Where's the After Party? 6 Ways to Leverage Your Online Event (after it's over)
1. Post it to your website. Okay, this probably seems obvious, but you'd be surprised at how many organizations fail to do it. So what are the benefits of posting the event to your site?
- Search engines love new content. Adding a page with your most recent event helps create a deeper website.
- Site visitors love new content. New content creates site "stickiness," which gives people reason to bookmark and visit your site again.
- By posting past events, you create the potential for an "endless" audience. While the live event probably had an attendee limit, no limit exists on the number of people who can download and watch/listen to it.
- It could be an additional revenue stream. Depending on your business model, you could charge a fee for people to download past online events, like webinars.
Whether you provide access to past events for free or for a fee, you should include forms for people to fill out before they download. This way, you can add them to your sales funnel and lead nurturing plan.
2. Post it to YouTube. If you haven't created a "channel" for your organization on YouTube, consider doing so (it's easy, and it's free).
Here's an article that will walk you through the process. Why do it? According to
YouTube's fact sheet on its traffic statistics, "Fifty-one percent of our users go to YouTube weekly or more often, and 52 percent of 18-34 year-olds share videos often with friends and colleagues." That's a lot of eyeballs and ears (i.e. potential customers). Here's another interesting article on
YouTube, which now hits 24 hours of video per minute.
3. Post it to Facebook. Guess what site gets more traffic than Google? Yep, Facebook. And Facebook content is showing up in searches, too, which is even more reason to create a dynamic fan page for your organization. One of the tabs on your page can be "Video" or "Media" where you can upload your events. It doesn't have to be the full event either. In fact, "teasers" are extremely effective. Choose two minutes of the most dynamic part and upload that--and then let people know where they can sign up for the next event.
4. Create podcasts from the audio. A podcast is audio in an MP3 format that people download to their computer, iPod, MP3 player, etc. Here's a
tutorial that'll educate you on the podcast process. You can post your podcast to your website (for a fee or for free) and in a number of other places, such as directories or complementary organizations. The beauty of offering the podcasts in a number of places is that you'd include info that would link back to your site. This is a great strategy from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective and from a marketing "reach" perspective.
5. Embed or link to the event in other marketing materials. Think email newsletters, blog posts, tweets, and email signatures.
6. Seek shout outs. Once you've posted the event to your site, get creative in how you promote it. Bloggers are always looking for good content to link to, so reach out to bloggers in your industry and let them know about your latest online event. Think your event could be a good resource for a reporter covering your industry's beat? Send him or her an email introducing yourself and your willingness to be used as an expert resource and then include a link to the event so the reporter can see what sort of information your organization offers.
Got more suggestions?
We'd love to hear other creative ideas for using your online event.