Tag: event websites

3 Tips for Calculating Social Marketing ROI for Event Management

Untitled design (56)Social media has become a critical tool for the successful promotion and execution of events. Justin Guinn, market researcher at software review site, Software Advice, believes that this is largely due to how social has now such a great impact on event awareness and enrolment. It also helps that most event management software options on the market offer various social tools and integrations.

Event managers are catching on to the benefits of social strategies, which explains why 40 percent of businesses are already using social media for event marketing, and 78 percent of event organizers plan to increase their use of social media in the future. But with the rise in social media usage, many event marketers are still falling short in one critical competency: calculating the ROI of their social media strategy.

According to the 2015 Gartner report How to Measure Social Marketing ROI (available for Gartner clients), only around 56 percent of social marketing leaders are calculating an ROI for their social programs.  And without proof that their social campaigns are contributing to the success of their events, social marketers will have a hard time making a case for additional resources down the line.

As such, proving an ROI on social marketing should be a priority for event management teams who market on social channels. That’s why we’re listing three tips to help you calculate the ROI of a social marketing for event planning. Follow these guidelines to build buy-in for your social strategy.

Untitled design (26)1. Track Attendance Driven by Social Engagement Campaigns

There’s no one right answer for how to track event enrolment via social channels. As a general rule, you should be tracking the number of times a visitor lands on your website from a social networking site and also the number of those visitors who convert into customers or attendees.

The most popular tracking method for social traffic to your site is to include UTM tracking codes on your hyperlinks. UTM codes are enabled by Google Analytics and require some knowledge of that platform. Google Analytics training, which Google offers for free, is a good place to start if you’re a UTM/Analytics novice.

The UTM codes themselves are attached to the end of the hyperlinks you include in social posts, and they work as identifiers for Analytics to track various valuable metrics. They offer an invaluable snapshot of traffic driven by each post.

As Michael Stancil of PracticalEcommerce explains: “You may be wondering, ‘Why do I need to know clicks and conversions if the Facebook ad dashboard tells me this?’ That’s a valid question. But with the data provided to you in Facebook’s ad dashboard, you’re only scratching the surface. You won’t see how that traffic actually interacts on your site. And if you’re concerned about other metrics (as you should be) —such as time on site, number of pages viewed and bounce rate—you won’t be able to find them.”

Regardless of how you go about it, accurately tracking the traffic your social campaigns are driving is hugely important. Proper tracking enables you to see just how much traffic each social post is driving, as well as how much money that traffic is generating. Monitoring these various metrics will make it more clear what works and what doesn’t, and enable you to steer your social strategy in the best direction for your business.

2. Recognize the Importance of Engagement and Social Listening

Tracking social-driven traffic and tying it directly to revenue is one of the most tangible ROI calculations you can provide. But there is plenty of other value that engagement on social channels can provide.

One important metric is social listening. Engagement through social listening manifests itself in many ways, but most often takes the form of responding to concerns and complaints launched by customers at your social accounts.

According to an event marketing-focused social media article from The Bizzabo Blog, there was an 800 percent increase in social media complaints about businesses in the U.K. over one year. Likewise, the Guardian reported that one in four social media users in the U.K. used social platforms to voice complaints in the first three months of 2015 alone.

Of course, you never want customers to complain about your business, brand, products, events etc. But there is a silver lining here—recurring complaints can signal trends that need to be addressed.

Even a single complaint has value, in that it organically opens the door for you to engage the customer and respond to their complaint. And if you’re going to respond, be timely about it. The Bizzabo Blog states that 40 percent of customers who complain on social media expect a response within one hour.

Your engagement, whether it’s to offer a solution, recompense or even simply acknowledge the complaint, is a successful social touch point that contributes to the overall customer advocacy of your organization. In fact, Bizzabo found that when a complaint is answered by a business, it leads to a 25 percent increase in customer advocacy.

calc3. Leverage Social as a More Efficient Channel of Communication

The third metric for calculating the ROI of social media marketing for your events is the cost savings. Social marketing is incredibly efficient when compared to more traditional marketing channels.

Take, for example, the Kissmetrics Blog’s stat that around 77 percent of event marketers are leveraging social to engage with attendees and build hype and awareness prior to events. How else would that hype have been built, if not through social channels? Emails, phone calls, print campaigns, TV and radio advertisements? These are all lofty investments in terms of additional resources, labor hours and materials involved.

Depending on your business’s size, you could potentially operate your social campaigns and manage customer/attendee questions and complaints through those channels with one dedicated employee.

The greater operational efficiency social offers can go a long way to winning greater buy-in and approval for even more resources from those in charge. Especially if you can turn a minimal-spend social strategy into an actual profit center for your business. Even if it’s only a percentage of your total revenue, it’s coming at virtually no cost to the business.

 

Software Advice Bio PicJustin Guinn is a Market Researcher at Software Advice, a company that hosts research and reviews of event management and registration software comparisons, and software for small businesses and nonprofits. His work has been cited in dozens of notable publications, including The New York Times, Forbes, The Huffington Post and TIME Magazine. His research explores the impacts of emerging software and technologies, and he has conducted primary research with both consumers and business owners to get a full picture of technology’s role in these markets today.

