This is the first article in a series about building the foundational pieces of your virtual event strategy. Coming soon: how to figure out what kind of virtual event to run and the best KPIs for measuring success (all based on your goals, of course).
They aren’t the most fun things to define or track. But everything and everyone needs goals. Just like people need them to grow personally and professionally, businesses and programs need them to achieve results.
As an event marketer, your goals might sound something like: Earn my CMP designation. Automate my event marketing reporting. Build a high-performing events team. And although it probably wasn’t originally on your list, I’m guessing there’s been a recent addition to your goals list: Develop a virtual event strategy.
Virtual events are taking over the event world right now. They are the new normal — for now, at least. Rather than silently suffering or throwing their hands up in defeat, event marketers are embracing what they must do today to keep the momentum. If it’s been a minute since you’ve handled virtual events, this blog series is for you.
Think about setting your virtual event goals like you would for any of your live events. No matter the kind of event, your goals play a huge role in building, promoting, and running your event. And if you don’t define the purpose of your event, there’s no way to effectively identify whether or not you’re succeeding.
The first step to figuring out what you want to get out of your virtual events: Ask yourself some key questions.
Second, use these answers to formulate your goals. To keep things simple, you may decide to focus on one primary goal. Let’s go through an example.
It’s clear from these answers that we are looking to host customers who spend a lot of money with us. We want to ensure their happiness as a customer. So, the goal of our event could be to retain the top-tier customers who attend our event.
Last but not least, take your goal and make it SMART. A SMART goal has a few traits (outlined below) that will help you effectively measure success after your event.
Let’s go back to our goal from above: Retain the top-tier customers who attend our event. This is good — it definitely has legs to stand on. But it can be much better.
Good:
Retain the top-tier customers who attend our virtual event.
Better:
Boost the retention rate of our top-tier customers by the end of the year.
Best:
By the end of 2020, boost the retention rate of top-tier customers to 95%.
Keeping your customers happy so they stay customers is just one example of many event goals you could have. With the money companies invest in event marketing, it’s important to make sure you’re aligning them with the right goals. (Yes, virtual events are often low-cost compared to live events — but they’re not always no-cost. And even investment aside, does anyone really want to set the wrong goals?)
Let’s talk about five of the most common event goals.
Building brand awareness is one of the most important things you can do for your company, whether it’s been around for 20 years or 20 minutes. Your immediate goal isn’t necessarily to close deals, but rather get your company’s name, product, people, mission — everything — in front of and recognizable to your target audience.
Increasing thought leadership is a great way to create relationships and boost a company’s presence in the market. As experts who educate, influence, and inspire others in the industry, thought leaders have nailed how to build credibility and trust. And those are the people we want to work with, right?
Generating new demand is one of the goals we see most often with virtual events. People who register for a virtual event or watch the on-demand version are looking for information on the topic you’re presenting, so they’re already engaged. This means you’re not just increasing the size of your database, but you’re doing so with highly responsive and qualified leads.
Increasing customer retention and loyalty is perhaps even more important than bringing in new customers. Virtual events are a great way to engage and educate customers so they know your company continues to support them (especially in trying times). Plus, customer-only events are opportunities for you to gather valuable feedback on what’s working well and what needs improvement.
Impacting your revenue goals is, at the end of the day, where any marketing or event goals you have eventually flow. Even if your virtual event’s immediate goal was to build brand awareness, generate new demand, or something else, the ultimate goal is that those successes translate into more sales. That said, it’s important to recognize when this should and shouldn’t be your primary event goal.
One mistake event marketers make is making too many decisions before defining their goals. Event goals must always come first. We can’t stress the importance of this enough because they influence everything that comes next.
So, what comes next? Now that you know what you want out of a virtual event, it’s time to answer the question: What kind of virtual event should I run? We’ll discuss in part two of this blog series.
Spoiler alert: Virtual events are so much more than webinars now.
