The right event marketing strategy can ensure you get the largest and most relevant audience for your event — but your efforts shouldn’t stop there. You want to create a buzz around your event and get your registrants engaged and talking before, during and after the event.
And the number one rule of marketing? “NSAMCWADLP”: Never Start A Marketing Campaign Without A Dedicated Landing Page. In other words, never start your “campaign”, or event, without having a “landing page”, a webpage to send prospective attendees to.
As we continue to plan and market our annual conference, Cvent CONNECT Europe, our website is a critical component of our event marketing strategy. Like ours, your event’s website is your biggest promotional event planning tool — it’s the first place where your audience looks for key information, and where they’ll spend the most time interacting with your brand prior to the event.
If you’re new to event marketing, you might be asking yourself, “But what should my event’s website look like? What should it say? How can an event website help me drive more attendance to my event?”
We’ve got your answers here:
What Should Your Event Website Look Like?
Your goal should be to build a sleek, professional-looking website that’s easy to use and navigate.
Every detail counts: is the most important information front and centre? Do all the links and buttons work? Does it take too many clicks to get to a certain page? Are the fonts scaled correctly and easily readable regardless of web-browser?
It’s important to maintain consistency across your event marketing and promotions to build brand awareness throughout the event journey and maintain a professional look and feel. Make sure your emails, website, mobile app and other event materials and communications all look like they’re from the same family — they should share the same fonts, headers, footers, colours and logos. Attendees should be able to immediately recognise items pertaining to your event.
What Should Your Event Website Say?
The second most important rule in marketing is: have a “Call To Action”, or CTA.
Your CTA should consist of three to five action words (that means verbs!) that compel your audience to take action. Looking for a really great CTA for event marketing? “Register” — it’s that simple!
As long as your CTA entices potential attendees to click on it, it’s effective. And speaking of clicks…
How Can Your Event’s Website Help You Drive Attendance to Your Event?
It’s hard to be sure what works best without experimenting a little. Not sure what will generate the most responses? Suspect that different wording might boost your conversion rate? Measure the number of page sessions, time on page, average session duration, and most importantly, the amount of “goal completions” (aka registrations!).
Then, use the lessons you learned from this data to inform your decisions at your next event. If attendees loved your streamlined, minimalist-style website, keep it similar for next year. If you received multiple requests for additional information, consider building more of that into your site.
Want more tips on building an event website?
Stay tuned for our next blog, Branding Your Event Website: 6 Things to Remember, to learn more about how you can communicate your organisation’s brand through your event website.
