The 5 Phases of Launching Your First Virtual Summit

Additionally, here are five benefits of using a virtual summit, if you are not yet convinced:

One of the main benefits of hosting a virtual summit is that it will increase your lead generation.

How this happens is through the second part of the benefit: The network size.

If your reach has been limited to local areas, hosting a virtual summit will introduce your brand across the country, and maybe even internationally.

You are also able to eliminate time-wasters by hosting an event specific to your niche/field.

After all, you wouldn’t be attending a virtual summit targeted towards baking and cooking if you are mainly focused on sourcing construction tools.

This is something that you will see across most marketing blogs.

Building your business’ website? Add trust icons.

Looking to host a podcast? Interview the experts.

Producing video content for your business? Find valid and trusted sponsors.

By merely being associated with those long-time business owners/experts, you are creating and establishing trust among your leads.

The first few summits that you host will probably be free of charge.

But like gran always says, “nothing in life is free.”

Once you have established an audience that is highly interested in your content, you can start charging people to attend your next virtual summit.

Of course, these might not be as popular as the free events.

Some entrepreneurs sell these recorded online summits to those who were unable to attend them, generating revenue for themselves.

Besides these, the kind of content you create and spread through these virtual summits are bound to get attention from real buyers.

Having online conferences has also made businesses more accessible to larger and more diverse audiences.

Gone are the days of traveling and prolonged home absence.

Similarly, removing financial barriers has made all these virtual summits a lotmore inclusive.

One example of this is the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in 2019 that attracted just over 16,200 participants.

In comparison, the virtual conference hosted in 2020 registered over 26,000 users.

With online platforms becoming increasingly advanced, it is also becoming easier to host larger online events.

The only theoretical financial limit is the reach of your advertising in the days leading up to the summit.

In many of these events, there is a lot of information that comes out and might be difficult to digest all at once.

Well, fortunately for you, materials that are used in your presentation can be reused and reformatted into content to sell after your summit.

You can do this by creating video summaries, blog posts, or even make an eBook of your presentation!

This will help you target your leads, even after your summit, as well as create informative content for different parts of the buyer journey.

You can read more about creating the perfect sales funnel here.

And, of course, when you create online content, there is a whole list of added perks when it comes to tracking engagement.

In-person events don’t provide the same tracking of engagement as virtual events.

Virtual events allow you to display content alongside keynotes to track your user engagement to create audience segments for those specific demands.

It’s also more likely that users will fill out polls which gives you a more accurate account of how well your content is resonating with the crowds.

But enough talk about all the perks of hosting a virtual summit — let’s show you how to do it!

Depending on your reach and product niche, you want to consider how many guest speakers you should invite.

It doesn’t matter if you are just starting out, or are a long-time virtual summit host, always invite people who are knowledgeable in their field, but aren’t in exactly the same market as you.

Even if it means that you have a group of 4 people at the event, you would rather have people who know what they’re doing than introducing wild-cards because you feel that you should have +10 guest speakers.

Sometimes less is more.

Something to keep in mind is that you want to grow your conversions, so don’t invite someone with a similar marketing strategy to yours.

Rather, invite guest speakers who offer complementary services or products to yours.

Also, ensure that you have the right target audience before you send out promotional campaigns.

The chances are likely that the target audience for your virtual summit will be the same as for your product/service, but it’s worth looking into it to ensure that you deliver valuable content to the right people.

Now that you have the right people, the right place, and the right goals, it’s time to set up a promotional landing page.

This doesn’t have to be super complicated, you just want to make sure that you list:

Push your subscribers to attend this virtual summit by doing the following in your email campaign:

There are essentially three types of virtual summits that you can choose from:

Once you have your structure laid out, it’s time to choose the platform you’ll be hosting from.

Fortunately for you, we live in a time where there are multiple platforms available to you.

You simply have to choose!

Here are some platforms you want to look into when planning your virtual summit:

You also need to email your attendees with daily interview links if you are planning on hosting a multi-day event.

If you don’t, you might face questions and posts saying “I never got the link” or “the video isn’t playing for me!”

Be prepared to handle these issues quickly!

Maybe even look into hiring or allocating someone to dealing specifically with the tech issues.

Something else you want to look into is creating a space where virtual attendees can meet like-minded individuals.

This is the one obvious disadvantage of hosting a virtual event — you don’t get the same exposure and networking chances as you would at an in-person event.

You can create a Facebook group, where you allow people who are interested in meeting people to get to know one another.

This will add a unique flair to your summit and will add another area where you can introduce value to your attendees.

Another way you can encourage conversation among your attendees is by leaving your attendees with a thought-provoking question between presentations.

So, now that you have hosted a great event, it’s time to follow up with all the people who attended.

There are two main things you want to follow up on:

Following up with your attendees will give you super valuable insights into the areas that you did great in, as well as those that you can improve on.

Due to virtual summits also being large events, it’s easy to track and gain insights into how new customers are being funneled.

If you can identify areas where your leads are stuck and not converting, then you can work on improving your marketing strategy.