August was a very busy month for The Social Effect. We’ve fully embraced the event industry’s expansion into virtual events. The latest step in our journey is a very exciting collaboration with the Virtual Events Institute (VEI). This collaboration will help us share our Marketing Optimisation for Virtual Events (MOVE) methodology with more event professionals and play a key role in closing the skills gap between in-person and virtual events.

The Virtual Events Institute is a global platform designed to bring the community together to connect, discuss and learn how to produce exceptional virtual and hybrid events. The platform uses summits, training and market insight to help create the next generation of event professionals. People who don’t just push in-person events online, but create new-age virtual events that engage, inspire & double the value attendees invest in their ticket.

What attracted us to VEI is their immense passion for helping event profs succeed and overcome the challenges associated with the move to virtual. The B2B event industry is going through quite a turbulent time and it’s important to band together, not only to minimise the impact of current challenges but to make sure the industry excels.

To this end, we’ve provided a module in the VEI training program dedicated to attracting an audience to your virtual event using the MOVE methodology.

An introduction to MOVE

So, what is MOVE exactly? Without giving away everything you’ll learn in the course, MOVE combines 4 quads each focusing on a different aspect of the attendee’s journey to your virtual event. Here’s a quick summary of each quad:

• POSITION – The first quad is all about making sure that your virtual event is able to compete with the thousands of other virtual events out there. It shows you how to map out your personas and match your event’s unique selling points and benefits to each persona.
• TARGET – As the second quad, TARGET helps you get the messages that you mapped out in POSITION in front of the right people at the right time. The spray and pray approach is a thing of the past.
• CONVERT – The third quad focuses on plugging the holes in your attendee’s journey to minimise drop off at each step. By Increasing the number of people who click on your ads, complete the registration process and attend; you’ll be using your budget more efficiently than if you were to simply drive more traffic to your registration page.
• TUNE – The final quad in MOVE is all about looking back to look forward. What questions can you answer now that your virtual event is finished? How can you improve performance for your next one?

A glimpse behind the scenes

A few thank yous

Of course, it takes a village to put together a course like this and we would be remiss for not thanking some of the key players who helped us bring our training module to life.

A massive thanks goes to Chris Gowland and Emma Hilditch from VEI for helping us shape our content into its current structure. Chris – thank you for adding your visual flair to the final product – it looks fantastic!

I also want to thank Peter Mann and Claire Mallaby from Just Shoot Me Digital for being so patient with us all the way from take 1 to take 596 235 – and making Eric look and sound great in every single one.

And finally, thanks need to go to our very own Managing Partner, Eric, for managing to explain the MOVE methodology so succinctly. And being so photogenic!

Matt Green

HEAD OF MARKETING

Pre event marketing is broken and Matt is on a mission to help you fix it. It’s his job to delve deep into every aspect of pre event marketing to help event marketers streamline & optimise their B2B event marketing.