 

 

 

Why Your Events Could Benefit from Multilingual Websites

Choosing which event to attend is no longer restricted by borders and time zones, as delegates are increasingly happy to travel further afield for the right event. They are spurred not only by the abundance of cheap flights and budget accommodation, but by a real desire to learn about the latest innovations, best practice guidelines and the opportunity to network and share ideas with colleagues and peers from across the world.

But are we doing enough to reach delegates beyond our country’s borders?  A study by the European Commission in 2011 revealed that 90% of Internet users in the EU, said that when given a choice of languages, they always visited a website in their own language. A similar survey by the Common Sense Advisory in the US also found that 72% of consumers were more likely to buy a product or service online if the information provided was in their native language1. With this in mind and the fact that most people now research for events online, doesn’t it make sense for your events to have multilingual websites?

Untitled design (13)Why Multilingual Websites Can Boost Your Events

Multilingual sites today present one of the most cost-effective ways of marketing your events, attracting new delegates, building relationships with them and giving your organization an international outlook:

  • Shows You Care – It doesn’t take much effort to create a multilingual website (more below) but that extra effort shows your delegates that you care about them and are considerate of their needs, which makes them more likely to book onto your event. We all know that personalization is important to our delegates and what could be more personal than talking to them in their own language?
  • Builds Trust with Your Delegates – Trust is an important part of doing business. Trust in an event and the event organizer is even more important if a delegate is travelling from abroad. Communicating with these delegates in their native language helps them feel secure, understand what they are buying and who they are buying from.
  • Helps You Stay Ahead of Your Competitors – Make no mistake, your event has competition. Whether it’s from other events, alternative ways of spending budgets or time constraints, your delegate needs to make difficult choices. If they only go to a few events a year, you need to make yours stand out. Offering a multilingual website will give your event a competitive edge by demonstrating to delegates that your organization thinks, works and deals internationally.
  • Improves Search Engines Optimization – Search engines lead people to your site. While it’s tempting to view Google as the only search engine that matters, in reality this isn’t the case as in many countries, such as France, Japan and China, Google is not the default search engine. Baidu is popular in China, Acara in Japan and Voila in France. Such search engines are a key to tapping those markets unless they have access to a particular language though your multilingual event website, then your event will not be found. In addition, search engines like Google are developing the capacity to run searches in foreign languages.  Having your website available in those languages helps to ensure it will be picked up in searches.

But the Internet is in English

If you assume your delegates speak your language well enough to skip the translation step, you’re wrong. Today only 35% of the Internet’s content is in English, and this number continues to diminish. Russian, Spanish and Portuguese, for example, are continuing to trend upward with no sign of slowing down.  If you are targeting delegates who speak these languages, it is worth considering translating your content to better reach and connect with them. And while other languages like German, French and Japanese are trending down, they still represent such a large portion of the online community that it is worth thinking through your targeting approach to those markets as well1.

It’s a Lot Simpler Than You Think

Having the ability to communicate to a whole new international audience in their own language will undoubtedly bring results not only in a financial sense but also in terms of marketing and creating awareness of your event. And luckily, creating these multilingual event websites isn’t a complicated process if you consider the following basic requirements:

Make Sure Your Event Technology Supports It – Most event management or registration software these days offer a multilingual module, which allows important pages on your event website including those for registration and agendas to be displayed in several popular world languages of your choice.  By providing tools that allow you to automatically translate things like website headings, button texts, warning messages and email communication, the software helps you copy templates from one language to another in no time. Organizations like the British Council do this with their in-country events and the system has proved to be very successful.

Make Sure You Have the Necessary Staff Resources – If it’s a simple event website with a registration form that collects basic delegate information (name, country and contact details), then having staff that can speak the language isn’t entirely necessary as you can manage most of it through an online translation service like Google Translate. In most cases, however, you will need to have someone on your team who has a working knowledge of the language to oversee all translation requirements and more importantly, manage all delegate communication – from sending registration confirmation emails, making changes to agendas and managing requests.

If you don’t have the staff resources, then there are other affordable options.  You can hire a freelance translator through services like Upwork and Fiverr, that offer hundreds of talented and reliable people to work with. Alternatively, you can also use an online translation service like Unbabel, that combines artificial intelligence with crowdsourced human translation to deliver fast and high quality services to companies who want to reach international markets.

Written by Lynda Browne, Client Loyalty Manager, Eventsforce

1 Unbabel: Top Languages of the Internet, Today and Tomorrow

How to Make Sure Your Events Show Up on Google Search

What is SEO?

Google today acts as both the main gateway and gatekeeper to the Internet.  It controls more than seven out of every ten searches on the Internet.  It also stores and ranks the links of websites according to certain criteria –  and this is where SEO comes in.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) refers to how search engines determine which links are shown first to users. And if you want people to find your event when searching for events like yours, then investing time on your site’s SEO optimisation is definitely something you need to do. Some may argue that it’s an IT thing or a job for the SEO specialists.  However, if Google search is an important source of registrations for your events, then it’s far from ideal to just hand over SEO to IT and expect things to simply work out.

