You’ve been working day and night to get your virtual summit ready. Your copy is ready and is spot on, your videos are perfectly edited, your emails are done and ready to be sent. But the virtual summit promotion has not yet begun. You’re 100% happy that your summit content is as close to perfect as it can be.

You may be exhausted from all the work you have put in till now to get it to this point. Now the real work begins. You’ve got to get as many people as possible to attend this summit.PRO TIP: A successful online summit functions in two stages. Stage one is the creation and setup, and stage two is the promotion of it. You should be spending 80% of your time on stage two. When planning your promotional campaign, start with the big wins first. Try to get as much traction as possible, as quickly as possible. For most people, this will come from their own audience as well as speaker & partner audiences.

Speaker & Partner Email Promotions

It sounds easy to ‘just promote’ an online summit. However, there’s a lot of preparation that needs to be done beforehand. If you’re asking your speakers, and partners to promote the summit to their audiences you want to make it easy for them by removing as many obstacles as possible.

These are busy people, and the last thing you want is to miss out on 100,000 people hearing about your event because you didn’t have the email script ready for them to send. You should make sure that the email script they do send has been split tested beforehand. Split testing email headlines can take an email with an open rate of 10%, and boost it to 40%.Let’s put that into perspective. If a speaker emails the first version (the unoptimized one) to their 100,000 person list, and gets a 7% open rate, that means that 7,000 people might click on your link that takes them to your landing page. Ninety-three thousand people will never do anything as they don’t even open the email.

If you can split test beforehand, and make sure your email headline is the best it can be, a 40% open rate will mean that 40,000 people see your information, and might click through to learn more. The only way to get a 40% open rate is by split testing your headlines to find the perfect one. This is the difference between success & failure of many virtual summits. When preparing these emails for your partners make sure that you have a custom script for each speaker and partner. Remember that you want to make it as easy as possible for them to broadcast your summit. Another thing that we’ve found incredibly useful is asking or incentivizing partners to promote your summit over 2 or 3 emails. Most people’s inboxes are jam-packed, and a single email is often missed. If they’ve already agreed to send one email, they’re almost always open to sending a second or third email, as long as they’re spaced out enough.

Speaker & Partner Social Promotions

Another extremely effective method for promoting your online summit is to ask your speaker, and partners to share it on social media.
Many of the industry leaders have a massive social following, and this can be a considerable driver of leads for your summit. To make it as easy as possible for your speakers make sure that you’ve prepared any graphics in the correct sizes for their various social media platforms. Each social media platform has different image dimensions and requirements, and you want to get as much reach as possible.PRO TIP: Use Canva to create engaging, and eye-catching images for social media. Canva has all the required sizes in templates which makes it easy to use.

You should ask the speakers to share the event on each social channel specifically. Industry leaders have a reach on each of the social media channels, and you want exposure to as much of it as possible. If you don’t ask, they might only share it on Twitter. However, if you specifically ask them to share it on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and various others, you’re more likely to get the extra exposure.
This article was originally written by Liam Austin and published on entrepreneursHQ.