Creating the perfect event website can make a big difference in expanding your client base and increasing brand awareness to help your business grow.
A great event website should capture the attention of its audience, encourage them to find out more, and even get them to convert. If you want your business to enjoy long-term success and sustainable growth, you need to invest time and effort into a quality website.
In this article, we share how you can create the perfect event website to help your business succeed online.
Summary
1. Know your target audience
You can’t build the perfect website if you don’t know who your target audience is. Who is your event for? What kind of customers are you hoping to attract? When you understand who your target audience is, you can create a high-quality website that directly meets their needs and is more likely to win those conversions.
There are many ways you can find your target audience. However, below are the most effective research strategies that will help you find the information you need sooner.
- Utilise Google Analytics to discover who visits your website and to learn more about your customers.
- Analyse your social media analytics to gain insight into who is engaging with your brand.
- Create buyer personas based on your analytics data to help target your website design and content more directly.
- Survey your existing customers to discover what they like about your brand and what could be done to improve things.
2. Build brand authority
In our minds the perfect event website is one that attracts a lot of traffic, has high engagement levels, and even higher conversion rates. A lot of your website’s success depends on your brand authority. The more authority your brand has, the easier it is to gain customers’ trust.
One of the best ways to build brand authority is to focus on high-quality link building. There are many ways you can build links to your website, but some of the most effective include:
- Writing guest posts
- Creating linkable assets (such as research reports and infographics)
- Writing and pitching press releases
- Rédiger des articles invités sur d’autres sites, redirigeant vers les votre
- Créer du contenu riche qui sera partagé (comme des rapports de recherche et des infographies)
- Rédiger et diffuser des communiqués de presse
Of course, building your brand authority isn’t something you can achieve overnight. Like all good investments, it takes time. However, it will be well worth the effort. In fact, according to authority management specialists Hive19, “Backlinks remain one of the most important elements of SEO. They help grow your website authority, improve your search engine rankings, and represent a “vote of confidence” from other websites to your own. The more high-quality backlinks to your website, the more Google will see your website as an authority and rank it accordingly.”
3. Clearly share your brand logo
When people visit your website you want it to be clear whose website they are visiting. Therefore, you need to have your company logo and any brand-related information laid out clearly on your website. This is important as it tells people who you are and helps promote brand awareness, ensuring that even if visitors don’t convert into customers, your brand will be remembered.
The goal of sharing your logo and a brief explanation about your company on the homepage is to provide visitors with all the information they need upfront. This helps keep things simple, promotes your brand in the best possible light, and increases engagement from the get-go. You can go into more detail on other pages of your website, but first, you want people to know who you are and what you do.
4. Boost site load time
It goes without saying that slow loading websites lose customers. Not only that, but the first 5 seconds of page load time have the biggest impact on customer conversion rates. So, if you want to attract and retain as many website visitors as possible, you need to build a fast loading website. Some of the best ways you can make your site load quickly include:
- Limiting image and video content as digital resources like these can take a long time to load.
- Minify and combine site code files.
- Invest in dedicated hosting.
- Compress your files; the smaller they are the faster your site will load.
- Reduce the size of any images.
- Reduce the number of plugins your site uses.
- Be sure to monitor your site speed regularly and make updates.
Boosting website load time can seem like a lot of work (and it is) but it’s totally worth it. While reducing your page load time can be challenging, having a fast-loading site will have a significant impact on your site performance, customer satisfaction and retention rates. So, it’s well worth the investment.
5. Make your website easy to use
Website usability is a huge selling point for customers. Everyone, no matter their age or technical know-how should be able to navigate your website with ease and find the information they are looking for quickly. The easier your website is to use, the more satisfied your customers will be. This will lead to higher conversion rates, more time spent on-page, and an increase in customers recommending your company to others.
One of the best ways to make your website easy to use is to build clear navigation. Your website visitors should be able to look at your main menu and navigate easily to where they want to go. Keep your navigation as clear and concise as possible, helping your customers find things like product pages, blog posts, and contact information. All text should be easy to read and there should be plenty of white space on pages to reduce clutter and help users find what they are looking for quickly.
The ultimate goal of your website is to convert visitors into customers. Building a website that is easy to use and simple to navigate will greatly improve your chances of winning those conversions and growing your business.
6. Integrate online ticketing solutions
Your event website wouldn’t be complete without an online ticketing solution. Now, this is where many event websites tend to fall down. Online payment processing can be difficult to get right, causing slow-loading pages and failed payments (to name a few!). The easier it is for your customers to pay, the more likely they are to convert.
That’s why we recommend integrating WeezTicket into your website. With this online ticketing solution, selling tickets couldn’t be easier. You don’t need to have any specialist technical know-how – WeezTicket takes care of everything. You can control everything from on-site sales and event invitations to last-minute discounts and new customer registrations.
Whether you’re promoting an event for 10 people or 100,000, having an integrating online ticketing solution like WeezTicket’s helps keep things simple.
7. Integrate social media accounts
Social media is a powerful marketing tool that many businesses use to promote their brands and attract new customers. Social media accounts are particularly useful for event companies as they help promote upcoming events, personally engage with customers, and offer a behind-the-scenes look at your business.
Whether you have a large social media following or not, it’s important to integrate your social accounts with your business website. This will allow your customers to move between the two – boosting traffic to both your website and social media pages simultaneously. By integrating your social media accounts with your events website, you can increase traffic to both and keep your audience informed, engaged, and connected with your business.
8. Write keyword-targeted content
There isn’t much point in building a website that nobody can find. Your website must be discoverable online and this means you need to target your industry keywords. Everything from your website landing page to blog posts should be targeting keywords in your industry so that your website can be found by your target audience.
HubSpot summarises the importance of keyword research perfectly: “Keyword research provides valuable insight into the queries that your target audience is actually searching on Google. The insight that you can get into these actual search terms can help inform content strategy as well as your larger marketing strategy.”
9. Include testimonials and reviews
If you want your event website to stand out from the competition, you need to share testimonials and reviews from your customers. Despite the numerous marketing tactics that can be employed online, “word of mouth” advertising remains one of the most effective strategies for gaining new customers.
Including customer reviews and testimonials on your website can have a significant impact on your conversion rates. In fact, 91% of 18-34 years olds state they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family. Testimonials help create trust between your brand and your customers, they provide social proof and they increase customer confidence in your offerings. If you want your event website to succeed, including customer testimonials and reviews is a must!
There are many elements that go into creating the perfect event website. However, we hope our guide has provided you with the support you need to achieve brand success online.
Weezevent offers simple and efficient solutions for online ticketing and registration, access control, on-site cashless payment and communication with your audience thanks to an emailing and CRM tool.
Need more information on what our solutions can offer for your event?