How to Leverage Virtual Events to Create Brand Advocacy?
Virtual events present a unique opportunity for companies to create brand advocacy. They are a powerful and effective advertising technique. By using virtual events, businesses can increase brand awareness, help improve customer loyalty, and get more valuable customer feedback.
What is Brand Advocacy?
Brand advocacy is a modern marketing strategy that is gaining popularity. It promotes a brand through words and actions by people who like an organization’s services and products. Advocates promote, support, and recommend businesses regularly to potential customers. There are various brand advocates, including:
- Influencers
- Customers’ referrals and reviews
- Business partners
How to Encourage Brand Advocacy Through Virtual Events
There are several ways through which businesses can incorporate brand advocates in virtual events. Make sure to provide your brand advocates an incentive or reward for their continuous work in promoting your brand.
In addition, make sure to deliver premium products and services that encourage loyalty and attract more brand advocates. It reduces the need for organizations to spend much money on regular public relations campaigns.
Offer Incentives
Encourage your staff to use these virtual events for advertising your brand. Offer incentives or rewards for the customers they onboard. Among the rewards you can offer include:
- Commissions
- Gift cards
- Discounts on products
Make the incentive approach more effective by presenting the rewards immediately after the virtual event to create a “learderboard” effect.
Businesses can also set up digital swag bags for virtual event attendees. Planning and giving out digital swag should take a creative approach that emphasizes brand recognition. Customized desktop or Zoom backgrounds are examples of digital swag.
Create Internal Employee Campaigns
Staff members are integral to brand advocacy plans because they have all the information about the company’s products. Make sure all employees have a rich business knowledge to convince potential customers to test or trial the products and services. Creating internal employee campaigns can go a long way to heighten brand advocacy.
Run Affiliate Programs
Affiliate programs bring in a broader reach for brands and are, thus, an excellent approach for brand advocacy. Find affiliates with the same goals and needs as the organization and ask them to participate in a virtual event. Offer exclusive access to to rooms or sessions as an incentive.
Offer Event-Only Discounts
Offering event-only discounts will help increase attendance numbers and create hype around the organizers brand. Include ways to facilitate attendee discussions about the information they learn through chat and breakout rooms.
Share Content Comprehensively
Ensure to give brand advocates enough information to help them market the organizations products and services better. Choose a virtual event platform that offers social media integration so that content can be easily shared via social media.
Make Mutually Beneficial Deals with Business Partners
Business dealings with partners are critical to brand advocacy. Host marketing events with mutual advantages for the organizer and its business partners. Turn events into a big splash by saving new product and program announcements until the end of the day(s). This encourages attendees to start conversations about the new products and promote your advocacy.
The Bottom Line
Virtual events can be an essential tool for organizations to acquire more brand advocates.