Building Traffic and driving attendance for paid virtual summit

Yes i would love to get some marketing hacks and tips.

Hi Odoemena, I understand that marketing is one of the biggest challenges you face when launching a paid virtual summit. I’ve spent a few months learning as much as I can about the events industry. Conferences and summits can be extremely profitable, but first you need to make sure that the event will be enriching and valuable to your attendees. It’s not just about the ticket fee, but they are also giving you their precious time to attend the event. Put yourself into the shoes of your attendees and ask yourself how much they will gain from attending the event and think of how it is relevant to them and their situation. 

Here are some of my observations & key marketing strategies that might be useful to you: 
To market and promote an upcoming event

• For B2B events, create a free event listing on LinkedIn (for B2B) and/or Facebook and Eventbrite (for B2C).
• Create a website for your event that reflects your brand and what they can expect from the event. Make the registration process as seamless as possible. Create an “early bird” offer and display a countdown timer to give them a sense of urgency. 
• Leverage your speakers’ network by getting them to promote your event on social media. If they have a huge following, it’s a huge bonus for you. To make it easier for them, provide customized social media design kits and sample posts they can use to promote the upcoming event. Give them a customized URL so you can track how many people have signed up through the speaker. If it makes sense, offer an affiliate program where the speaker can gain a certain % for every attendee that signed up via their link. 
• If you have the budget, create a “promo” video to get people to have a feel of what they can expect to gain from the summit. If you’ve run a paid summit in previous years you have some footage, include that in the video.
• Run Facebook ads and include a messenger bot in which they can opt-in for free tips and get updates from you.

To make a better experience for your attendees & make more money  

• Create a premium community/Facebook group where attendees can network with each other. Even better, create a challenge that they can participate in. 
• Combine a fair mix of live-stream and pre-recorded sessions so that people won’t have to sit throughout the event.
• Allow ample time for networking opportunities.
• Set up interactive polls to get more engagement and allow time for Q&As.
• After the key event, make a “highlights” video or share the key takeaways in an infographic from each segment of the summit. 
• As an upsell, provide the session recordings available on-demand after the event. Set a 14-day timeframe for them to watch it. Alternatively, I’ve seen organizers selling “all-access passes” in which they offer lifetime access to the recordings and include some extra bonuses.
• Get testimonials after the event and create a post-event survey to gain feedback about the event and what they would like to see more in the future.
• Don’t forget to set up Google Analytics so that it’ll be easier for you to understand where your attendees are coming from and analyze other important metrics. 

I’m up for a chat if anyone here is planning to organize an online event or talk more about marketing and tech.