Category: Marketing Communications

5 essentials for an effective event homepage

Why do websites for major community and commercial events fail the basic effectiveness criteria set by the flyer for a community center rummage sale?

I sit down to write this blog post in a mood that fluctuates between righteous indignation and profound discouragement.

We’re well into the second decade of online communication and yet we still have homepages for major community and commercial events that fail the basic effectiveness criteria established by a paper flyer for a community center rummage sale.

Unless yours is a limited-attendance, exclusive event that wants to discourage inquiries from the riff-raff, it’s essential that the homepage of your event website contain some basic information to assist potential attendees. That’s because your online visitor is busy, busy, busy and his or her decision to attend your event may well be made based on a 10-second scan of your homepage. Why do so many event homepages make that 10-second visit an exercise in hair-ripping frustration?

If you want to be kind to your potential attendees, here are five things your homepage needs to tell them:

Who?

People need to know who is hosting your event because they want to know if it’s being put together by a reputable organization or some fly-by-night franchise.

What?

They need to know what it is (beyond the cutesy, artsy, or edgy name you’ve given it, such as “Frolic in the Park”). It’s tough for event organizers, who’ve been up to their ears in planning for months, to grasp that not everyone knows the event is “all-day” or “for kids and their parents” or “free.” Yet descriptors like these are essential for the homepage, particularly if you want people to be able to describe it to third parties (aka, “word of mouth advertising”). So is cost. I’ve come to the conclusion that an organization that puts the admission price of the event on their homepage instead of burying it somewhere on a “Registration” page deserves the sainthood.

When?

People need to know when your event is. You might think that putting the dates on the homepage (“December 8 and 9”) is enough, but that’s barely a “2” on the scale of effective communication. That’s because it doesn’t include the year, and think how many times you’ve reached an event’s homepage only to discover it’s for last year’s event. How about “Thursday, Dec. 8, and Friday, Dec. 9, 2011”? You’re getting warmer.

Times are important, too. Can people go there with kids after school? Is it a late-evening event? Does it include dinner? Give the potential attendee a break, right there on the homepage. Get rid of some blathering marketing copy they aren’t going to read anyway and put in the times: “Thursday, Dec. 8, 3 – 10 p.m. and Friday, Dec. 9, noon to 11 p.m.” Whew! That wasn’t so hard to do, was it?

Where?

Particularly when people are trying to decide if they are going to attend your event, they need to know where it is. Is it convenient? Is it familiar? Or are they going to spend 30 minutes driving up and down some main drag peering at address numbers? Oddly, the “where” is the area in which most event websites rate a big zero.

Amazingly — astonishingly — many of them give no indication on the homepage of where they are — not just in town, but in the world. No, they think they are the only “Frolic in the Park” in the universe. Is your event in Vancouver? In Everett? In Portland? Do people have to hunt around for your Contact page to find out? (And then discover it consists of somebody’s email address?) If you are having an event, you need to put the location right up there on the homepage.

And just the address (including the city) is not sufficient. There needs to be lots of additional information, including the name of the building (“Town Hall” or “Mary Foster’s house”), the neighborhood (“in North Cedar Heights”), and some landmark directions (“just around the corner from Safeway” or “five minutes north of the fairgrounds”).

A picture of your location is surprising helpful if people need to identify a building when they arrive. If your location is obscure, it’s just about essential to have a link to an interactive map, such as Google Maps. If you’ve checked out maps on other websites, you’ll know that some mapping services are pretty much useless while others are helpful. Take the extra time to figure out how to link to a helpful one.

Why?

You’re all excited about your event, but that doesn’t mean everyone else is. And that’s generally because they don’t know what the benefits of attending your event are. Is it relaxing? Educational? Useful? Will they be able to meet people they couldn’t meet other places? It can’t hurt to put in a sentence to let them know. Right there on the homepage.

Looks aren’t everything

One final remark. The design of your homepage — its aesthetic — tells people quite a bit about your event. Most organizations put a lot of time any money into graphic design — beautiful backgrounds, distinctive typefaces, and eye-catching photography. Oddly, this often detracts profoundly from how well the homepage communicates vital information — the sort of information that enables visitors to decide if they are going to attend. Perhaps the most fatal design mistake is a dark or black background with all the information in white type. Many visitors like to copy and paste information (particularly that address information) into their calendars or into an email to friends they’d like to attend with. If your website type is white, and people paste it into an application, it’s going to be invisible. Sure, they could go to all the trouble of figuring out what on earth went wrong and then figuring out how to apply color in that app. But they’re not going to bother. Oops.

If you simply must have white-on-dark design, make sure you have widgets at the top of your homepage that will allow visitors to email a link to your site, post a link to it on Facebook, or tweet it on Twitter.