SEO Top Tips: How to Get Events Listed on Google

SEO with Google Search has changed so much the last few years, that many marketers aren’t sure what’s outdated, what’s important, what will make a difference and what is simply wasted effort. The reason for a lot of the changes to Google’s search algorithms is user experience.  If Google sends you to a website, they want to make sure you have a good experience on that page. They are after all a business and want to make their customers happy. From their point of view, they didn’t create the webpage but they are endorsing it. They need to make sure that people have a good experience on that page to keep people coming back to Google. Which isn’t so different in the way we run events.

Let’s take a look at how Google ranks pages and what planners need to do to ensure their event websites rank well in search results:

1. Content is King

It wasn’t long ago when marketers could use SEO tactics like link building, keywords, and title tags to make their websites do better on search rankings, regardless of content quality.  But that is no longer the case. Good, original and engaging content is key for SEO – and publishing content on a regular basis is even better. A good example of this is a blog. You can get your speakers to contribute with previews of their presentations.  Get them to ask attendees what questions they want addressed during their session or include their Twitter handles and invite people to engage with speakers directly in the run up to the event. Putting together original content that people want to share, link to and write about is simply put the easiest path to organic SEO.

2. Keyword Magic

Having a good understanding of the keywords that your attendees, sponsors and exhibitors are using to search for events like yours will help you come up with the right type of content, headlines and anchor text (more on that later) that will convince people to click on a link and check out your website.  So you’ve got to find the keywords that best describe your event. For example: if your next London event is about Europe’s new data protection legislation (GDPR), then your keywords will be: GDPR, data protection, EU data protection legislation. If you know that people are searching for ‘seminars on GDPR in London’ then these long-tail keywords should also be included in your content’s SEO strategy. To create solid keyword lists for your events, use free keyword tools like Ubersuggest and Google AdWords Keyword Planner.

A word of caution, however. Keywords are a great way of optimising your search rankings and having them appear regularly across your website and the content you publish online is definitely something you should do.  But you’ve got to make sure that your use of keywords is always relevant – too much of it risks your content being seen as spam. In fact, keyword ‘stuffing’ is 100% against Google’s guidelines and is likely going to get your website penalised.

3. Be Clever with Headlines

Boring headlines are not going to do you any favours. Neither are misleading racy headlines that bring in short-term traffic volume (especially on social media) because after the initial clicks fade away, Google will no longer see the point in driving traffic to your content. The goal of your headlines should always be to inform your reader, not the search engine.  There’s nothing worse than having a headline that’s awkwardly framed around one keyword or one that forcibly repeats a keyword phrase.

While creating strong headlines is a good ranking tactic, subheads you use on your web pages have a slightly different function.  Rather than saying pretty much what you said in the headline which is more focused on engaging your readers and telling them quickly what the page is about, subheads should focus on the keywords you want people to use to find your website.

4. Easy Site Navigation

Clean simplicity and no unnecessary clutter is what you should aim for. You want your event website pages to get to the point – especially on your home page. You want your visitors to understand the purpose of your event in seconds – you want them to feel satisfied with the information, not overwhelmed or underwhelmed and definitely not confused.

Read:  10 Easy Tips for Designing Great Event Websites

Make sure you also use strong call-to-actions at the to point readers to other relevant pages.  For example, your agenda page can have a CTA button that says ‘Meet the Speakers’, leading them to the speakers’ bio page.   By getting your site visitors spend more time on your website, you will help raise the authority of your site which will have a positive impact on your SEO ranking.

5. Use Text with Images and Videos

Google can’t see images on websites, so it’s good to give any images you use on your event website an alt text and relevant file name to ensure Google knows what the image is about. We would recommend focusing more on including the image information within the text over alt text as the latter is a small ranking factor. For example – an image providing an agenda for an event – should also be listed out in the content, to ensure Google can read it. Including transcripts for  your video content can also be very useful – the same goes for your infographics.

6. Be Wary of Pop-Ups

Many event planners use pop-ups on their websites to promote early bird discounts or other offers that will entice people to register for an event.  The misuse of pop-ups however has led to a lot of controversy over whether marketers should use them or not. Google last year announced that they would begin to penalise websites that use ‘intrusive interstitials’ (bad pop-ups).  And intrusive is the key word here. Google doesn’t penalise all pop-ups, just the ones that get in the way of someone’s ability to access the content on the page when they’re searching on a mobile device. So pop-ups that users have to dismiss before being able to access the main content of the page will get you in trouble with Google. On the other hand, a pop-up that uses a reasonable amount of screen space and doesn’t disrupt the mobile user’s experience has no implications on SEO.

7. Use Attractive Anchor Text and Meta Description

We mentioned earlier anchor-text – the text used for links within a piece of content.  These can link across to other sites or internally across other areas of your site. Google uses these links to help discover new pages and spread organic traffic. The main rule for anchor text is to use text that is succinct and relevant to the target page.

