Marketing Strategy for Events: Virtual Badges as custom event badges

Getting your attendees to engage with your event can be easier than you have experienced before.  

While engaging attendees during the event can be achieved in a variety of ways (which depend on the format of your event), we will focus on the moments before and after the actual event takes place.

Why?  

Pre-event engagement can bring you more attendees.

Post-event engagement ensures that attendees who participated maintain a strong and positive memory of your event, which increases their chances of attending again next time.

In the following sections, we'll give you our tips on how to implement a Virtual Badge Marketing campaign that will turn your attendees into event promoters.  

The most important thing to remember:  

Your attendees will only share content from your event on their social networks if it helps them build their own reputation and personal branding.    

This means that by participating, they must prove to their network that they are active, enthusiastic, and eager to learn.  

What is the marketing strategy behind it? Give your participants custom event badges.

Event badges are a classic. Some attendees even keep them as souvenirs. By offering digital badges to your attendees, you give them an effortless way to proudly share their accomplishments with their social networks.  

And here's the icing on the cake: If you use Virtualbadge.io to automate badge creation, you can have an entire campaign active in just 10 minutes (and for free).

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How to use custom event badges for Pre-Event marketing

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1- Give your participants something to be proud of 🏆

Picture the scene: An attendee just signed up for your online event. They're not even sure if they'll attend yet, but once they tell their network about it, they've committed to it.  

For them to make that decision, their custom event badge needs to have a positive impact on their reputation.  

In practice, this means the following: Include your event's top selling points in the badge design.  

If your event badge makes your attendees look good to their contacts, they will be proud to share it.

2- Sponsor space 💸

Do you have a small marketing budget and rely on sponsors? Use Virtual Badges to negotiate with your sponsors.  
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When designing the Virtual Badges for your event, you can add a "sponsor slot". Now you can ask your sponsors for additional support if they are interested in being featured on the badges and use the space as a negotiating lever for new supporters.

3- Don't start too early! ⌛

Timing is critical in any marketing campaign. Especially when it comes to getting your attendees to share about an event they haven't attended yet.  

Here's what we know: you don't want to launch the Virtual Badge campaign too early, because it's harder for your attendees to engage with something that's months away. But you do want to launch it early enough so that interested people in your attendee's network can still participate.  

In our experience, the most successful pre-event badge campaigns start about 10 days before the registration deadline.  

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How to use custom Event Digital Badges for post-event marketing:

1- CV building 💡

Now that your event is over, you can give your attendees a recognition token for their participation, which they can use to show their network what they've accomplished recently and build their personal brand.  

If your event is an educational conference, you can also offer digital certificates to your attendees.

In this case, all badges created will be hosted in our European services (yes, that's GDPR compliance playing its part) and can be validated and authenticated at any time.  

2- Timing ⏱️

As mentioned earlier, timing is always a critical factor in the success of a marketing campaign. Post-event badge campaigns are no different.  

We've seen events that achieved high sharing rates up to a month after the event, but those weren't the majority.  

We recommend playing it safe: Launch your Virtual Badge campaign within the first week after the event.  

3- Unique fields 🦄

Explore the custom dynamic fields of your Virtual Badges. These fields make each badge more unique by allowing your participants to add details referring to their experience. For example, these details could be their role in your hackathon (so they could add the word "participant" or "mentor," "speaker," etc.). Or, if your event allowed your participants to work in teams, you can add a field for "Team Name".  

The idea behind this is simple: the more personal those badges are, the more likely they are to share them on social media.  

For more details on custom dynamic, check our support documentation.‍

In the end, recognition is the key to success in word-of-mouth marketing, so give your attendees a badge they'll be proud of!

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