Bless their hearts

Here are a few links to events whose plain, simple homepages are doin’ it right when it comes to communication:

Social media — a quick guide to doing it right

The folks over at the Search Engine Marketing Group have written a concise article on how to optimize your social media presence.

If you’ve made the first steps into social media to take control of your online appearance, or that of your product, service, or event, chances are you’ve been quickly overwhelmed and annoyed by all the work it seems to require. Post here, link here, comment here…and, face it, we all have real work to do! Which are these tasks are important for reputation and search engine ranking and which are just digital squirrel-caging?

Now, we have some answers.

Kristi Hines over at the Search Engine Marketing Group has written a concise article on how to optimize your social media presence. “How to Optimize 7 Popular Social Media Profiles for SEO” makes sure you know about the basics of social media and then gets very specific about what you can do with the SEO tools on Linkedin, Quora, Biznik, About.me, and more.

If your online presence is due for a facelift, you couldn’t pick a better place to start.

Why you want to know about Quick Response codes

You’re seeing QR codes in more and more places these days. Here’s what these little square code boxes can do for your event or organization.

Did your last poster, flier, ad, or brochure have a QR (Quick Response) code?

If not, listen up and find out what these little square code boxes can do for your event or organization.

Let’s start with the great news: The (web-based) tools for generating QR codes are free. You can find out lots more about the do’s and don’ts of creating QR codes in this article from Search Engine Watch.

Now that we’re past that barrier — why would you want to add this extra step to your design process? Here are two of the reasons:

• QR codes are the vital link between print media and electronic information. They allow you to embed information — such as the URL of a web page — in a QR code (a 2 dimensional bar code). Anyone with a smartphone (with a free app such as Qrafter) can scan the QR code and translate it into text, a hyperlink, a phone number, an email address, etc.

• Think of all the things someone looking at your poster or ad might ask about your event that can’t be handled by the print version. What’s the hour-by-hour schedule? Are there still tickets available?

Chances are you’re seeing QR codes in more and more places these days. One of the coolest uses is business cards — instead of typing someone’s business card info into your electronic contacts program, or relying in a specialized smart scanner, you can scan a QR code that contains the contact information in vCard or meCard format.

The cross-training approach to social media marketing

Your forays into social media should be designed to enhance rather than undermine your overall performance.

I’m hearing from a lot of businesses that don’t really want to use Twitter, Facebook communities, blogging, SEO and all the shiny new online social media tools for marketing, but feel that they must take the plunge to “keep up.” A few of these folks are marketing newbies, but most have solid, successful backgrounds in traditional marketing programs.

Solid. Successful.

Let’s look at it this way: If you were a standout basketball or soccer player, would you suddenly want to devote all your energies to learning extreme mountain climbing? Not only is it the latest fad, but, because it is a fad, the mountains are now crowded with other newbies. They’re slowing down the paths and often plummeting to bad endings in crevasses. The sherpas are now charging premium prices to guide you (and schlep your expensive stuff) up the slopes.

Instead of putting all your energy into trying to catch up with the current fad, take the cross-training approach. Get into it strategically and make sure what you do is strongly integrated with and complements your current exercise (or marketing) program. In other words, what you do online should mesh with your existing, successful, use of brochures, ads, trade shows, signage, white papers, and other marketing channels. (This not only conserves your resources, it will make sense to your customer base.)

Consider this: If your competitors are sweating their way up the slopes of online marketing like lemmings, chance are they aren’t paying as much attention as they should to traditional marketing channels. What areas of opportunity are they now leaving wide open for you to take advantage of?

This is a great time to take a look at your users, buyers, and decision makers. It may be the time to do more speaking at conferences, take out a series of eye-catching magazine ads, sponsor events, ramp up sales calls, or use good old email to offer prospects a nice, substantive white paper. The point, after all, is to show customers that you do more for them and do it better (rather than you do pretty much the same thing as the other guys). Plus, those real-world activities will give you plenty to blog or tweet about as you ease your way into social media.

You can’t afford to ignore the impact of online marketing tools — but, like cross training, your forays into social media should be designed to enhance rather than undermine your overall performance.

“We can’t say that!” Why not?

Rand Fishkin’s public postings about the process of seeking investment capital for his company SEOMoz may represent a trend toward transparency in business communications.

I’ve been doing communications, in-house and as a consultant, for more years than I like to admit.

With nearly every client, and certainly with every in-house gig, I remember the meetings in which we’d sit with senior leaders and map out a plan to distract attention from what was really going on in the company.

Occasionally one of us on the communications team would suggest: “Why don’t we just tell people some of what’s going on?”

“We can’t say that!” was always the answer. There would be a general round of patronizing chuckles, gasps of terror, or snorts of scorn (the reaction depended on the organization) before everyone got back to the business of obfuscation.