The meta description is the brief description found under the meta title – that piece of text commonly used as a preview snippet that appears in Google’s search results, right under the title and URL of your event website.It presents a major opportunity to separate your event from others and convince searchers that your event is worth looking into. So make sure to include your keywords as part of the text and more importantly, make it appealing and use a strong call-to-action that will prompt people to click on the link and come to your site. The ideal length for a meta description is 70-156 characters, otherwise the text gets cut off.

8. Have Credible Backlinks

Backlinks are basically the sites that refer to your event website. Let’s say your event sponsor creates a link on their website to your event registration page.  That’s a backlink. Backlinks that come from high-authority websites or websites that experience a lot of traffic show Google that your website has value and authority which has a positive impact on your SEO.  Consider doing some guest blogs around your event on these high authority sites (ex. industry news sites/blogs) as this will increase your backlinks – just make sure you don’t do it at the expense of quality, because, again this will cancel out your SEO efforts.

Keep a close eye on your link profile, analytics and be on the lookout for misuse. If you think your event site is being harmed by low-quality links you do not control, you should put every effort in cleaning them up. You can also ask Google to not take them into account when assessing rankings for your site by disavowing them.

Conclusion

Having a good understanding of Google’s SEO criteria can help a lot with your event’s Google ranking. Just remember that more than anything else, SEO is about the user experience.  Your site visitor’s user experience. And that experience starts from the minute they type in their search query into Google. The better their experience, the better your SEO.


Do you want your event websites to make more of an impact? Eventsforce can help you create branded personalised multi-lingual event websites in minutes.  Find out more here or get in touch for a chat!

Sources:
Hubspot: 18 SEO Myths You Should Leave Behind in 2017
Contently: 7 Keys to Great SEO for Content Marketers

 

10 Easy Tips for Designing Great Event Websites

Untitled design (84)

Websites are still one of the most powerful marketing tools for events today. They provide people with information.  They educate.  They entertain.  Ultimately, they get people to sign up to your event.  But if your website has too much information, doesn’t look appealing and more importantly, doesn’t create a sense of excitement around your event, then chances are people are going to go elsewhere.

Thanks to recent advancements in technology, you no longer need to be an expert in web design to put together a great looking site for your event.  Most event management solutions these days offer web design tools that have an abundant choice of templates that make the whole process a whole lot easier.  But speed and convenience isn’t everything.   People make conclusions about an event very quickly through its website and it’s important to make a good impression from the start.

We had a chat with web designer, Dan Auty, who has worked on event websites for companies like Peugeot, BP and The Law Society, to discuss some of the latest trends in web design and look at some of the key things organisations need to think about when building websites for their events:

Untitled design (79)1) Get to the Point!

No one really looks at a web page for more than 10 seconds, so focus on your event’s key message.  Make sure that anyone coming to the landing page of your site can quickly scan it, understand what the event is about, find out when and where it’s happening and how they can register.  Stick to one paragraph and avoid long-winded introductions – chances are people are not going to read it, especially if they already have an idea about your event through the invitation link that led them to the site in the first place. Make sure that the date, location and your CTA button (ex. ‘Register Now’), are positioned above the fold and that they’re available on each page of your site.  If you make it difficult for visitors to find this information, they will leave.

2) Showcase Your Main Selling Points

Make sure your landing page has something that grabs the visitor’s attention. You can feature a well-known guest speaker or even testimonials from celebrities or high-profile attendees that came to your last event. If your venue is in an attractive location like Las Vegas or the Caribbean, then use large colourful location shots that get people excited about the experience they’ll have around the event.  Las Vegas at night is an attractive image to a lot of people, regardless of what the event is about.

Untitled design (83)3) Use Strong Visuals

Over the last few years, websites are putting a lot more emphasis on the use of visuals like images, graphics and videos. Think about the visual draw of your event that isn’t necessarily the subject matter. You can use pictures of your event location or venue – exterior and interior shots of fancy or well-known facilities usually work well.  Or you can use images of your guest speakers or the cocktail party you had at your last event.

What you want to avoid is pictures of people speaking at podiums or attendees sitting in dingy seminar rooms.  Also, try to avoid using generic stock photos of people having meetings in boardrooms etc. –  instead, use real images from your previous events. And if you can’t find the right photo, try using illustrations in your visual mix.  You can easily say a lot through a well-designed graphic.

4) Video is a Big Deal

Video content marketing has been gaining a lot of momentum over the last few years. In fact, a recent industry poll from Eventsforce revealed that 84% of event planners are using video as part of their marketing efforts to promote their events. Videos gives attendees the opportunity to learn more about your event and they do a good job of conveying the personality of your organisation. They also are a lot more engaging than text –  Forrester Research claims that a minute of video can be equivalent to 1.8 million words!

 Videos that automatically play in the background can add a lot to a page but try and limit the ones that play with sound as it can be off-putting for some visitors.  There are many other ways of using videos on your event website – from save-the-date-videos and highlights from your last event to video testimonials, interviews with keynote speakers and informal blog-style videos that can feature tours of your venue. Have a look at this article here for more ideas on using video on your event websites.

