Promote your virtual summit before it begins

1. Start promoting your virtual summit as soon as you have a basic registration page set up.

You’ll want to start spreading the word about your virtual summit as early as possible. You don’t need the full registration page to start the promotion for your event, even just a waitlist page is good enough.

2. Share and promote the event within your own personal network of friends, family members, and social media connections.

For instance, you could: Email friends about your event. Text family members. Share the event on your personal social profiles.

3. Promote the event to your email list subscribers and give them insider information to get them excited.

Keep your email subscribers involved in the organization of your event. The goal here is to warm them up and get them excited in the weeks and months before your summit starts.

4. Share the event on your podcast, blog, and any other platform you regularly publish content on.

For example, you could share a story about what attendees can expect to learn, highlights from the session interviews, your motivation of why you want to host the event in the first place, or any other interesting piece of content you can create about your event.

5. Update your social media profiles with the correct websites, descriptions, and images, create shareable graphics and videos, share status updates, and tag speakers and sponsors in your updates to incentivize sharing.

Use tools like Canva or InVideo to create engaging content. Promote your content across all relevant social networks in your industry. Schedule your social media posts using the Facebook Creator Studio or tools like Content Studio or MeetEdgar.

6. Craft a story around your summit and pitch it to relevant media outlets in your industry.

What sets your summit apart from other products in your niche? Is it your motivation, the speaker line-up, the format, the way attendees can network, or the platform you’re using? These are just a few potential differentiation factors, you can and need to get creative here.

7. Create a rewarding affiliate program and provide your affiliates with a clear promotional schedule and promotional materials like swipe copy and graphics.

Giving affiliates a clear promotional schedule makes it easier for them to spread the word about your event at the right times.

8. Set up a group on a platform all your promotional partners are used to, like Facebook Groups or Slack, where all partners can engage and ask questions to make sure everyone is on the same page.

Take advantage of the group dynamic to spark competitiveness amongst your affiliates. Be present to answer questions and congratulate your promotional partners when you see them make sales.

9. Invest in paid advertising on platforms where your target audience is most active.

Advertise on the platforms where your target audience spends the most time. If you’re not sure, you may need to define your customer avatars to find out. Map out your paid ad campaigns and start creating the creatives for them, either alone or with the help of professional advertisers.