Marketing automation has quickly become a must-have in the modern marketing toolkit, streamlining and optimizing key steps in the marketing life cycle and empowering businesses to efficiently turn leads into paying customers.
When a marketing automation tool is integrated with an efficient platform for lead generation, the full marketing lifecycle is in the palm of a marketer’s hand. In this post, we will present the ins and outs of marketing automation for virtual events and cover 4 tips to help you supercharge your virtual event marketing funnel.
Jump to:
- What is marketing automation?
- Benefits of marketing automation in virtual events?
- How to use marketing automation for virtual events?
- How to segment your virtual event audience using marketing automation?
- 4 ‘musts’ to supercharge your virtual event marketing funnel
What is marketing automation?
At its core, marketing automation helps businesses automate repetitive tasks, freeing up time and resources to focus on strategy and creative campaigns, while providing the tools and insights necessary to drive revenue and growth.
Benefits of marketing automation in virtual events?
We identified at least 5 ways in which marketing automation can improve your virtual event strategy:
Streamlined communication
You can automate email and social media communications, using marketing automation tools. This will make it easier to keep your attendees informed and engaged.
Improved targeting
You can segment your audience through automation and deliver personalized messaging to specific groups of attendees, which can improve engagement and conversion rates. We’ll examine this further, below.
Tracking and analysis
Analytics is an essential feature of automation tools, enabling you to track and evaluate event attendance and engagement. It goes without saying that these insights will reveal what is working and what isn’t and empower you to tweak your strategy accordingly.
Lead generation
Lead generation is another popular application in marketing automation. Lead generation tools will help you nurture your leads through the sales funnel, even after the event is over.
Increased efficiency
Obviously, automation is synonymous with time-saving. By reducing the need for manual tasks, you free up time to focus on other important aspects of your event.
How to use marketing automation for virtual events?
Marketing an event comes with so many options and strategies that it can keep you busy for months. If you plan on scaling and improving your virtual event marketing strategy, automating parts of your event marketing processes is the way to go. Here are six areas where you can apply some form of marketing automation:
Email marketing: You can use automation tools to create and send personalized email campaigns to promote your event and keep attendees informed, from registration to post-event nurturing with relevant content and conversion CTAs.
Lead generation: Automation tools can help you capture and nurture leads generated from your event. You can use lead scoring and lead nurturing to qualify and move leads through the sales funnel.
Social media automation: Platforms like Sprout Social and Hootsuite allow you to schedule and post updates on social media to keep your audience jazzed and informed.
Event registration and confirmation: high-end virtual event platforms like Kaltura offer integrated features to automate the registration process for your event with automatically sent confirmation and reminder emails to attendees.
Tracking and analysis: There are plenty of automation tools available to track and analyze attendance, engagement, and conversions from your event. Data obtained from tracking is key in optimizing your marketing strategies and improving the overall success of your event.
Overall, it is important to have a clear strategy in place and use the right marketing automation tools to execute it effectively. Here again, it pays to adopt a holistic platform like Kaltura that has many of these automation tools integrated. That way, you only need a single platform to do it all.
How to segment your virtual event audience using marketing automation?
Virtual event audiences aren’t uniform. They consist of many different people and profiles. Good marketing is focused and delivers a personalized message that will resonate with individual attendees. And that’s where audience segmentation comes in. Especially for larger audiences, marketing automation will be a godsend in creating effective audience segmentation. Let’s review the different types of data you can automate and use for your audience segmentation:
Demographic information: e.g., age, gender, location, and job title.
Behavioral data: how attendees interact with your event (level of engagement, pages visited, and content consumed).
Lead scoring: scores your leads according to their engagement with your event, and use these scores to segment your audience into different stages of the sales funnel.
Past purchase history: what have attendees previously purchased or shown interest in?
Survey and polls: use surveys and polls to gather information on attendees’ interests, pain points, and goals.
Event registration data: segment your audience according to how attendees register for the event (email, ad, blog post, social post, …).
Once you have segmented your audience, you can use marketing automation to deliver personalized messaging and content to each segment, which can improve engagement and conversion rates.
4 ‘musts’ to supercharge your virtual event marketing funnel
Engagement as a lead detector
Sometimes engagement is treated as a result, but it can also be a cause. This is not only a result of great content, polls, quizzes, etc. but also a catalyst that makes a passive participant into a qualified lead. Engagement makes a memorable experience, which is one of the most precious assets for a marketer. However, you cannot determine who is a qualified lead without some numbers: using insights, you can identify the most engaged users and show them some interest.
Get your data organized: one place for all
Our platform needs clear access to the numbers, so that analytics can map the leads hierarchy for us. Landing page? Registration? Live session? Content on-demand? All of these generate a lot of data, but not necessarily useful insights. Data spread all over the place tends to be confusing and time-consuming to organize. Keeping data on one platform allows the numbers to tell a coherent story: the different segments are communicating with each other, can be unified or separated, and the process of drawing conclusions becomes clearer and easier.
The event is over, but the marketing automation party has just begun
The qualified leads and the data you collected so carefully wouldn’t just lay there and wait for you to do something! Marketing automation is a key component of any successful marketing strategy, and virtual events and webinars are no exception.
The goal of marketing automation is to optimize the marketing processes of businesses: Marketing campaigns can be targeted and personalized, and marketing efforts can be measured. Eventually, it boosts efficiency, improves customer engagement, allows better data-driven decision-making, and prevents overcommunication or a lack of personalization.
Your marketing automation tools will handle email marketing, social media marketing, and lead nurturing for you. These tools ensure that you are able to effectively reach and engage with your audience, and turn your data, eventually, into ROI. Moreover, it saves a lot of precious time for you and your team, keeping your hands free to deal with other important aspects of the business.
Better together
So we reviewed the “must” phases of each and every step of the lead generation process, but it is always better to combine them all and integrate them into one platform so you can relax and enjoy the peace of mind of a well-oiled process, and make this process truly enjoyable.
How?
Kaltura boosts engagement by getting your leads-to-be tickled during the event with the room engagement tools; through the data in the analytics dashboard of the management platform, you can identify qualified leads and target them effectively.
Oh, and event marketing automation tools can be integrated easily to nurture and convert these leads into customers. It is now possible for businesses to effectively engage their audience and generate leads by combining the power of event marketing automation with the versatility and scalability of Kaltura Events and Kaltura Webinars.
