Are you running into some major event marketing challenges? Having a diversified marketing strategy is important. Businesses should be reaching customers through a variety of marketing channels including social media, email, and events. Event marketing is particularly effective as it provides an opportunity for customers to interact with representatives from your organization and ask questions about your products or services. 

However, leveraging event marketing in an effective manner can be a challenge. Organizers and companies run into a variety of challenges including budgetary concerns, difficulty measuring the success of your events, and not reaching the intended audience. Of course, event marketing is even more challenging right now in the midst of changing health and safety regulations and widespread event cancellations.

Many business owners are surprised to learn that many of their biggest event marketing challenges can be solved by pivoting to virtual events. Keep reading to learn how virtual events can solve your current event marketing challenges and reinvigorate your marketing strategy.  

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1. Low Budget 

Events are a highly effective marketing channel, but they’re not always the most affordable option. 

In-person event costs can add up very quickly. You need to rent a venue, pay for catering, rent equipment, and more. If you want to book prominent speakers, you may even have to provide a travel stipend or pay for flights and accommodations on top of the standard speaker’s fee. If you have a dispersed team, either due to remote work or having multiple office locations, there will be even more travel costs that your company will need to cover in order to get everyone to the event.

If that sounds like it’s outside of your company’s budget there is a more economic option; virtual events. Virtual events do not require the rental of any physical space nor do you need to worry about travel costs. You will need to invest in a good virtual event platform, but virtual events are typically more affordable for both the organizer and the attendees.

2. Lack of Provable ROI

We’ve just discussed the financial investment required to host an event, now let’s look at how to measure the return on that investment.

With a typical in-person event, it can be hard to measure how your event marketing initiatives have performed against your set KPIs. Fortunately, when you host or sponsor a virtual event, you can pinpoint specific outcomes and measure performance by analyzing the data provided by your virtual event platform. 

With a virtual event, you can measure: 

  • Attendance at the event and at each session or meeting 
  • Visits to exhibition booths 
  • Attendee engagement during sessions 
  • The number of chats sent 
  • Connections made during the event 
  • Views on event and sponsored content 
  • And more 

Learn more about how to leverage your virtual event data to take your event strategy to the next level 

3. Difficulty Reaching Dispersed Audiences

Many businesses have customers and partners dispersed all across the nation – and maybe even across the world. If you are selling your products via ecommerce, holding in-person only events may be limiting your ability to reach your full customer base.

Virtual events are ideal for companies that need to reach customers, partners, or employees that are geographically dispersed. With many businesses moving towards remote work models, it’s more challenging than ever to get everyone together for B2B events in one central location. Virtual events help bridge the distance by allowing attendees to join from wherever they reside.

4. Environmental Impact

Cutting back on event travel isn’t just better for your budget, it’s also better for the environment. Both corporations and consumers are placing a greater focus on sustainability and environmental awareness these days. Hosting in-person events can generate a lot of waste and carbon emissions. From the travel and energy usage required to the single use plastics and paper used to distribute food and materials to attendees, in-person events can have a huge impact on the environment.

Virtual events on the other hand are more sustainable. The University of Michigan published a virtual event case study which showed that a virtual event had created 66x less greenhouse gas emissions than an equivalent in-person gathering would have. If your business is looking for ways to reduce its carbon footprint, go virtual.
 

5. Health and Safety 

Right now there is still a lot of uncertainty around what types of gatherings or events will be safe for attendees. The Omicron variant threw a bit of a wrench in many event marketers’ plans to return to fully in-person events this year.

However, virtual events remain a safe and effective way to reach audiences without risk of exposure to COVID-19. Instead of investing hours and hours of time planning an event that might get canceled, plan a hybrid event with a strong virtual component or a fully virtual event to ensure that you can meet your marketing objectives no matter what.  

6. Difficulty Delivering the Right Content to the Right People 

Creating an event experience that will appeal to everyone is truly an impossible challenge – if you are providing the exact same experience to every attendee. Everyone has their own individual interests, reasons for attending the event, and networking preferences. But how do you accommodate all of those individual differences and make sure that everyone finds the content and activities best suited for them? Well, at an in-person event you probably can’t.

Virtual events are able to deliver highly personalized event experiences to your audiences by recommending the most relevant content to each person based on their interests. Social27 Virtual Event Platform features a Recommendation and Prediction Engine that guides attendees towards sessions, networking opportunities, and sponsors that are well-suited to the attendee’s stated interests. This ensures that each person sees the content that they want.  

Solve Your Event Marketing Challenges with Social27 Virtual Event Platform    

Overcome your event marketing challenges with a virtual event on Social27 Virtual Event Platform!

Social27 Virtual Event Platform can help you build events that will help you expand your reach, lower your costs, reduce your environmental impact, and keep your attendees happy.  

Set up a demo today to see how you can harness the power of virtual events with Social27 Virtual Event Platform.