Marketing your Digital Event: Speakers

Posted by: Donna Sanford

Friday, September 28th, 2012

The second in a series of quick articles on marketing your digital event, today I’m talking about speakers. (Last week I offered tips on timing your campaign.)

In all honesty, there’s nothing here exclusive to digital events. Most of these would promote your physical event just as well.

• Have speakers publicize their participation at your event. Give them sample language they can post on their blogs – or a press release template.
• Give speakers registration discount codes they can pass on to their online audiences.
• Get a group of presenters to author blog posts for your event site. Have some boilerplate info at the bottom of each post about the event and how to hear more from this author.
• Post presenters’ slides online using Slideshare.net. By posting some of the presenter slides on this site, you’re enticing people to hear more about that particular topic. Make sure you include a slide at the end that has more information about the event and day and time of that presentation.
• Consider holding a webinar 30 days out from your event for a sneak peek of what you expect to be a most popular session.
• Get a handful of key speakers to record video previews of their sessions and post them to your event site over a period of weeks
• Have speakers author articles that correspond to the topics they’ll be presenting, and get them placed in industry media. Make sure you place them in advance and mention the event. (This strategy requires careful and advanced planning and coordination with media outlets.)
• Get the media talking about your event by releasing information about your speakers’ content. Are any speakers releasing new survey results, or “behind the scenes” case studies that will be especially popular?
• If there’s an influential blogger and/or podcaster in your industry, arrange for him/her to get “exclusive” interviews with key speakers to be placed on your site and theirs.

Comment or submit ideas of your own here, and we’ll grow this list!