How to Successfully Market Your Virtual Career Fair

Because of those challenges, you may have already considered taking things online and making your career fair virtual. The good news is that this type of event is a lot easier to pull off than you might think, particularly during a period where we're all very used to video conferencing and similar platforms of that nature. The bad news is that more and more people are having the exact same idea, to the point where competition is getting more and more fierce.

Thankfully, you can successfully market your virtual career fair and stand out from the rest crowd. You just have to keep a few key things in mind while you do it.

Leverage social media and video marketing

One of the best things you can do to promote your virtual career fair involves posting as frequently as you can on social media sites. Not only should you rely on all of the usual suspects like Facebook and Twitter, but also consider this the perfect opportunity to sign up for a LinkedIn Premium Account.

In addition to using these social media channels as straight promotional tools, you should also use them to further your video marketing strategy when it comes to the event itself. Work on creating relevant, compelling videos that give people a sense of why they should carve time out of their schedule to attend your event over someone else's. Rather than putting a lengthy, text-based description about what a keynote speaker is going to talk about, have them record a short video where they explain it in their own words.

This is great, because seeing people’s facial expressions will show how passionate they are about the upcoming event. The audience will be able to hear the tone in someone's voice and really get a sense of how excited they are for this opportunity. It's far more compelling than a traditional description on a website, and by leveraging video you're increasing the chances that people will actually make it through to the end, too.

Research keywords and thought leaders

Likewise, you should rely on age-old best practices of content marketing to help promote your event as much as possible. Use a site like Respona to research related keywords and other topics that people want to learn more about. Craft compelling blogs and other collateral around these pieces on your website, and be sure to share them on social media too.

You could also use similar sites to find thought influencers in your industry, and other people who your target audience members are already paying attention to. You could ask to write a guest post for their blog or record a video for their YouTube channel, discussing the upcoming virtual career fair and why attending would be a good idea. This in and of itself is a great way to expose your message to a new audience, hopefully in a way that compels them to want to know more about what you have to say.

Don’t rule out offline channels

Of course, not all of your promotion needs to be exclusively digital - far from it. While your event itself is taking place online, you should still reach out to local media (including magazines, newspapers, radio stations, etc.) to promote your virtual career fair as often as possible. A lot of companies are understandably looking for local candidates, so promoting your event through this decidedly local angle is a great way to attract both potential attendees and participating businesses.

Beyond that, you should also use presentation software like Visme to come up with an event calendar to let people know more about what each day of your virtual career fair will entail. Not only is this a great way to keep track of everything on your end, but it also shows people ahead of time that there’s a packed schedule they'll be able to enjoy. They can start to plan their own calendars about what they want to see and who they want to talk to, which is a great way to get them excited well in advance of the big day.

Targeting, targeting, targeting

Finally, you'll want to take full advantage of the types of analytical tools that are built into platforms like Facebook and YouTube to laser focus your marketing efforts as much as you can. Rather than simply going after the widest possible audience, instead focus your marketing collateral and engagement strategy on the most specific one that you can. With Facebook Ads, you can run ads that’ll only appear to people who are seeking a very specific job and live in only a few or even one specific zip code.

The point is that you need to take the time to customize all of the ads that you're running to play to the demographics you're actually targeting. It doesn't make sense to spend a lot of money to run a far-reaching campaign if your ad is being mostly seen by people who have no interest in attending your job fair to begin with.

In the end, it's safe to say that the COVID-19 pandemic has changed a lot of the things we used to take for granted - and career fairs are definitely one of them. But just because it's no longer possible to get people in the same room at the same time doesn't mean that career fairs are dead and buried. As is true with so many industries, COVID-19 has caused them to evolve into something new and more modern - albeit far faster than most people could have predicted. The sooner you understand that, the sooner you'll be able to take advantage of it - and that's an exciting position to be in ahead of any event.