Today we’re going to be continuing our series on hosting a virtual summit with the topic of marketing a virtual summit. So, the last episode was a doozy, I tell you. I started that episode and didn’t realize how long it was going to be, so I hope I can keep this one a little bit shorter.
Marketing A Virtual Summit
But marketing a virtual summit is going to be the piece that, I would say, will either make or break your summit. Because what’s important is that you get the word out there. And what I found to be helpful is that you have others who are helping you to do so, especially if you have really good speakers.
And I was blessed with my summit to have some amazing speakers who were very generous with sending their emails and promotional pieces, but it’s also important that you provide them with what they need. So you need to be on top of your game when it comes to providing marketing materials. I chose to provide everyone with graphics, but also the copy for both the social media post, and the email marketing piece so that they could copy and paste.
And they did not have to think about, okay, what am I going to say? Okay. You know, when am I going to have time to do this? Because it was just copy, paste, and upload the image. And so what I did was, and I recommend this, and I would highly encourage you to create a Google folder or a Dropbox folder that contains all the graphics, promotional graphics, as well as the copy for both social media and email marketing.
So your affiliates or your speakers can simply go in there and grab that material and do what they need to do. And so some pieces for marketing a summit are as follows:. And then we’re going to break these down. So the first is affiliates, the second is social media, the third is giveaways, and the fourth is press releases.
So let’s talk about affiliates. In my case, I chose to make the affiliates just the speakers, but I did have a few other people who came to me and were willing to promote the summit. And then, so I said, would you like to sign up as an affiliate so that they could, in turn, get something in exchange for their time?
So an affiliate would receive 15 percent of the cost of signing up for the VIP pass. If someone purchased the VIP pass, they would receive 15 percent of that pass. Obviously, my summit was free to attend live, but if you wanted the recordings and some extra things that the speakers provided as resources, you could upgrade to the VIP pass, and then you would get those extras as well as the recordings.
So affiliates do help to promote your event because this is yet again, uh, possibly another group of people besides your speakers that would help you to promote it. And I did have several people promoting my event who were not speakers or sponsors, and that, you know, did help.
Secondly, there is social media. It goes without saying that social media is free. It is an easy way to market. You could create videos, you could create graphics, and you could create just, you know, word copy to share in all those places. And I did that. I made reels. I made TikToks. I made other promotional videos that I put on YouTube and other places, as well as just some copy and graphics that I shared across all platforms that I could think of. And that was a great way to promote or market your summit.
The third is a giveaway, or giveaways plural. You can do a giveaway in a couple of ways. You can have your sponsors or your speakers submit. an item to give away, and then you can run the giveaway on one of your forms of social media and have people enter the giveaway, and then you would obviously draw at the end of a specific time period.
I chose instead because they were giving so much to the summit itself, I chose to do my own giveaway, and I gave away a VIP pass to the summit, so that was a $27 value. That way, the person who received it could either come to the summit live or they could just get the recordings, the VIP pass. And I created a reel on Instagram.
I chose to just do Instagram, and I had them enter, and they could enter by liking the post, commenting, or by following the other speakers and sponsors. Each of these things got them an entry. And so I did not get as many entries to the giveaway as I would have liked, but I feel like it was a good idea to get attention.
People did share it. The video got shared multiple times, which got more eyeballs on it—all of that kind of thing. But as I said, I wish it had been a little bit bigger response to the giveaway, but a giveaway is a great way to market your summit.
And then finally, a press release. I wrote my own press release. I looked into writing and getting it submitted to different forms of press, and that was a little bit out of my price range, but I did write a press release, and I did submit it to ones that were free to submit to that I could do myself. And I don’t know; there’s one that’s harder to track your results from.
So I don’t know what the results of the time that I spent—you know, what my ROI was—were on the press release. But I do feel that the affiliates, the social media, and even the giveaway, though, it wasn’t as great as I had hoped, were good ways to market the summit. If you are interested in having someone help you host a virtual summit, do all the background work on that, then I would love to speak with you.
You can reach out to me and my team at alyssaavantandcompany.com
Questions? Join the Group!
If you have specific questions about hosting an virtual summit, I’d love to get those because that would help me to make sure that I’m covering everything that you’re interested in knowing during this series on the podcast. You can submit your questions inside The Christian Business Advantage Facebook group. I look forward to seeing you there!
