Meetings

Make the Most of Your Virtual Conference Content

You may be sitting on a content gold mine after a year of virtual meetings. In addition to offering it on-demand to attendees for a set amount of time, consider these ideas to boost post-event engagement.

With associations hosting virtual events over the past year—many including recorded education sessions—they likely find themselves with a lot of content at their disposal.

While your virtual meeting may be over, how can you give that content some additional legs? Here are a few ideas for using it to drive post-event engagement and revenue, expand audience reach, and build stronger relationships with attendees, exhibitors, and sponsors.

Rebroadcast your event. While many associations offer their conference content on-demand to people who couldn’t attend, consider replaying it at a certain date and time to encourage people to tune in and learn. While it may not technically be “live,” pushing it out this way will give people the sense they are attending a new event. It’s also a good way to highlight your sponsors, exhibitors, and partners again.

Create microlearning opportunities. If possible, break up session recordings into several shorter presentations. These could attract an audience of people who prefer to learn in smaller chunks or who only want to learn about niche topics. These opportunities will also give your association a chance to experiment with pricing. For instance, do you offer them all as a bundle, or do people pay for them on a one-off basis?

Develop soundbites for social media. Video posts on social sites are known to yield higher engagement rates than written posts. Editing your event video into bite-sized segments that capture key moments or messages is a great way to fill up your social media calendar. Just remember to tailor each video to the specific platform.

Create an event summary. Once the event wraps up, consider putting together written recaps that summarize key findings, takeaways, and learnings from the keynotes and education sessions. You could then put those recaps, as well as sessions recordings, into an email that you send out to attendees or even your entire membership. This email could also be appealing to a sponsor.

Host spinoff events. Look at your most popular sessions, and then offer people the opportunity to reconnect to dive deeper into those topics. You could have a moderator guide these small-group discussions, or you could invite the original speaker back to do a live Q&A. These spinoff events could also be prime opportunities for sponsorship—consider giving sponsors a few minutes at the start of each one to talk about their products and services.

How is your organization extending the life of the content offered at your virtual events? Please share in the comments.

(Nadzeya_Dzivakova/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

Samantha Whitehorne

By Samantha Whitehorne

Samantha Whitehorne is editor-in-chief of Associations Now. MORE

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