Give yourself a big high five. You just pulled off another amazing virtual event that went smoothly and seamlessly for everyone. But now that the main event is over, you may be wondering what’s next? Good thing, too, because your work isn’t over yet. There are still a few things that need to be done. Here’s a quick post-event checklist for you to keep in mind.
Repurpose Your Content
You’ve got all that content. Now, what are you going to do with it? Why not make it available to attendees for on-demand viewing? Anyone who wants to revisit it at any time can do so. This also opens it up to those who were not able to participate on event day but are still interested in your event topic. Let everyone who signed up know that the recorded version is now available on your website or via another platform. This will also allow you to track ongoing engagement.
Another way to make the content work for you is to break it up into smaller segments. Pull out sections that cover off sub-topics that could be used as stand-alone pieces. Did one of your guests or panel members say something that was particularly engaging or so on point that it bears repeating? Let others know about it. Think of the myriad ways that these smaller pieces of content can be used – blogs, websites, landing pages, social media, email campaigns – and you’ve opened up a host of opportunities to repurpose captured videos that can go on to further attract and engage potential leads.
Stay In Touch with Your Audience
Keep your audience warm by ensuring they’re informed, engaged and interested. Send a series of follow-up emails. Thank them for attending. Give a quick shout out to the presenters. Include snippets of the content that you’ve pulled out: a highlight reel, some lighthearted humor, maybe vigorous debate on a certain topic. Whatever can be pulled and repurposed can be sent to your audience for ongoing adoption. Sweeten the deal by including insights and an offer as well.
Ask attendees to take a few minutes to complete a post-event survey that will help you improve on subsequent events. Get their thoughts on speaker performance, topics they’re interested in, people they’d like to see, the topics covered, people they might be interested and how important things like having access to downloadable content is to them. Find out if they’d be willing to tell others about your event. (To help encourage participation, you can offer a small incentive like a gift card or a discount code.)
Develop & Nurture Online Communities
From social media contests to online forums encouraging debate and discussion, it just makes good sense to keep your primary audiences engaged. What were some of their favorite moments? Ask them to post a photo or two or leave comments. This can be used for cross-promotion through follow-up emails that you send.
An event-specific landing page can be a great resource for you (hello back-end statistics) and a starting point for creating an online community These forums often evolve organically over time which provides further insight into your audience’s interests and preferences.
Don’t Forget About the Data
You’ve got all this amazing information at your fingertips. Make sure you use it. That one-time event can actually tell you a lot about how engaged your audience was, how interested they were in the topic and how they reacted to what was being said and by whom.
You can also look at the regions that your audience represented. Was there a higher turnout from certain geographic locations than others? You may want to redirect some of your activities towards them. All this insight – when distributed across the organization to the team members who can benefit from it the most – can help you improve both performance and engagement in subsequent virtual events.
Remember your internal teams. The C suite will want to know how things went. Sales will want to know about the potential leads that were generated. (In fact, the sales team should have their own follow-up plans in place as soon as the event ends.) Your IT people will appreciate hearing if there were any glitches or, conversely, that things went smoothly from start to finish. Provide the data that you’ve gleaned and make suggestions for improvements.
There you have it: your post-event checklist. It’s a good way to see how a few small activities can go a long way to keeping audiences interested or providing opportunities to help convert attendees into warm leads for your organization.
