Hosting a digital event is a great way to introduce your life sciences and STEM brand to prospective customers and to engage them during the buying process. If leveraged correctly, online events — whether live or on-demand — can be a powerful and crucial part of your marketing mix, helping you attract the right audience, build connections, and generate qualified leads.

Take webinars. While this format boomed during the pandemic, 63% of B2B marketers continue to use it for lead nurturing. With an average conversion rate of 55%, webinars can reach a global audience at much lower costs than traditional events. ResearchGate found that they are 10x more efficient on a cost-per-lead measure for B2B brands than physical trade shows.

To generate successful results during your event promotion, ensure that no stone is left unturned during every phase of your campaign — from pre-event promotion through to post-event marketing. Effectively measuring and analyzing your event ROI is just as crucial so that you can make the most of the leads generated. Read our best practices below.

Best promotional practices for each phase of your scientific event marketing campaign

Before: Pre-event strategies

Once you’ve planned an insightful event that provides value to your customers and prospects, it’s time to get the word out. There are plenty of ways to reach target audiences, getting them excited and generating awareness.

Promoting your events using an all-in-one solution like ResearchGate offers multiple tools at every step of your event campaign — enabling you to drive attendance and secure registrations before the event. Our proven strategies are:

• Promote events through advertising: Promote your event via Event Ads on ResearchGate to reach on-platform scientists. Combine it with a Sponsored Email, optimized to highlight event details for a powerful omni-channel campaign.
• Encourage organic discovery by posting event attendees: Attendees can share and recommend events to their networks, pushing organic sharing. Posting attendee lists on Event Posts show community interest, increasing the visibility of your event – and allowing you to get discovered.
• Generate social proof: Sharing your attendees also encourages people to take action, based on a phenomenon known as social proof. This helps to boost your organic reach and engagement. 
• Get your audience involved to cultivate engagement: Your event’s aim is to solve your target audience’s pain points, so get them involved. Solicit questions that speakers can answer before and during the event using question boxes on ResearchGate Event Pages. 
• Inform your audience to amp up excitement: Share content pre-event so people can dip their toes into a topic before deep diving — from studies and articles to speakers' biographies. On ResearchGate Event Posts, speaker information is integrated with ResearchGate profiles, showing your audience who will be speaking within the scientific community. 
• Use automated email reminders to ensure attendance: With Event Promotion, attendees receive a confirmation once registered. One hour before a live event is due to start, the event video link is emailed to all registrants.

During: Tips for high engagement

What are the goals of your event campaign? It could be to generate a set number of qualified leads, via effective thought leadership video content, for example.

Generating leads is built on relationships. So, while sharing knowledge is critical, don’t forget to engage with audiences and encourage dialogue during the event. Be sure to:

• Interact with registrants via the chat function in your chosen virtual event streaming platform to answer questions or run live polls.‍
• Connect with attendees on social media for a more personal touch.

After: Post-event follow-up tactics and event attribution

Post-event marketing: After the event has ended, your job is far from over. You just generated valuable video content that should be repurposed and leveraged across different channels and formats — such as social media posts and blogs — to help you boost visibility and build connections with your audience.

Your goal is to continue the conversation so you can keep leads warm, get them into the funnel, and build relationships with prospects. You also want to gather valuable post-event feedback to improve your event offering. Strike the iron while it’s hot by following up right away using Event Pages and Email to promote your event content on ResearchGate:

• Create a multi-touch marketing campaign for registrants: For best results, use more than one post-event engagement activity. Share event learnings and summaries. Share digital leave-behinds, and any information about upcoming events. If an event is product-specific, provide additional content, like a product brochure. Also, don’t forget to thank your audience for attending.
• Follow up with your leads: Add leads to your regular lead-nurturing campaigns. Use the event momentum to follow up individually. Schedule a call so they can ask more questions or start the buying process. You could even consider offering an incentive to event attendees, such as a discount.
• Encourage event rewatching: Registrants can access your event and watch it anytime via a post-event link, as part of your multi-touch campaign. ‍
• Ask for feedback: Keep upping your event game by asking for feedback. Question boxes on Event Pages also allow registrants to provide feedback when the live event ends.

Post-event attribution: Lastly, you need to measure the event ROI — a term that indicates the net value an event marketer gets from an event for the net cost that goes into producing it.

Set tracking correctly. Using a marketing platform like ResearchGate can make measuring event ROI more simple and accurate, thanks to data integration. Be sure to:

• Use lead gen registration forms: Use event registration forms that are optimized for lead generation to build your pipeline from the start. On ResearchGate, lead forms that are pre-filled with member information typically result in higher conversion rates (+15% on average). ‍
• Include the event in your sales attribution model: Events are highly linked with marketing goals, as well as sales targets. Define the attribution model and include calculations in your overall sales and business analysis.

SUCCESS STORY
Scientific organization Malvern Panalytical teamed up with ResearchGate to ramp up its webinar promotion activities and reach a wider audience. After employing Events emails and Events ads promotion in their event campaign, they saw an impressive event registration and turnout and generated qualified leads. Over 30% of the emails were opened — significantly above the industry average — and the campaign achieved a 2.78% click-through rate.

Engage your audience before, during, and after an event

Hosting virtual events creates attractive opportunities and benefits for your scientific organization. Events on ResearchGate is an ideal channel to help facilitate your event promotion and attribution, enabling you to expand event reach and attract the right audience in science.

Ready to start promoting your event within the scientific community using ResearchGate? Contact our team today to get a free consultation.

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