When you’re organizing an event, advance planning is critical to its success. The plan you develop must include details about launching your event marketing and SEO initiatives early enough to have a significant impact on awareness and ticket sales.
The reality is that many aspects of digital marketing take some time to drive results, and most promotional investments take time to prepare and execute. While it would be great to snap your fingers and organic traffic from search engines instantly starts coming to your event website and ticket sales page, that won’t happen. Instead, planning and preparation are the real tickets to success for event promotion.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the event marketing opportunities and investments that will require a head start in order to drive ticket sales.
Search Engine Optimization Planning
Search engine optimization requires a minimum of several months before you’ll see any changes in the amount of organic search traffic coming to your event website and ticket sales page. Search Engine Journal reports that according to Google, “In most cases, SEO [experts or agencies] need four months to a year to help your business first implement improvements and then see potential benefit.”
There you have it in Google’s own words. Therefore, you should develop and launch your event website at least four months prior to your event and invest time and budget dollars into optimizing it for organic search traffic.
Here are five priority things to keep in mind for search engine optimization planning:
1. Search Intent
Understand what your target audience of web searchers wants and provide that valuable information on your event website. What queries will they type into search engines to find an event like yours? Answer those questions in your website content. The goal is to match your content to search intent.
2. Content
Make sure the content on your website is informative and useful for web searchers. Not only does this provide a great user experience, but it also helps boost incoming links to your site (see #4 below). Furthermore, Google and other search engines want to give searchers the best results to their queries, and a comprehensive page filled with useful information should always rank higher than a page with limited or thin content.
3. Content Length
Include enough text on important pages to help Google and other search engines effectively crawl them and evaluate the content on them. If there isn’t enough text to analyze on a page, search algorithms won’t be able to match your content to search queries.
4. Links
Use links on your website to improve your search engine results page (SERP) rankings. Internal links throughout your site help search engines understand the context of your site and content while incoming links from other authoritative websites (i.e., backlinks) show search engines that you’re publishing good content under the assumption that sites with good reputations won’t link to your site if your content isn’t good.
5. SEO Best Practices
Follow SEO best practices to ensure search engines can effectively crawl your site without finding any problems or spam flags. This includes things like confirming the page load speed is fast, no keyword stuffing, no broken links, and more.
Advanced Marketing Planning
Both digital and traditional marketing require advance planning to ensure all of the creative assets are ready, ad placements are secured, and so on. Here are five key things you should consider and complete during the planning process:
1. Timing
Knowing you’ll need to launch your event website at least four months prior to your event for SEO, it’s best to begin planning your marketing strategies at least six months before your event date. Create a detailed timeline that includes every project and task as well as who is responsible for each deliverable.
2. Budget
Determine your marketing budget, and be sure to dedicate funds for all months, weeks, and days you’ll need to promote the event. If your website is launching on a certain day, your creative marketing assets should be ready on that day as well, so promotion can begin right away. Early tease marketing is highly effective at driving early buzz about your event, which typically leads to ticket sales.
3. Target Ticket Buyer Audience
Identify the target ticket buyer audiences for your event and start building marketing lists to connect with these audiences when your website and marketing efforts launch. For example, create a list of previous ticket buyers (name, email, phone number) if you’ve held similar events in the past. You can use this list for email marketing, telemarketing, and even to create lookalike audiences in Facebook to jumpstart your Facebook advertising.
4. Ticketing Partner
You should choose your ticketing platform provider six to 12 months before your event and understand how your ticketing partner can help you with your marketing efforts. For example, AttendStar offers a variety of tools for marketing within its ticketing platform, such as the Ticket Buyer Buzz and Remind Me email marketing tools, as well as a variety of event marketing services.
5. Social Media and Influencers
Leverage the power of social media and word-of-mouth marketing to spread the word about your event. This type of buzz should start when your event website launches and tickets go on sale, so social media content and conversations lead people to your ticket sales page.
You should reach out to social media influencers at least six months before your event. These are people who already have the eyes and ears of your target ticket buyer audience. If you can work with them to help you share the news about your event, more people will hear about it, and ticket sales will likely increase.
Key Takeaways about Advance Planning for Event Marketing and SEO Success
A successful event requires advance planning, and that includes your marketing and SEO efforts. Don’t wait until one month before your event (or less) to start promoting your event. Instead, prepare for a launch of a minimum of four months before your event. This means your website needs to be up and running on that day so you can start publishing useful, authoritative content that will drive organic traffic from search engines, social media, and more.
Need help? Contact us, and we’ll help you plan for your ticket sales and marketing, so your event has the best chance for success.