Untitled design (81)5) Don’t Forget About Fonts

Many event websites use a particular font or typography that follow the organiser’s corporate guidelines but there are also many out there that choose their own. If you have that choice, then make sure you have think about  it carefully as the typography you decide on can indicate subtle hints about the personality of your event or organisation. Is it a fun event or a serious one?  Is it educational or inspirational?

Web designers used to be limited to certain font types to ensure that it would be supported by common browsers and devices, but this is no longer the case.  There is a large selection of fonts you can choose from – though if you’re stuck, ‘Arial’ is still a popular one as it look good on all types of screens.  You can also look at Google’s range of fonts here, which are all free to use.

6) Colour Schemes

Research from QuickSprout shows that 90% of all product assessments have to do with color. In fact, colour is 85% of the reason you purchase a specific product. So, it’s a no-brainer for any website that colour affects conversions. But colour can be a tricky thing – you have to use it in the right way, at the right time with the right audience.

Again, you may be constrained by your organisation’s branding guidelines but as a general rule, stick to dark coloured text on light backgrounds.  It looks good, gets better engagement and helps in conversions. It also has the added advantage for those site visitors with visual impairments. Sites with low contrast are difficult on the eye for most people but can be especially difficult for people with low vision – bad combinations include blue links on black backgrounds or red text on green.  There is no hard and fast rule as to how much contrast is enough, but it usually isn’t too hard to figure out when certain colour combinations don’t contrast well together.

Untitled design (80)7) Make Site Navigation Easy

Think about the user journey and try and make the path from one page to the next as smooth as possible. Avoid using a lot of drop down menus as they tend to look messy and can take up valuable space on your site.  A lot of people will be looking at your site through mobile devices, so you need to think about how it’s going to look and work on different screens.  Recent research by Tech Crunch, for example, shows that there is a new trend in using top bar menus for mobile instead of the traditional hamburger menu layouts.

Learn from your past events. Have a look at how visitors previously engaged with your event websites using Google Analytics  – it can show you the exact journey visitors took throughout the site, as well as give you some valuable insight on popular pages, conversion rates and the point at which people were abandoning their registrations for your event. It’s also worth testing the navigation of your site by someone who hasn’t been involved in building it to get an objective view on content, functionality and how easy it is to use.

8) Registration Needs to be Simple

The overall look and feel of your registration pages may depend on the kind of registration software you are using for your events. As a general rule, however, try and make your forms as clean and simple as possible. Don’t have too many boxes and don’t ask unnecessary questions. For example, don’t ask  attendees for their mailing addresses if you’re not going to end up using that information. Don’t forget, the more clicks it takes to close a sale, the more excuse your attendees have to walk away.

9) Make it Mobile Responsive

Most event websites today are mobile responsive and if they’re not, they should be. As well as giving your attendees a consistent user experience regardless of what device they view your site on, a responsive web design also helps with SEO.  Google favours mobile-optimised sites and as a result, ranks these sites higher in search results.  In fact, Google now penalises those sites that are not responsive – so all the valuable SEO your site currently has could all go to waste if it’s not viewable on a mobile device.

If your site is mobile responsive,  then it’s easy to have two different websites for your desktop and mobile devices. The layout of your screen (including text and images) can change automatically based on the detected screen size of the user’s device. So if the browser detects a screen smaller than 480 pixels, for example, it will show the Smartphone layout of your site, which doesn’t include the Twitter feed you have on the desktop version. Having the flexibility to drop things in and out depending on the screen size ensures that people are getting the right kind of information as quickly as possible, regardless of the devices they use.

Untitled design (13)10) Have Multilingual Support

Multilingual websites are actually one of the most cost-effective ways of marketing your events. They help attract new attendees, build closer relationships and give your events an international outlook. We’ve seen a number of conferences doing this over the last couple of years for – it helps them stay ahead of the competition.  It also helps with SEO.

It doesn’t need to be a complicated process either. Most event management or registration software these days offer a multilingual module, which allows important pages on your event website including those for registration and agendas to be displayed in several popular world languages of your choice.  For more information on the topic, have a quick read of this article here.

Want your event website to make an impact? Eventsforce can help you create branded mobile-responsive event websites in minutes using its simple content editing interface.  Find out more by getting in touch here.

Why Video Is a Big Deal for Marketing Your Events – Part 2

Untitled design (43)We all know how important it is to create a feeling of excitement around your events as it makes it easier to convince people why they should attend in the first place. We know that if we do this successfully, people will share their experiences afterwards and come back year after year. And video is a great way of doing this.

Last week, we talked about why online video is one of the most practical uses of your marketing time and budget (Why Video is Becoming a Big Deal for Marketing Your Events – Part 1). In this post, we’ll focus on the key things you need to take into consideration when putting together a video strategy, as well as some creative ideas on how to use videos when promoting your events.

Get Your Video Strategy Right

Untitled design (42)Start by identifying your target audience(s) and the message you are trying to convey to them. The most common mistake is trying to cram too much in or making it too sales-y. Don’t try to target everyone, otherwise you risk losing them all. Set your key goals and identify how your video content is going to help you reach those objectives. So if you want to attract last year’s attendees, then maybe make them the focus of your video. If you want to attract more delegates from overseas, then focus your content on who they will meet and what they can do in the city you’re hosting your event in.  And never end the video with a blank screen – always provide some sort of call to action, whether that’s registration, an offer or links to related material or content.

