The following adage holds true: Everything old becomes new again—now including silent films.

According to Hootsuite, about 85% of all Facebook videos are seen and not heard. It’s not hard to imagine why. Many times, it’s not doable (or socially acceptable) to turn up the volume on a phone or laptop to listen to the audio on video content. Viewers often settle for watching video content on mute and relying on silent cues ranging from context to captions.

The event tech marketplace is a unique animal, reflecting the industry it serves. There are a handful of event technology providers that offer a broad swath of functionality. They’ve built integrated enterprise systems offering services like registration, housing, speaker management, exhibitor services, floorplan management, virtual events, mobile apps and more, all within one system, database and brand. Of course, there are many more vendors that offer a more singular functional set that, in some cases, are considered “best-in-class” offerings.

It’s hard to take high-level event marketing strategies and turn them into real actions. So, let’s break things down! We’re going to take a deep dive into exactly how you should be marketing your virtual events. But rather than talk from 10,000 feet, we’re keeping our feet on the ground with 10 tactics you can actually use and how to incorporate them into your strategy. 

1. Optimize your event website.

Over the past two years, event experience leaders showed agility in the face of constant change as they pivoted to virtual and hybrid formats, offering experiences that engaged attendees while safeguarding against the spread of COVID-19.

They’re becoming more and more ubiquitous at business meetings and events these days: professional headshot studios. Corporate event planners have learned that most event attendees no longer care about wasteful tchotchkes, giveaways or gratuitous swag bags—they want something lasting and valuable that they can really use. While there are many ways to spruce up your event and take it beyond just a run-of-the-mill sales meeting or company gathering, there’s nothing like having a professional, on-site headshot studio to make it even more memorable via a valuable takeaway. 

Event marketing is on the rebound following a nearly complete shutdown during the pandemic and its aftermath of staffing shortages, resource gaps and budget cuts. The question for event marketing and operations leads is how to recover and grow revenue and attendee numbers with less. District Marketing and Bear Analytics recently hosted a webinar to discuss strategy and tactics for attendee acquisition gains. Here are some of our key tips and takeaways.

Read the Tea Leaves

You’ll find tons of metrics and insights reported across all the virtual event marketing platforms you use. They can help paint an overall picture of your virtual event’s success, but some are much more telling than others when it comes to event evaluation.

Navigating this deluge of data at every stage of your virtual event marketing campaign can be challenging. In this blog, we’ll explain how to measure the success of a virtual event using just a few powerful key performance indicators.

Our words matter. We often use them at our events or in our teams to communicate ideas, convey passion, express creativity, articulate intelligence, radiate confidence and exude wit. But choose the wrong ones, and you’ll become the insensitive event staff or coworker.  

Assuming you don’t want to be that person, let’s explore some commonly used words at trade shows and conferences, or phrases that are either past their expiration, culturally appropriated or downright offensive, and what you can say instead to demonstrate your intellect, wit and inclusivity!  

As the leader of an event and experiential marketing agency, the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic was one of, if not the, most challenging time for myself and our business—not only because we had to rethink our industry’s entire model of in-person events, but also because I had to make some incredibly difficult decisions regarding our employees. Namely, we faced the unfortunate reality that we needed to downsize and furlough a number of our team.

Today’s event attendees are less driven by product than they are by purpose. For instance, 85% of people around the world are making more sustainable purchases. As a result, 83% of organizations are taking sustainability into account when planning events.