The conference may be over, but in an increasingly digital world, finding meaningful ways to sustain your content post-event is a marketing must. As a conference organizer, it is essential to find new ways to stay connected to your sponsors, attendees, and interested parties year-round. Read on to discover our top tips for how to distribute and amplify your organization’s content and key messages long after the conference itself is over.
Invest in a Research Repository
When choosing a virtual conference platform, be sure to select a tool that builds upon and challenges the traditional conference model in which research rarely leaves the physical confines of a poster hall. Products such as digital research and conference content repositories give new life to research post-event by providing on-demand access to abstracts, ePosters, video sessions, presentations, and more. This allows for authors and presenters to gain continued recognition for their work and provides sustained engagement with your conference and its material long after the live event has finished.
Depending on your organization’s authorization and privacy preferences, it may be worth considering an open access conference repository. Making all proceedings openly accessible can help attract new potential attendees and increase sponsor visibility, making your event a more appealing commercial option.
Please and Thank You
Polite formalities such as “thank you” emails are not imperative event management practices but can be very helpful for building your organization’s reputation. The speakers, participants, and sponsors who came together to ensure your event’s success will value a short and sweet message that shows your appreciation for their efforts.
Send out a post-event survey to establish what worked well at the conference and what aspects might need improvement. Virtual and hybrid conference models are still rapidly changing, with new technologies appearing daily. A survey will help keep the best elements of your event fresh in the minds of your audience and will give you an idea of the features that you need to tweak prior to your next conference. Make sure to reach out to your audience with the survey results when they're ready, along with a summary of the event, such as key stats and data points. This is a great way to re-engage attendees and can be used as a marketing opportunity to promote next year’s event.
In this email correspondence, you should also point attendees to your conference content repository so that they can highlight and share their work while gaining access to relevant content that they may have missed.
Social Media: Familiarize so you can Optimize
Social media is an extremely effective tool when it comes to promoting your organization post-conference. Throughout the live event, be sure to capture shareable content, including short video clips from sessions or ePosters that touch on current trends and events. Post-conference, share these posts under trending or popular hashtags. This will become “evergreen” media that you can use year-long to draw people back to your event and help them look forward to future ones.
It can also be helpful to repurpose your content via social media. By promoting a 'replay' of your live event, you can once again shine a light on the partners and sponsors who helped make your conference happen while also promoting on-demand content in a new and innovative way. You can use applications like Keynote to easily create visual cards featuring bitesize learnings drawn from conference sessions - social media posts with images have been proven to perform better than those without.
Make sure that you utilize platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook to continue to draw people back to your website and the findings presented during your conference. This can also be done through initiatives like monthly newsletters, 'spinoff' Q&As and webinars that build off of the content from your conference or a case study of your event.
Data, Data, Data!
Ensure your virtual conference provider offers you post-event analytics and insights. The preservation of conference content is essential for increasing the lifespan of your event, but getting insights into the number of people that are clicking on each session or ePoster helps you to truly unlock the full value of your conference content. Morressier provides powerful data analytics, allowing authors to see how much of an impact their work is having. Draw participants back to your event by sharing these quantitative details - this way, they can see the tangible results of their time and effort!
Conclusion
Running a successful virtual or hybrid event is a difficult yet gratifying endeavor, but the work doesn’t end there. To really unleash the full potential of your meeting, it is critical to ensure your participants and partners engage with your website and content on a consistent basis. This way, you’ll be able to gain a strong reputation, brand awareness, and attendee loyalty that will help take your organization to the next level.