Make sure your videos are mobile responsive.  According to Cisco, mobile video traffic accounted for 55 percent of total mobile data traffic in 2015.  This figure will increase 11-fold by 2020, accounting to 75 percent of total mobile data traffic, globally.  If you’re targeting millennials, this is even more important as they are three times more likely to watch videos on their mobile devices.

Distribution is another important thing to think about.  It used to be enough to make a video, post it on your website and YouTube and that would be the end of it.  But these days, you have to think about distribution across different social media sites that can help maximise your reach. Each platform has its own creative constraints and this may mean ‘tailoring’ your content for each site. Facebook, for example, supports any length of video, while Instagram has a limit of one minute.  On the other hand, both Facebook and Instagram can play videos silently in the timeline, so you may need to think about adding subtitles to ensure your message comes across. Also, don’t forget to share your video content with other third parties involved in the event so that they can use it for their own marketing and promotional activities.

Finally, don’t forget about tracking metrics.  The success of your video campaign can easily be measured – whether it is sent via email, posted on your event web page or on social media.  You can track all sorts of meaningful data including the time spent watching the video, time spent on the page, click through rates and the number of viewers who followed through with your intended action.

How to Use Videos Before Your Event

7 Practical Ideas to Use Videos to Promote Your EventsFor some practical ideas on how to use video content to promote your event, have a look at the list below:

1.Save-The-Date Videos: This can be a great way of letting people know about your upcoming event and mark it in their calendars.  Share the video via email with your delegates, post it on your event website and on social media.  Make it fun, short and snappy.  The video-sharing service, Vine, is a good tool for this as it allows you to easily record and edit short looping videos.

2.‘Event Highlight’ Videos: If you’ve hosted your event in the past, then you’ve most likely filmed it. Have a look at this one from last year’s Sports Technology Awards. It highlights what happened at their event with plenty of B-roll footage of people chatting and having a laugh. It also includes testimonials from the many different voices and personalities. Use old videos to make totally new videos. Swap out the soundtrack and voiceover, add some new stock footage and you may be surprised with how good it turns out!

3.Video Testimonials: Again, this assumes you’ve hosted the same event in the past. Collate testimonials from different people talking about why the event was valuable for them, including some from your speakers, volunteers and staff. Going back to our earlier millennial stats, almost 70% find video customer testimonials helpful when making a purchasing decision but two in three lose interest when a video is too promotional.  So keep it simple and don’t oversell.  Focus on your attendees’ experiences and make it fun and personable.

4.Video Conferences: These can be a good crowdsourcing tool to use in the run up to your event to connect with your attendees and do some research on the kind of things they would like to see or experience at your event. A study from Eventsforce found that 62% of event planners use crowdsourcing tools to determine things like agendas and session topics, speakers and dining preferences. Though it may be quicker to do this via registration forms or other crowdsourcing platforms, a face to face informal video discussion with a select group of delegates can create long-term loyalty around your events.

5.Video Ads: This is probably the most popular form of video content used around events. It highlights the key sessions, provides details about your speakers and focuses on what delegates should expect at your event, including things like transport and accommodation.   If you are going to feature your organisation, make sure the video presents someone who is actually going to be at the events as it makes the person more approachable on the day.

6.Video Blogs: Make your promotional videos more interesting by producing informal blog-style videos. This can be things like venue tours or a list of the top ten reasons why your event will NOT be a waste of their time. It can be a list of some of the best places to relax at the end of each day or even a list of quirky places they can visit at your event destination. Ask your suppliers and see what they can provide. By focusing on their event and personal experiences, you will establish more trust with your attendees from the start of your campaign.  And by having this trust, you are far more likely to get them to read all the other content you send their way.

7.Speaker Videos: Video is also a useful tool to woo your speakers. Show them videos of your last event and speakers. Perhaps send them amusing thank you videos after they’ve accepted your invitation to speak. Give your viewers a ‘sneak-peek’ into your event by creating videos of your speakers talking about things they’ll be covering at the event and the sessions they’re interested in attending themselves.  Get them to ask viewers what topics they would like them to cover or ask them a few questions about recent trends that are relevant to your industry today.

 

 

 

 

Why Video Is a Big Deal for Marketing Your Events – Part One

Video Blog 2Let’s face it.  Video is a great tool for marketing your events. It gives your attendees the opportunity to learn more about your event and does a good job of conveying the personality of your organization. It also is a lot more engaging than text.  Forrester Research claims that a minute of video can be equivalent to 1.8 million words1.  That, by the way, is the equivalent of 3,600 typical web pages. So if you write an average of one web page an hour, it would take you 150 days of writing to achieve the impact of one minute of video – assuming of course that your content is good in the first place!

