Building a Connection: What Makes an Event Website Awesome?

The right marketing can ensure you get the largest and most relevant audience for your event – but your efforts shouldn’t stop there. You want to build 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 user conference, Cvent CONNECT, our website is a critical piece of our strategy. Like ours, your event’s website is your biggest promotional tool – it’s the first place your audience looks for key information, and where they’ll spend the most time interacting with your brand in advance of 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. This is a screen-cap of the homepage for our annual event, Cvent CONNECT. Notice that the page is simple and branding is consistent. Also, our “Call to Action,” or the action we want visitors of this website to take, is abundantly clear: we want them to register for the event. Every detail counts: is the most important information front and center? 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 promotions and marketing 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, colors and logos. Attendees should be able to immediately recognize items pertaining to your event.

What Should Your Event Website Say?

The second most-important rule in marketing: have a “Call To Action,” or CTA. Your CTA should be three to five action words (that means verbs, people!) that tell your audience to take action. A really great CTA for event marketing? “Register” – it’s that simple! Notice in the picture of the Cvent CONNECT event website above, the CTA for “Register” exists twice on the page, and entices you to click on it. 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 grab 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, how many “goal completions” (aka registrations!) are completed. 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. If page views were higher on your agenda page then on your info page, how can you utilize elements from your agenda page into your info page? Good luck and happy marketing!