CEO Insights Magazine

The repercussions of the Covid-19 pandemic compelled the event producers, attendees, sponsors, and exhibitors to switch to Virtual Events as the sole option for their event strategy. As full-strength vaccination drives against Covid-19 make business travel safe and viable, organizations and audiences are keen on leveraging the trending hybrid model of industry and corporate events, incorporating a shared value proposition of both virtual events as well as in-person events.

As corporate events focus on creating business opportunities leading to revenue generation, we examine how brands can implement multiple strategies to maximize the ROI of hybrid events:

Pre-event Marketing

Choose Your Location and Tech Framework
For venues, investing in a location with distinctive architecture, impressive decor, and settings enhances the quality of video and audio capture and streaming to the virtual event platform. Subsequently, collaborating with a cutting-edge technology platform meeting the client’s requirements is crucial to delivering a seamless event experience.

Grow Your Online Audience
Scheduling and incorporating hybrid events in the organization’s marketing plan is the key to leveraging a conference, trade show, or summit beyond a one-day occurrence. The strategy enables engagement with the audience unable to attend live.

The pre-event engagement with prospects is critical to acquiring the apt event audience. Broadcasting the final event schedule across the brand website, social media platforms, and content syndication platforms can help maximize event attendance at a minimal cost. Targeting relevant LinkedIn groups for event marketing is a perfect way to initiate conversations with top-of-the-funnel leads and establish brand authority. The inbound marketing technique creates an excellent opportunity to drive awareness of future events, showcase the creative elements and techniques developed, and create future meeting opportunities outside of the event.

The virtual component of the hybrid model drives event promotion to a total target audience to acquire the most extensive possible event attendance. The extended marketing techniques increase ticket sales, generate more potential business leads, build deeper brand awareness, and increase ROI.

Invest in High-quality Content
High-quality content includes solutions to the prospects’ current business challenges, the latest industry trends, and trending online content that resonates with the audience. Onboarding reputed thought leaders, industry heavyweights, and keynote speakers elevate the quality of the event, enhancing the organization’s credibility and establishing brand authority and affinity that improves future event attendance.

Create Sponsorship and Partnership Opportunities
Onboarding sponsors and partners is a highly lucrative revenue generation stream. According to Marklectic, the average cost of a Virtual Event sponsorship package is $8,456.

Experts recommend providing the sponsors with access to past event analytics. The insights into the event audience and participation drive the sponsors’ interest.

With the inbuilt virtual setup bearing no physical space limitations, hybrid events can sell a more significant number of sponsorship rights to boost ROI.

Live-event Marketing

Invest in Audience Engagement
Establishing a direct connection with the in-person audience and your virtual attendees broadens the organization’s reach beyond the in-person prospects. Multimedia tactics such as live tweets, video highlights, Q&A sessions, interactive games, multiple-choice surveys, and chat boxes create an overall immersive experience for the brand’s social followers. Introducing post-event cocktail dinners, wine tasting sessions, etc., creates deeper engagement with in-person attendees.

While investment in audience engagement and creating post-event on-demand offers drive current and future lead generation opportunities, leveraging post-event analytic reports help in future event strategy optimization.

According to Exhibit Surveys, Inc’s report, 67 percent of the attendees are marketing organizations’ new prospects and potential customers. Thus, organizations should consider onboarding Subject Matter Experts from their team if attendees or media experts are keen on gaining deeper insights into certain aspects of your business.

Post-event Marketing

Create On-demand Offers
The virtual component of hybrid events enables breakout session recording to create post-event on-demand offers for in-person and online attendees. Developing repurposed content, including a mix of sales collateral and high-value gated assets, like eBooks and B2B marketing coaching sessions, drive engagement and generate leads who might eventually turn into clients. There is no limit to creating and leveraging repurposed content to expand event ROI.

Future Strategy Optimization
Post-event analytics and NPS surveys are crucial to measuring event performance against the event KPIs. A Markletic survey suggests 88 percent of the event organizers conduct post-event surveys to assess attendee satisfaction. The valuable insights into event performance help optimize the brand’s strategy to host future hybrid events for an even improved ROI for the business.

Summing Up
Optimizing the benefits of the hybrid model of events helps marketing organizations expand event audiences and leverage high-quality content through leaders and key influencers. The strategy allows marketers to establish brand authority, attracting increased sponsorship investments. While investment in audience engagement and creating post-event on-demand offers drive current and future lead generation opportunities, leveraging post-event analytic reports help in future event strategy optimization. Irrespective of the inbound or outbound marketing techniques that marketing organizations employ, the strategies, if executed optimally, bear the potential to maximize the ROI of Hybrid Events.