It’s true that video content marketing has been gaining a lot of momentum over the last few years. The trend first started with publishers, then marketers and now we’re seeing it become a lot more prominent in the events industry. A poll last month by Eventsforce revealed that 84% of UK and US event planners are using video as part of their marketing strategies to promote their events. In fact, the overall pace at which digital video consumption is growing right now is really quite staggering.  By the time we reach 2019, it is said that video will make up around 80% of all consumer Internet traffic globally2.  We expect this kind of growth to be reflected across our own industry as organizations increasingly try to find new and creative ways of attracting people to attend their events.

The recent advancement of technology is a big contributing factor to its popularity.  Simple animation tools and Smartphones devices are allowing people to produce slick and professional looking videos without the need for the sizeable investment that was required not so long ago. The ease in which videos can be put together and uploaded on traditional platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo has also played a part.  So has the recent surge of new video offerings from social media platforms like Facebook and SnapChat that are helping video content go viral – did anyone not see this Chewbaca Mom video last month? It has broken the record as the most-watched Facebook Live video – ever.

The impact of video on your events can really be significant. It can be a great way to generate enthusiasm amongst your attendees and equally present a really good case for those who haven’t yet registered. So if you’re doing it already and doing it well, then you’re on the right track because it will become an integral part of any event marketing campaign over the coming few years. But if you’re still unconvinced and feel that it is something that can take a lot of effort with little gain, then read on.

 The Business Case for Video Content

Video BlogWe’ll be looking at the key considerations you need to take before putting together a video strategy, as well as some great ideas on how to use video prior to an event (more on that in our blog next week).  Before doing that, however, it is important to look at why online video is one of the most practical uses of your marketing time and budget:

  1. Video more engaging than text – Compared to text, video offers your attendees more of an enjoyable ‘sit back’ experience that promises to be short and interesting. From a psychological point of view, it is said that visual makes up around 90% of all the information our brains pick up and that we process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.3 With this in mind, you can see how video can simplify your whole event communications process. It can also help overcome things like language barriers by allowing you to explain things to any number of people anywhere around the world.
  1. Return on Your Investment – Incorporating video into the digital marketing strategy of your event can be a really cost-effective way of reaching your target audience. A study has found that video converts better than other forms of digital content, with 71% of respondents indicating it performs better for them than text and images. The report also found that marketers are seeing very positive engagement rates from using video, with a majority indicating that video is a good vehicle for lead generation4.
  1. Improves Search Engine Optimisation – Video is good for your SEO ranking. Search engines lead people to your event website so the significance of this is quite important. Posting a video on YouTube moves up your search engine rankings due to Google’s high rank for YouTube. Posting a video on your event website will also help it move up the ranking pages – the advantage of this over YouTube of course is that the traffic coming in is likely to stay on your site. On YouTube, you risk attendees getting distracted by other videos instead of following your call to action – whether that’s registration or a sign up to your app. It’s best to use both methods at the same time, but it is recommended to vary your videos if you can.
  1. Expands Your Reach to Millennials – If your events target millennials, then you’ll find this interesting. A recent report from online video maker, Animoto, shows that 50% of millennials will read an email from a company if it includes a video – something worth thinking about when sending out your email invitations.  The study states that 76% of millennials follow companies or brands on YouTube and that they are three times more likely to watch a video on their mobile devices. The numbers speak for themselves.  If your attendees are millennials, then you can’t afford to ignore video.
  1. Increases Click-Through Rates – People tend to show more interest in an email or website if it contains video. According to one infographic on video marketing trends, using the word ‘video’ in an email subject line can boost open rates by 19%, click-through rates by 65% and reduce unsubscribes by 26%2. When done right, video also has the potential to boost landing page conversions by 80% – so a video on your event site encouraging people to register by promoting an early bird discount can have a significant impact on your numbers.

Next week: Top considerations when putting together a video content strategy along with some great ideas on how to use videos to promote your events

Sources:
1 Market Wired: A minute of video Is worth 1.8 Million words, according to Forrester Research
2 Cisco Visual Networking Index
3 iMedia: Why people respond to video more than text
4 Tubular Insights: 71% of marketers confirm video converts better than other content

How to Make Sure Your Event Emails Don’t Get Marked as Spam

Untitled design (19)When social media first started to make its impact in the events industry, many felt that email would no longer be the marketing powerhouse it once was.  But we are now in 2016, and email marketing is as strong as it ever has been.  In fact, it remains a top priority for organisations with nearly 72% planning to spend more time on email production and more than 80% reporting to increase their email marketing budgets over the next year1.

Like it or not, emails still remain the most effective marketing tool for your events today. It lets you reach out beyond the constraints of your event website or app and into your delegates’ personal space. It is also a very controlled experience where you, as the event planner, can decide everything from what it looks like, what time it shows up, the call to action and what kind of personalised content to use.  More importantly, it is measurable. You can analyse things like open and click-through rates and measure each campaign for its effectiveness.

But with more than 20 percent of legitimate marketing emails never reaching the recipient’s inbox, what steps should event planners take to ensure the successful delivery of their email campaigns? In 2015, spam messages accounted for 53% of email traffic worldwide2 and as a result, email providers have raised the standards for filtering which emails are sent to junk mail folders.

