Last week, we wrote about how event content can be your event marketing’s secret weapon. As a refresher, event content includes all the information you should have in your event calendar to entice potential attendees to commit. It’s much more than just the standard date, time and location; event content also includes things like metadata, event photos, RSVP lists and user reviews. Thorough and complete event content does more than just inform your audience; done correctly, it can make the difference in convincing them to attend.
The following are four ways to execute best practices in event content development. They are fairly intuitive and very easy to implement regardless of your technical prowess.
Brevity is the soul of wit; a modern addendum to this could be that brevity is also the soul of event descriptions. When writing a description, you need to strike a fine balance: you want to sell your event and provide key information without overwhelming the reader. A good rule of thumb is to keep your description to 160 characters. This will force you to boil it down to the most important features of your event. If you aren’t a Twitter aficionado and aren’t used to measuring communication in character length and are now picturing what that might look like, this sentence is precisely 160 characters.
In a post on the importance of brevity in marketing, the Madison Avenue Marketing Group noted, “It may be tempting to mention every feature, benefit, bell and whistle, but remember to consider your audience and their ability to absorb and process information in a short time. Giving them too much to think about can cause people to zone out or even become confused.” The same is true for events, and should be reflected in your description.
Event content is more than just date, time and location, but this does not mean these are not important and should not be prominently featured in your event information. The purpose of providing event content is to preemptively answer any question someone considering attending the event may have. These key pieces of information make up the core of information attendees will be looking for when they are perusing the event listing. If you make the potential attendee search high and low for this information, there is a good chance they will become frustrated and will move on to something else.
This is where you start going beyond core information (description, date, time, location) and get into providing the supplementary information that can persuade them to want to take part in this incredible experience. Two very effective ways to whet their experiential appetite are:
Most people process information visually—in fact, the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text—so the easiest way to convince them they are in for an amazing time at your event is to show them a photo that depicts this. It could be people having the time of their life at a previous installment of this event or something else that conveys fun and excitement. The additional benefit of adding a photo is it creates an additional item that can be indexed by search engines, making the event that much easier for attendees to discover and RSVP.
Is your event being held at a waterfront park, historic building or scenic outdoor facility? Perhaps you’ve chosen a popular bar or nightclub, or a well-reviewed hotel. People often attend events for the venue as much as they do the topic or performer. By including a description of the venue, you are providing another reason to say yes to your event.
Be sure to include things like metadata and hashtags to give your event listing a more complete content profile. Event metadata includes an event category, target audience, or groups and departments with which the event is associated. Creating one hashtag for your event will make it easier to consolidate and monitor social media chatter.
Another feature not to be overlooked is allowing attendees to subscribe to your event. Not only does this help make your event more discoverable, but it will help boost attendance as people will be reminded of the event before it even happens.
All of the attributes listed above are taken into consideration when Localist’s EventReach is calculated. EventReach considers factors that impact SEO and how discoverable your events are to users browsing your calendar, as well as post-event engagement.
Want to optimize your event content to make your own events more discoverable? Request a demo of Localist today!
