It’s post event. But it’s not time to put your feet up yet!
Yes, you spent countless hours pre-planning, preparing, and hosting your event to attract the right audience. But one of the most important parts of event planning is post event engagement.
Keeping the momentum going and following up post event is key if you want to accelerate long-lasting relationships at scale. And analyzing post event engagement metrics gives you hints as to who’s most likely to be a loyal partner or advocate. So, you’ll know who to build a relationship with and what next best action to take.
If you’ve ever wondered “Why is post event engagement important?” or “How do you keep people engaged post event?” we’ve got you covered.
Why is post event engagement so important?
Post event engagement could be considered one of the most important aspects of event planning. And you should not leave it to the last minute.
Often the aim of an event is to gain contacts and network with new people. So even though your event has ended, you’re only halfway done as far as completing your business objectives. Whether it’s making sales or generating interest.
After all, what good are all those leads and new connections if you don’t actually connect and continue to build a relationship?
Here’s why you should put just as much effort into post event marketing as pre-event marketing:
Post event marketing provides an opportunity to create solid relationships
When people attend your event, they’re more likely to want to build a relationship with you afterwards. Post event, they’re more willing and interested to work with you or buy your products. Given that it takes many points of contact to build solid relationships, you’ll need to continue interacting with them as soon as your main event has wrapped up.
Every day that passes after your event, you run the risk of your new contacts and losing interest.
But if you can properly engage your participants immediately after your event and nurture them with your content, by getting them subscribed to an email drip campaign for example, you’re off to a good start.
Post event marketing determines a partner/advocate’s level of engagement and value to your business
After your event, your marketing team will begin analyzing the massive amount of data you collected through your event platform during the event. This can include looking at what sessions were the most popular, which user profiles logged in the most, who participated in the most chats and polls, etc.
Basically, the more engaged an attendee is during the event, the more likely they are to be interested in purchasing your product and working with you post event.
If you find that certain guests were highly engaged during your event, and now they’re actively opening your post event emails, this is another good indicator that your contact is interested in building a relationship with you and more likely to add value to your business.
These are the people you should immediately contact and your post event engagement strategy should appeal to, as they’ve repeatedly shown they will be loyal partners or advocates.
Post event promotion extends your reach and builds brand loyalty
Keep your leads and event guests in the loop post event with your company’s messaging and content. This could include subscribing to a weekly newsletter or encouraging them to follow your company’s social media accounts.
If you can regularly produce valuable and interesting content for the contacts you’ve made, then you can start to build a sense of authority, eventually gaining their trust to build brand loyalty.
For people who signed up for your event, but didn’t attend or only participated a bit, these post event follow ups can be a good nudge to re-engage them. Perhaps this means getting them to follow your social media accounts, or sending them a post event highlights page so they can register for your next one.
Post event promotion helps you achieve your goals
If your event’s goals were to create new relationships, generate interest, or network with new people, it makes sense that most of your personalized communication and actual sales will need to occur during the execution of your post event engagement strategy.
Now you have the contacts you were looking to collect. You have all the data and insights to tell you what worked and what didn’t. You can see what sessions and topics were the most popular, and evaluate those data to craft interesting, relevant, and improved content that your growing audience will engage with.
Using your post event data, you begin to formulate and improve your communication with your audience going forward. When you send a new email update, your audience will open the email and click on the links because you’ll better understand what they want to see.
See how these measurements can help you assess whether you’re hitting your goals: 12 Event Metrics to Measure your Success
10 top tips to keep post event engagement high (and help you use content to your advantage)
Because it takes many points of contact to build a solid relationship, you’ll need plenty of reasons to continually reach out to participants post event. Luckily, events create an abundance of content that you can use to interact with your participants long after they’ve attended your event.
#1 Don’t underestimate the power of email
Email will be your greatest tool for re-engaging your participants post event.
You’ll get more responses if you send more emails. It’s as simple as that. Too many salespeople get discouraged when a contact doesn’t open one email or return their call, so they stop post event engagement with that person. But you often have to be persistent.
Send a thank-you email, a sorry we missed you to no-shows, and nurture them all through targeted campaigns.
Post event engagement pro tip:
Use an event platform that can integrate with your existing CRM. This will save you from having to manually enter new contact information and make it easier to fire off more emails.
Need email inspiration for all stages of your event? Check out the best 18 free event email templates to drive attendance & increase engagement.
#2 Share and reshare your event content
You’ll have a treasure trove of content following your event, so recycle and reshare this content regularly to your new audience.
If you host a hybrid or virtual event, you’ll have countless minutes or hours of recorded footage that can be edited into bite-sized chunks that are ready for sharing.
Find the best clips and snippets from your event and include them in your emails, or post them on your company’s website or social media page. You can also make infographics, memes, or share inspirational quotes from your event.
Post event engagement pro tip:
A great way to get first-party data from your attendees and keep post event engagement high at the same time is by using a gated content hub. You can turn your live event into on-demand content in just a few clicks. And those who watch the content on demand feel like they are actually at the live event through the live engagement replay.
Looking for ways to repurpose your event content. Check out our article on content marketing for events where we cover the benefits, how to repurpose content, and give some real-life examples.
#3 Send a post event survey to collect feedback and attendee data
The data you collected during your event (user interactions, time spent on the mobile event app, virtual audience engagement, etc.) will give you a pretty good idea of how interested your participants were during your event. But it can be hard to measure “brand sentiment” – how your participants actually felt during your event.
