It's All Virtual

With a number of virtual events on tap for 2009 (see the calendar of events here), marketers and exhibitors are busy preparing – assembling content for their booth, rounding up colleagues for “booth duty” and preparing the sales team for a burst of hot sales leads.  I’ve assembled past blog posts into a collection of virtual event best practices.  Without further ado:

1. Bring the right people, have the right content (in your booth), perform the right actions and provide the right prizes (https://allvirtual.wordpress.com/2008/12/14/how-to-exhibit-at-b-to-b-virtual-tradeshows/)
2. Utilize surveys to provide a deeper understanding of your customer prospects and generate insights back to your product management team (https://allvirtual.wordpress.com/2008/12/19/utilize-surveys-in-virtual-events/)
3. Leverage Twitter – show-hosts can look to Twitter to expand the reach of the event’s audience and exhibitors can leverage Twitter to invite their followers to visit their booth at  the event (https://allvirtual.wordpress.com/2008/12/15/leverage-twitter-for-virtual-tradeshow-outreach/)
4. It’s not always about “net new sales leads” – get closer to your existing customers (https://allvirtual.wordpress.com/2008/12/16/get-closer-to-your-customer-with-virtual-tradeshows/)
5. Use treasure hunts to increase engagement (https://allvirtual.wordpress.com/2008/12/23/use-treasure-hunts-to-increase-engagement-in-virtual-events/)
6. Have a process in place to handle the hot sales leads (https://allvirtual.wordpress.com/2008/12/31/how-to-handle-those-hot-virtual-tradeshow-sales-leads/)
7. Utilize multiple metrics to judge success – Cost Per Lead (CPL) is the key metric for most marketers, but also consider other success metrics [e.g. quality of leads, conversion of inquiry to sales engagement, etc.] (https://allvirtual.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/what-cost-per-lead-cpl-should-i-pay-for-virtual-tradeshow-sponsorships/)

What best practices do you utilize at virtual events?  I welcome your input – feel free to drop a comment below.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 at 5:46 AM and is filed under Virtual Tradeshows (VTS). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.