How to Use Virtual and Hybrid Events for Lead Generation

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Events have been an integral part of the B2B marketing toolkit for generating qualified leads. And today, many of those events are offered in all-virtual or hybrid formats.

Embracing technology to deliver digital events allows marketers to expand audience reach, save costs, increase engagement, and improve convenience and accessibility.

Those are all valuable benefits of virtual and hybrid events, but the most powerful results for marketers are the digital touchpoints and data that can be used to identify high-quality leads, accelerate the sales cycle, and fuel business growth.

Here are some top ways B2B marketers can unlock the power of events to turn event attendees into sales leads.

Engaging Content

Creating relevant and compelling content that provides educational value increases lead generation potential. Virtual and hybrid events are ideal platforms for creating and delivering content that significantly elevates attendee engagement.

Advances in digital event technology make it easy to present visually appealing images and infographics, videos, live demos, and interactive presentations for highly immersive experiences.

Event sessions and footage can also be repurposed by marketers as on-demand content, designed to grow engagement long after the event ends. Moreover, event content can be repurposed as blog posts, short videos, and social media content to generate interest and leads.

To function as an engine for lead generation, virtual and hybrid event content should focus on audience pain points, challenges, and interests, providing actionable takeaways and insights. Addressing each of those areas captures the attention of attendees and increases the likelihood of conversions.

Interactive Features

Interactive features—such as live chat, Q&A sessions, and polls—integrated into digital event platforms enhance attendee experience, increase engagement, and encourage participation.

Those features help brands more effectively connect with attendees to increase lead generation potential by allowing marketers to capture valuable insights that can be used to craft highly personalized follow-up campaigns.

Gamification is another tactic that can be integrated into virtual and hybrid events to drive lead generation. Gamification elements include challenges, quizzes, and leaderboards that incentivize participation via rewards. More and more marketers are using gamification to learn more about the interests, goals, and behavior patterns of attendees.

Data and Analytics

Event data captured by webcasting technology platforms is a great resource for identifying qualified and potential sales prospects. Marketers can use that data to build a robust list of marketing-qualified leads to drive continuous touchpoints with prospects, fill sales pipelines, and foster faster conversions.

Events can provide a wealth of data, often gathered through the use of analytics tools that give the ability to marketers to collect valuable insights in a variety of ways:

Registration pages. Event registration pages are a gold mine for creating detailed sales lead profiles. They can be customized to intake any relevant data point, such as demographic information (gender, age, race, and region), in addition to the usual job title, name, and email address.
Session attendance. Analytics tools can show both individual and overall attendee session attendance patterns. That information relays to marketers what topics were most popular as well as what session formats were most appealing to guests (panels, presentations, Q&As, etc.) That data helps to inform marketers what challenges or interests prospects may have and what the best communication methods are to reach them.
Engagement over time. Using event data, marketers can see how long people stayed in a session and what time frames had the most attendance throughout the event overall. That can help them plan future events by ensuring that the most important sessions to the organization, such as new product announcements, see the most attendance by attendees and potential leads.
Interaction and responses. Marketers can see how attendees respond to polls and questionnaires presented throughout an event. Those responses offer invaluable insights into the pain points, opinions, and preferences of an attendee. During the sales lead outreach process, marketers and sales teams should work together to add engagement features and questions that help solve those pain points.

The insights derived from virtual and hybrid event data and analytics help marketers gain a deeper understanding of their audience and fuel strategies for future events.

And when integrated with CRM and other marketing platforms, virtual-events data allows marketers to segment their audiences, optimize lead-generation strategies in real-time, personalize follow-up communication, and generate a robust sales pipeline.

Digital Event Platforms

Digital event technology today is designed to handle the digital logistics of an event from registration through post-event analytics. Today's technology provides the engaging content, interactive features, networking opportunities, and data and analytics marketers need to help their brands increase engagement and develop stronger connections with key audiences.

From conferences to product launches to tradeshows and other events, marketers can harness the power of virtual and hybrid event formats supported by digital event technology to optimize the lead generation process, building robust sales pipelines.