Get Ready to Get Online
Your audience is ready. Are you? Here are the four things you need to know to successfully market your event online
by Paul O’Brien | Published in August 2008 event marketing | Focus on Marketing | marketing
Most event marketers overlook the tremendous potential their websites alone have for promoting events, and with so many buzzwords floating around about advertising online, it’s easy to get lost. Here are a few of the easiest ways to get started — and some of the best-performing tools to market events successfully.
1 Be Search-Friendly, Get Found
Search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! or MSN are the primary source of traffic to websites. Your website is a destination for people searching for your event. If you’re a balloon clown, for example, you would inform people to go directly to balloonclown.com using business cards, flyers and other forms of advertisement. But that only generates a limited amount of traffic from an audience already familiar with your business. The majority of your traffic should come from new customers introduced to you via search engines.
To do that, your website needs to be “search-friendly” — optimized to take advantage of that traffic.
2 It’s All about Optimization
How do you make that happen? Optimize the content on your website to capture traffic generated via search engines — i.e., Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.
Follow these two basic principles when putting content on your website.
Think like your target audience: Use simple and familiar words that they will use when looking for something to do.
What does thinking like your audience mean? Search engines work by indexing (grabbing) specific keywords off of your Web pages and associating those words with the content of the page. When someone searches for the keywords “balloon guy,” your page may come up in search results, but only if you have the words “balloon guy” on your Web page. As a marketer, you use words that evangelize and promote your event — but keep in mind that your audience may not be searching for the words you use. For instance, if they think of a clown as a circus entertainer, balloon artist or helium master, they will search using those keywords, and if you’re promoting “Balloon Fest,” unfortunately, they won’t find you.
Make your content accessible to the search engines.
A search engine uses technology to index your site that is limited in what it can read. Consider a graphic of your event flyer posted to your website. A search engine can’t read what is written because, typically, search engines only recognize HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). Putting up your flyer as an image is only valuable to the audience that visits your site directly; no one else will find you.
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Ensure the information on your site is unique and entertaining.
How do you promote a sale or in-store event with anything other than the details of the sale? Keep in mind that your entire website is indexed by a search engine, and the more users you can attract to the site, the more are informed of your upcoming event. That’s why it’s important to leverage the rest of the site with unique content once you’ve attracted your new, expanded audience. For example, feature news about your industry, or create fresh content with a blog about the event, guests or performers.
3 Go Local
SEO is exceptionally helpful, but a disclaimer: It comes with no guarantee that you will show up prominently in search engines. To do that, you have to be proactive.
Your events are promotions that attract an audience to a local business: a conference center, store, hotel, theater, etc. Your online audience searches for a website through Google or Yahoo!, but they search for a place to go or something to do — such as go to your event — using a local search engine, which provides highly relevant results within a certain time and geographical range. Zvents, for example, is one such search engine, created specifically for events. Through this type of search engine, you can promote your event to a targeted audience.
4 Engage the Social Community
Most of those buzzwords we’ve been hearing lately are related to Web 2.0: blogs, social networks, tags and social bookmarks, reviews. Web 2.0 refers to the evolution of the Internet to make the experience a two-way conversation. New opportunities have emerged that allow your audience to interact with your events online, contribute information or insight, and support your efforts. Think of it as instant word-of-mouth marketing.
Spark interest and participation in your event by using the surrounding online community. Post news about your event on a blog (try blogger.com or wordpress.org) with fun videos or photos of your last event. Doing this, you are naturally creating a form of content that search marketers call “link bait” — content so amusing that others will promote it for you.
You can also set up a “group” about your event on Facebook (facebook.com) and invite your fans to join. Within a social network, it’s easy to virally promote, share and interact with people with similar interests. As your audience interacts, be transparent and honest about who you are. Respond to reviews of your event with information and perspective as the event promoter. Your audience will appreciate the opportunity to chat with you and spread the word!
It’s clear that marketing events online is important. Direct Partners recently released the results from a survey of large United States corporations that showed that e-mail marketing is now the most popular form of direct response marketing. Borrell Associates’ annual Local Media Benchmark has found that local Internet advertising will eclipse $13 billion, which exceeds all other forms of media. SEM, in particular, is growing faster than any other online opportunity.
Your audience is online. Are you?
Want to find out more about Zvents? Check it out in the Media Center.
About the author: Paul O’Brien
Guest columnist Paul O’Brien, a search and online marketing professional with over 15 years of experience, is vice president of marketing for Zvents (zvents.com), a search engine for local events. He regularly blogs at seobrien.com.
Contact: paul.obrien@zvents.com