Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Using keywords can be tricky. If you add too many, search engines will pick this up and not feature your content. Thus, you have to create valuable and relevant content. The minimum amount of recommended keywords, however, is two to three for most content. You can then try to optimize pages by creating variations of that keyword. For longer content, however, include a mix of keywords within headers and body copy.
3. Set a Good Structure
Make sure the structure of your content is also well-designed. Without sounding confusing, you want to relay your information effectively and efficiently. It has to draw your audience in, not away. Things like too much text, unnecessary information, or poor formatting can greatly impact.
Timing is Everything
Once this repository is up, you must create a calendar. Creating a schedule for each post will further streamline and organize your campaign. A social media scheduling tool will make posting across all social media platforms even easier.
You need to ensure you do not begin marketing your event too soon or too late. Ensure there is enough time before the event for attendees to register. Yet, not so soon that they would forget that the event is happening. You don’t want them committing to other plans.
Here is a pro tip for how to increase event attendance: During registration, attendees can add the event to their personal calendars.
How to Increase Event Attendance Through Virtual Event Tools
1. Event Landing Page
One way to go about with how to increase event attendance at your event is by designing an effective landing page. A separate event website is the best way to market your event. Your event landing page is where you can direct users to learn all they need to know about the event. Be exhaustive with information by including:
- An overview
- Agenda for the day(s)
- Promotional videos or other content
- Registration section
- Event FAQs
When it comes to how to increase event attendance you should be careful not to clutter your landing page. Keep it vibrant and aesthetically pleasing. Try to include SEO key phrases. This could help you rank more prominently, especially for event pages that are live for long periods.
2. Email Marketing
When it comes to finding solutions for how to increase event attendance for your virtual event, you should not miss email marketing.
Don’t forget those already on your mailing list. Target them first and foremost. How will you grab their attention? Are there any discounts you can offer those already engaged with you?
One of the best practices for how to increase event attendance is by targeting your mailing list. One thing is for sure: this is an audience that willingly signed up. So they are more likely to be drawn to your product or services. The average email open rate across all industries is 41.31%. Capitalize on this and email as much as you can. A 2.5% conversion rate is considered best for email campaigns. It’s better to attract one or two leads who eventually convert than lure in a few thousand with zero conversions. Lure them in with early bird prices, coupons, discounts, or anything that suits your fancy!
For those not on your email list, where will you find them? For that, you need to have targeted advertisements on social media platforms.
Here is a pro tip for how to increase event attendance: Based on the research you conducted, are there any hashtags you can come up with? Try using one in your emails.
3. Social Media
Social media usage is one of the most popular tips on how to increase event attendance for your virtual event. About 4.41 billion users are expected to find themselves on social media by 2025. Social media has changed the way people think and interact. It is a source of inspiration and is changing dynamics. You must capitalize on this. Leave your tracks everywhere. Be sure to target all social media platforms, including:
- Youtube
- TikTok
It is on these platforms that trends usually catch on. You need to jump on those bandwagons. Is there a popular soundtrack people are using on TikTok? Get on it. Is there a way you can engage others to use your hashtag? Find a way to do that! Use your audience to spread the word by asking them to tag, comment, and like your posts! Entice them with a lucky draw. The more you engage, the more engagement you will find. You will be sure to boost your numbers and followers with quality content. There are a lot of tips and tricks for social media engagement.
Here is a pro-tip for how to increase event attendance: Create a hashtag just for your event. You can engage attendees with a hashtag to be featured on your social media wall at the event. People can log in on the event day and see their posts featured. This is a great way to boost your event’s activity while ensuring how to increase event attendance for your virtual event.
4. Event Discovery Sites
Make sure to feature your event on event discovery sites to make the best use of tips on how to increase event attendance. This is where people actively come to look for events near them. Whether a conference, tradeshow, education or business event. You can put your event on vFairs Discover or Eventbrite. Showcasing your events on such platforms is a great way to attract attendees to your virtual event.
5. Google and Social Media Adverts
Paid adverts, social media posts, email marketing, and calls to action. For all of these tools that help you with how to increase even attendance, you must brainstorm a budget to maximize outreach. Be sure to set aside a budget for paid advertisements. Based on your target audience, these will pop up for them on various websites and social media platforms. If viewers see it enough, their curiosity will be raised, and they might generate a lead.
Here is a pro-tip for how to increase event attendance: You can learn more about Google and social media ads through our guide on amplifying your event reach through event ads.
6. Blogging
Remember how we talked about using SEO keywords? That’s where blogging proves most beneficial.
Blogs are crucial for all businesses. Blogs not only provide essential information about your event but is also one of the most effective tips for how to increase event attendance at your events. Here are some more blogging benefits to check:
- They engage audiences and share relevant and helpful content
- This content is informative as well as advertises your product in a meaningful way
- They attract new clients
- They build your brand and trust with clients
Here is a pro-tip for how to increase event attendance: Effectively place the call to action, such as “Sign Up” or “Request a Demo,” in your blog copy.
7. Other Considerations
When it comes to how to increase event attendance at your virtual events, there are a lot of other things you can take into consideration. You can include some other features that can make your virtual event more inviting. They also make it even better to use in your marketing materials. These can be:
1. Include Accessibility Features – If your event is all-inclusive, it will be more attractive and tap into a much wider audience. This is why it is crucial to include accessibility features.
Accessibility features to consider include:
- Translations in multiple languages
- Ensuring all content has subtitles
- The ability to resize texts
- Color contrasts
- Screen readers
Once you have these features, make sure you market them as much as you can. The more people know, the more attendees you can engage.
2. Mobile Access – Make sure your event is mobile-accessible. Whether a mobile device, laptop, or iPad. This can ensure people attend your event from wherever they are. This will also ensure more registrations as they will know they can access your event from anywhere.
3. Make Sure Attendees Are Comfortable – Make sure you have resources available to make potential attendees feel comfortable at a virtual event. Many people are still uncomfortable or confused when they attend events. You will need things like walkthrough videos, step-by-step guides, and FAQs about the technical side of virtual events. Assure attendees that customer support is available. Your assistance to virtual attendees will act as one of the best practices on how to increase event attendance.
Wrapping Up
Putting best practices on how to increase event attendance at your virtual event at practice is difficult and taxing. With more data every day, more work needs to be put into it to generate favorable results for your successful virtual event. However, with good research and the tools you need, your campaign can be effective!
