In today’s fast-paced, digital world, people crave connections with brands more than ever.
One of the best ways to create connections with target customers is including summits into your marketing strategy. However, with the continuation of the global pandemic, it’s extremely difficult to host physical events.
That’s where virtual summits come in…
This article will teach you what a virtual summit is, which stage of the customer journey it falls into, and why you need to implement it into your marketing strategy.
Where does a summit fit into your customer journey?
A customer journey is the entire experience a customer has while interacting with a brand. It includes everything from discovery to making the sale and beyond.
It mainly consists of four main stages: Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action.
Here’s how your virtual summit fits into these stages:
Awareness
A summit strategy involves joint venture partnerships with industry experts who come to speak at your event.
As a result, both you and your summit speakers will advertise the summit separately to your email lists prior to the day of the event. This means that your speaker’s subscribers will become aware of not only the summit but your business and its offerings as well.
Therefore, you’ll also be marketing your summit to potential customers through social media ads, which will expand your reach even further.
Interest
The entire summit is aimed at piquing the interest of your attendees about not only the topic but your products or services too.
That’s why you need to choose a summit topic that is relevant to your offers in one way or another.
For example, if you’re the owner of a graphic design agency that specializes in corporate branding, you might want your summit topic to be “Corporate Branding for Success”. Speakers can discuss the importance of branding, elements of branding, how branding can attract higher paying customers, examples of companies with excellent branding, etc.
Desire
Your summit session or the “after-summit Webinar” should bridge the gap between the attendees’ general interest in the topic, and their desire to purchase your products or services.
It should show them that your offer is the solution to their biggest problem or pain point.
During this phase, it’s important to make it clear that YOU are their best option and that they need to purchase from you instead of your competitors.
Action
Finally, the action stage will have a call-to-action (CTA) to encourage the attendees to tip over the edge and turn into paying customers.
This stage includes the summit emails that you send to the attendees after the event has taken place.
These emails can include:
- Your offer and price.
- Social proof (either in written or video format) that shows how your previous clients benefited from your services.
- Excellent promotional copy to encourage the customer to take action.
Why do you need a summit as part of your marketing strategy?
Here are the main benefits of incorporating a virtual summit into your digital marketing strategy:
1. Broaden your reach
One of the biggest benefits of virtual summits is that you, your attendees, and event speakers aren’t bound by a physical location. Therefore, your reach is broader and more attendees from different locations around the world can attend.
Consequently, this means that your marketing reach is also far broader and more potential customers will be exposed to your business and its offerings during your advertising campaigns.
As a result, your business will gain more brand awareness and people will start seeing you as an authority in your industry.
2. Expand your professional network
You and your attendees will have the chance to network with industry leaders and experts around the world.
This means that you get to build professional relationships with these experts — and, in turn, they’ll likely introduce you to new connections who can do wonders for your business’ reputation.
3. Increase your marketing ROI
One of the biggest misconceptions about a virtual summit is that it’s extremely expensive to plan and host.
This can be the case for some businesses, it certainly doesn’t have to break the bank.
However, getting a professional to help you, your virtual summit will give you a massive return on investment since these experts will help you stick to your budget by choosing summit tools and marketing methods that meet your needs.
Using the right tools and strategies, your summit is guaranteed to turn into a massive success.
You’ll get to make money, gain customers, and build a great reputation.
Ready to plan your virtual summit?
See how valuable a virtual summit can be for your business?, now you can start looking into hosting your summit.
Need help planning and hosting an amazing virtual summit for your business that’ll help elevate your business growth and authority? Have a look at our Simplified Summit Service that can help you get there and book a call to chat with us.