Use your post event engagement survey to really understand what your participants thought about your event and your company. Collect more qualitative data. Was there a guest speaker they loved, or not so much? Use your survey as an opportunity to improve your next event.
Post event engagement pro tip:
Send your post-event survey within 12 hours after your event has finished, while the event is still fresh in your guests’ minds.
#4 Pull your sales team in to make a personal connection
One of the primary forces driving events is lead generation. Naturally, it makes sense for your company’s salespeople to begin calling and emailing prospective leads post event.
Depending on the size of your event, you may have hundreds or thousands of leads that your sales team needs to contact.
Not all leads will be ready for a phone call right away. Especially if they haven’t exhibited the desired traits of a highly qualified lead. For these people, first, you’ll want to engage them through emails and newsletters, eventually building their trust and brand loyalty before contacting them directly.
Post event engagement pro tip:
Using your platform’s analytics, you can quickly begin lead scoring your attendees so that your sales team contacts those who exhibited the most desirable traits of a partner or advocate (consider early registrations, time spent on the app, amount of engagement, email open rates, etc.)
#5) Did we mention content? Create and share more than just your event content
Hosting an event is a great resource for generating useful and engaging content that will continue to promote your products and services post event. Build on this content to further create touchpoints with your contacts that are essential for building a relationship.
For example, turn sessions or popular discussions into blog posts and expand on more topics, create testimonial videos, or host “deminars” (demonstration webinars) of your services or products featured to keep your contacts engaged in your content cycle and share more with them.
Post event engagement pro tip:
Let your analytics guide you toward finding the most valuable bits of content to share, whether it was a popular speaker who received tons of engagement, or a post on your event platform’s activity feed.
Learn how to optimize your deminars: Use This Deminar Formula to Double Your Sales Conversations and 3X Your Win Rate
#6) Host a follow-up event to encourage networking
For an event goer, networking is often the most appealing and attractive part of attending an event. But many attendees often don’t feel like they connected with enough people during the event.
If you can give people another opportunity to connect with one another, do it and you’ll find that many people will be receptive to the idea.
Think of all the professional connections that will be formed because of your event. Your event will now be the common connection between several future business relationships, which strengthens your brand and will become a future talking point for years to come.
Post event engagement pro tip:
Use an event app that can remain live after your event has wrapped. This way you can send notifications and updates to remind attendees of your upcoming networking event.
Interested in learning more about networking? Read 16 tips for networking at your next virtual event.
#7) Show appreciation to attendees with an exclusive offer
One of the many perks of attending events is getting special access to exclusive offers post event.
For example, if your event was meant to show off a new product and get pre-orders, then offering exclusive deals to your audience is a no-brainer!
Exclusive offers could be anything from giving your attendees pre-ordering privileges or giving them discounts or special bundle deals.
Post event engagement pro tip:
Give your audience a limited-time offer to push them toward making the sale. This could mean offering a “24-hour only” exclusive offer and then extending it for another week for audience members who haven’t yet made a purchase.
#8) Host a friendly competition on social media to keep the momentum going
Leverage your audience’s competitive spirit to keep them talking about your event online.
Offer fun prizes and incentives to encourage your attendees to participate in a post event social media contest.
Popular suggestions include photo-sharing contests, by getting guests to post their pictures taken during the event. But it can also include caption contests, raffles, tagging friends, sharing the page or post with friends, or posting the most popular comment.
Post event engagement pro tip:
Make sure to give the winner and runners-up a special discount offer to buy your products, in addition to the prizes they win. It’s key to always keep your objectives in mind.
#9) Use attendee profiles to create personalized email segments
Events are powerhouses for generating new contacts for your business. If you want to send follow-up emails and share upcoming content with your prospective partners that will be opened, you’ll need to segment your email subscribers.
Event management software like SpotMe offers attendee profiles where you can see specific data you collected to determine where these people fall in your funnel and target them with specific emails and content.
Post event engagement pro tip:
There are many ways to segment your email list using the data you’ve collected. For local offers, segment geographically. For specific content, segment your audience by pages visited on your website or sessions watched during your event. You can also segment based on behavior, such as sending emails to people who spent a considerable amount of time logged into your event app.
#10) House all your content on a post event page or resource center
If your event was particularly entertaining, educational, or noteworthy, then your guests will be excited at the chance to re-experience it.
Your post event page is also the place to showcase your edited highlights reel so attendees can quickly reference the best parts of the event again. Also include any interesting stats about your event and links to downloadable content, which serve as another lead magnet.
This post event landing page not only reignites your previous attendees’ interest in your event but also acts as a lead magnet and powerful SEO tool for attracting new visitors to your next event.
Post event engagement pro tip:
Hire an event photographer to snap photos of guests, speakers, and vendors and let people know they can view these pictures on the post-event landing page.
Deliver a post event engagement experience your attendees will appreciate
Now that you’ve put on a world-class virtual or hybrid event, you’re on your way to achieving your business’s objectives and goals launched by your event planners.
With SpotMe, you can reach a larger audience than ever before, all while tracking important analytics and insights that will help your marketing and sales team maximize your event’s success.
Creating beautiful customized registration pages using SpotMe’s virtual and hybrid event platform is a breeze. You can also keep your audience engaged in Q&As, polls, networking sessions, breakout rooms, and by broadcasting live streams and uploading on-demand content.
Try SpotMe for free today and start accelerating relationships with potential partners and advocates.