Your delegates’ mail servers and applications use different ways of ‘scoring’ each mail – if the score is too high, then your email invitation, for example, will be classified as spam and may not be delivered to your delegate.  The problem is that each spam filter works a bit differently and ‘passing’ scores can vary.  Your email invitation could pass through one delegate’s spam filter, but get flagged by another’s as junk. Spam filters can sometimes even synch up with each other to share what they’ve learned and this will also affect the variability of your spam score.

Unfortunately, there is no fool-proof formula in addressing this as filtering criteria is constantly growing and changing. There are, however, some basic steps you can take that will help you reduce your email spam score:

Check Your Email Settings & Configuration tin can

Your delegate email servers are likely to reject your event emails when the address of your sending server doesn’t match the sender address on the email.  So you may be using your registration software’s mail server (eg. info@eventtech.com) to send out your email invitations but the ‘sender’ address on the email that appears in your delegate’s inbox is registrations@myevent.com.

To solve this problem, contact the person or organisation that manages your domain – in this case, myevent.com – and ask them to add ‘eventtech.com’ to the SPF record (Sender Policy Framework) for that domain. This tells your delegates’ servers that eventech.com is allowed to send emails on your behalf.


Want to be a tech savvy event planner? Sign up to the weekly EventTech Talk newsletter here and get weekly updates on the latest technology trends, discussions and debates shaping the events industry today.


Whitelisting

It is possible to stop emails being rejected by your delegates’ servers by adding your mail server to a ‘whitelist’ on their servers.  This can help if you are targeting individuals from one particular organisation (internal employees) or those delegates using public mailbox providers, such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail.  The process, however, does require making changes to email servers that are normally outside your control.  It also stops working if the address of your sending server ever changes.

Do You Have a Good Sender Reputation?

The delivery rate of the email marketing campaigns you do around your events relies heavily on your sender reputation.  Internet Service Providers (ISPs) consider sender reputation as the most important factor in determining whether or not to block certain emails. It’s something you need to keep a constant eye on as it can fluctuate from one email campaign to another. Make sure you have a double opt-in strategy to ensure your delegate list is healthy and engaged, with clear unsubscribe links which will dramatically reduce any spam complaints.  There are websites than can help you measure and monitor your sender reputation, like Sender Score and SenderBase3.

Avoid Purchased and Rented Delegate Lists iStock_000067308713_Double

As tempting as it is to grow the potential delegate list for your event, purchased lists are not best practice when it comes to sender reputation. More often than not, they are riddled with dead emails and spam traps, which can mislead mailbox providers that you break the rules by sending unsolicited emails.  Your emails will end up in junk folders or you may be branded as a spammer.

Sending to a list that hasn’t given you permission can also impact your ability to market your event, potentially damage your brand and even have legal implications.  Instead, allow your delegate list to grow organically. Give delegates the option to sign-up to your list when they register for an event – this way, you can ensure that they get all email communications from your organisation for all your events.

Don’t Forget: Content is King

Spam filters look into your email content. An email containing only a clickable link that takes your delegate to the event registration page, for example, is likely to be marked as spam.  Adding some descriptive text to your email will help to avoid this.  Make sure you have informative content about your event and try to limit the use of what these filters consider as risky words, such as ‘free’, ‘buy’, ‘order’, ‘purchase’ and ‘promo’.  Also, do not capitalise your ‘from’ address or subject line and generally avoid using capitalisation and exclamation marks in the body of your email message, as these will all have a negative impact on your spam score.

Read: Top Subject Lines For Your Event Email Campaigns

Balance your image-to-text ratio – Mail Chimp recommends a ratio of 80% text to 20% images. Emails with lots of images or large images and not much text will get a high spam score. Avoid linking to images that are held on another sever as you’re better off uploading pictures into the email itself.  If you are going to use links, make sure your images are hosted at credible services only as this will also have a negative impact on your spam score.

Check Your ‘From’ Details

Your delegates’ mail servers check more than your domain and content, with some putting particular attention to your ‘From’ address.  Try and avoid frequent changes to your ‘from’ address as this will impact your spam score.  When sending invitation emails for your events, ask your delegates to add your ‘From’ address to their address books. This way you can avoid all future email communications with that delegate from ending up in the spam folder.

Lastly, try and avoid using vague field names in your address, such as ‘noreply@myevents.com’. Instead, use clear, trustworthy names such as ‘registrations@myevents.com’ or ‘contact@myevents.com’.  Stick to a limited number of these names and build a good reputation for these addresses by sending engaging emails and you will notice a difference.

Test Your Email ‘Spamminess’                            

Brandon Checketts have a tool which can be used to test the ‘spamminess’ of your email content and the configuration of your account. You can try this for yourself here.

Written by Lynda Browne, Client Loyalty Manager, Eventsforce


If you would like to learn more about what Eventsforce has to offer, take a look at a few other blog posts listed below or get in contact with out friendly team.

Call us on 0207 785 6997 or get in touch here.

1 2016 Email Marketing Insights Study (Email on Acid – Nov 2015)
2 Statista: Global email spam rate from 2012 to 2015
3 Marketing Land: Email Deliverability issues?