Virtual events aren’t going anywhere, and while planning the logistics of a virtual event can seem easier than in-person at first, there’s much more than meets the eye. From creating an engaging attendee experience to understanding what content will drive prospects to RSVP, organizations are figuring out how to use virtual events to establish strong relationships with their most qualified targets.

On April 21st, we gathered senior marketing, sales, and demand gen leaders to participate in and speak at Defining Success to Drive Strategy: The Role of ABM in Virtual Events. The conversation at our virtual event centered around leveraging ABM strategy to drive recruitment, event experience, and follow-up.

Check out five of our favorite takeaways below:

1. ABM can help with new logo acquisition, pipeline acceleration, and customer expansion

“ABM can take different forms,” said Auseh Britt of Terminus. Terminus leverages ABM to help with 1:1, 1:few, and 1:many campaigns. ABM isn’t just one thing — it can be a bespoke, strategic campaign to an existing customer or quarterly outreach for new logo acquisition.

She also highlighted the importance of sales and marketing working together in tight alignment to engage target accounts and drive revenue as being at the core of all successful ABM strategies.

2. Design your virtual events with your audience in mind

Understanding your target audience is key to hosting a successful virtual event. “We make sure that all that content and experience is very tailored to that audience and what we know that they want to hear,” shared Caitlin Tucker of Quantum Metric.

She’s found that targeted content, shared learning experiences, and alcohol are the best ways to interact with attendees, and Quantum has done a lot of mixology and cooking events preceding online networking sessions.

3.Be mindful of the time commitment of your events

Dawn Colossi, formerly of FocusVision, shared that she’s seen the most success with smaller events that offered highly valuable content to already engaged accounts. It’s important to provide context about why someone should attend an event before inviting them.

“It’s a lot to ask somebody to spend 45 minutes to an hour with you,” she said. “There really is a whole engagement strategy that goes before you ask someone to spend [that time] with you.”

4. Constant experimentation is key

“We can’t be afraid to fail,” said Melissa Mertl of Palo Alto Networks. Marketers need to be open to trying new things because every account is different. There’s no tried and true method that’s guaranteed to attract prospects 100% of the time.

Melissa highlighted a few important factors that have influenced sales for her organization in the past: interested account contact, targeted content, and the right timing.

5. Leverage the digital content opportunity of virtual

For Caitlin’s team, it’s invaluable to have recorded content that they can repurpose from all of their virtual events. “Everything is captured,” she said. She gave ad campaign videos as an example of how her organization has used event collateral to reach super targeted audiences post-event.

Interested in hearing more? Check out the full panel discussion and more topic-based video clips from the event by filling out the form at the top of this page.