A data-driven guide to post-event marketing

This post is sponsored by Hubilo.

The main event is over, but the tail end (post-event marketing) is just about to start. It’s time to pull out all the stops and turn up the heat.

Post-event marketing is crucial in converting leads into actual customers. To do this effectively, you have to squeeze every drop out of your virtual event platform. This includes pre-recorded videos, live-stream feeds, and post-event emails.

Want your audience to keep coming back for more? Keep reading and learn how to use data from your virtual platform to promote the heck out of your event.

Create audience segments and personalise communication

Segment your audience if you want to make them feel like you’re communicating with them. The more you know about them, the better you can tailor your messaging to their wants and needs.

Here are some ways to segment your event audience using data from your virtual event platform.

1. Attendees and no-shows

Before you fire up your post-event email journey, create two segments – one for attendees and the other for non-attendees. Send a thank-you note to the first group along with a link to watch the event on-demand. To the second group, send an email that says you missed them and include a link to the most popular presentations from the event.

2. Industries

Another way to segment your attendees is by the industries that they represent. You can get this information from the attendee profile and use it to send targeted content and industry-specific case studies.

You can use the same logic to segment attendees based on their interests or what they are looking for. You can get this information from the attendee profile.

3. Speakers

Create a separate segment for speakers from your event. It is important to thank them for coming and sharing their knowledge.

While doing so, send them data on how their session did. Some metrics you can consider sending them are ratings, profile views, number of downloads of their content, and number of notes taken.

Personalised communication like this will help you build a good relationship with the speaker in the future.

Think like a pro

You can use event metrics to plan future events. For example, you can keep track of the days on which you saw the highest ticket sales and amp up your paid marketing on those days. If your event spanned multiple days, then you can use that data to decide dates for future events.

Reward your most engaged audience

The most engaged attendees are the ones you want to reward. They’re more likely than others to attend future events and can buy your products or services. You can also partner with them to spread positive word-of-mouth about your brand.

Here’s how you keep track of them.

1. Leader board

Start by identifying attendees who have engaged throughout the event and have found the most value from it. Give prizes to the first three attendees on the leader board and free tickets to your upcoming event to the next 20 people on the leader board.

2. Most active on event feed

Most platforms give the option to identify the most active attendees on the event feed. Use this data to identify such folks and reward them for their engagement.

3. Most notes taken

When people take notes, it shows how much they care about your event. Identify these people through your platform dashboard and reward them for their diligence! In the same way, you can also identify people who were the most active in meetings or whose profile was the most viewed, or whose profile was the most bookmarked.

Think like a pro

When you identify the attendees we spoke about above, check their profiles. See if they’re a good match for your ideal target audience. If they are, send them personalised emails or have your sales team follow up with them.

Identify interested attendees and give them a follow-up call

If sales are a goal, then following up with prospects is an obvious way to promote your organisation. But it is also time-consuming.

So how do you identify who to call first? Based on the data you have from the event, here’s the hierarchy you should follow in order of priority:

1. First, reach out to the attendees who have visited your virtual booth and interacted with it the most. You can grab this data from your platform dashboard.
2. Next, follow up with those who reached out to you during the event requesting a call or meeting or asking for more information on your product or service.
3. Then, follow up with those who responded to your emails asking for more information.
4. Then, follow up with those who have not responded to your emails, but engaged with your content.
5. Finally, reach out to the registrants and attendees who best fit your target audience.

Create a resource centre with the most popular content

People are busy. Unless there was something exceptional about your event (and even then), it’s likely that your audience will not have the time to go through all the recordings from your event.

So while you can continue to do this, the next best option is to create a resource centre with bite-sized information. Creating this will need resources at your end. So if you need to choose what content to repurpose first then look at the data to identify which sessions were popular among your attendees. In fact, you can even use this data while promoting this content. For example – “85% of attendees were glued till the very end of the session ABC”.

Or if your data tells you that a speaker was particularly popular with the audience you can use this information to promote content from that speaker.

Last, if your virtual event platform provides this feature, you can share a word cloud like this one to highlight the most used words in the feed.

Think like a pro

Here’s an idea to engage your audience further. Use this data to have extended conversations with your audience on topics of interest even after the event. These extended conversations can be by means of a podcast, LinkedIn live, or even a Twitter thread.

Use data to make your survey questions better

People don’t always take the time to tell you why they didn’t like an event you organised. So sometimes it’s hard to know what went wrong (or right). That’s where post-event surveys come into the picture.

Here is how you can use the data you have to make your survey questions better.

Look at the metrics for each of your sessions. From this data, you can identify the most and least engaging sessions. Ask your audience questions about these sessions to find out what worked and what didn’t. As an example, for the most-watched session, you can ask: “What did you like about our session on ABC?”

If you introduced something new at your event, you can look at the data to see if it worked or not. Based on this information, you can ask attendees questions about their experience with the new addition. For example, if you introduced a virtual photo booth and saw people engaging with it you can ask – “What did you like most about our photo booth?” – and then give your audience options to select from.

You can use the same logic for other aspects of the event that are important to you.

The power of data is infinite

What this means is that the real power of data is in the hands of those who know how to interpret and use it right. If you’re willing to go the extra mile you can turn data into information, and information into insight.

Pick which data types you want to leverage on a regular basis and then build on your tracking. After that, make sure you have an easy way to share this data with colleagues across departments.

Before long, you’ll be creating all sorts of valuable insights and meeting larger business goals such as converting prospects into clients, getting new members, or taking your brand engagement through the roof.