Curt Woodward, writing today for Xconomy Seattle, describes how SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin is breaking that tradition by writing publicly about what he’s doing and thinking as he seeks investment capital for his company. Fishkin’s observations are interesting, and Woodward has made them even more so by consolidating all of Fishkin’s blog posts and other communications using Storify, an online tool for stitching together web-based information.

I don’t think that every company or organization is ready for transparency about its plans, nor are certain issues (such as personnel changes or litigation) appropriate to discuss publicly. But I do think transparency is a trend, and, increasingly, something business partners and consumers will come to expect.

2 keys to great content strategy

The first key to great content strategy is knowing the organization, its audience, and the available tools. The second key is using that information to build realistic plans and options.

This is based on my contribution to a recent LinkedIn discussion (started by Boston web designer Craig Huffstetler) about what a content strategist should do.

1. A content strategist is responsible for knowing 4 things:

  • The communications needs and expectations of the target audiences
  • The strengths and weaknesses of the available communications tools
  • The resources (time, money and expertise) the client organization has to use the tools
  • The messages the organization wants to communicate

2. Based on that information, the content strategist builds realistic communications strategies and options.

When creating those options, it is important to:

  • Resist the lure of the tools. I see a lot of content strategists insisting that organizations use the hottest social media tools and channels — even when the organization’s audience has zero interest in receiving information through those channels.
  • Build on the existing strengths. I keep encountering organizations that have committed to content plans that, in order to succeed, would require 20 times the amount of time, money or expertise available carry them out. The plans fail — and the tools get blamed (“Facebook just doesn’t work for us!”).

The hallmarks of a great content strategist are a firm grip on reality and the ability to help the client face that same reality.

When the results come in, your client will thank you.

Twitter? (yawn) Don’t bother.

Advertising? Twitter has jumped the shark and is diving for the bottom with the fail whale hot on its tail.

My clients are, of course, anxious to get the most mileage out of their blogs by teasing their posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

By looking at statistical analyses of the blogs, we can see which of those teases are actually attracting readers. It’ll be no news to anyone that in most cases, the Facebook referrals are on the way up. Referrals from Google searches remain strong, and LinkedIn referrals are stable. But Twitter?

Young businesswoman sitting at desk yawning at Twitter
Are we tired of Twitter? (Photo: iStock)

Hello? Hello? Is anyone using Twitter any more?

I realized with a shock that I’d stopped using Twitter myself. I spend more time scanning Xydo.com (“social news evolved”) and paper.li newsletters (sent to me by email) and visiting Facebook (for community and social information) and LinkedIn (for hardcore professional networking news).

What’s going on with Twitter?

News that in two months Twitter will be injecting un-removable advertising posts into my Twitter stream was the signal that, for my purposes, Twitter has jumped the shark and is diving for the bottom with the fail whale hot on its tail. Enough users already are degrading Twitter with 40 posts a day of meaningless marketing babble that managing a Twitter stream has become a royal pain; stuffing advertising into the mix will soon raise stream-quality levels to unacceptable.

Swatting the social media buzzwords

Here’s a quick guide to some good glossaries of social media and SEO terms.

Is there a skyscraper on your SERP?

Possibly. In SEO-speak, a “skyscraper” is a long, narrow ad that runs at the edge of a web page. “SERP” stands for “search engine results page.” Easy — once you know the buzzwords.

Jargon and buzzwords are proliferating among social media and search engine optimization practitioners, and they serve the same purposes they do in other realms: They provide shortcuts for insiders and they exasperate just about everyone else.

If you’re wondering about things like “link farms” and “splogs,” here’s a quick guide to a few good glossaries of social media and SEO terms:

Social Media Glossary on Socialbrite (“Social tools for social change). Here are the words and phrases used by the professionals and policy types, from “API” to “YouTube” with a convenient hyperlinked index at the top.

The Ultimate Glossary: 101 Social Media Marketing Terms Explained posted by Kip Bodnar on the HubSpot Blog. Here’s where you’ll find explanations of services like Gowalla, Kyte, and MyPunchbowl (but no Evite? Hmm…)

25 Social Media Buzzwords…Explained by Jim Tobin of Ignite Social Media. A two-part article.

SEO jargon busters — a comprehensive list from DailyBloggr. Explains, among other things, latent semantic indexing, an important concept in SEO keywording.

The social media strategist’s guide to the Geosocial Universe

This profile of the current geosocial universe will help you plan your social media strategy.

Here’s something to think about as you plan your social media strategy and think about how to invest your time and other resources for online communication. It’s from data visualization expert Jess Thomas via TechCrunch:

Check out JESS3 for more on the Geosocial Universe.

Some thoughts on audiences and marketing

Apple’s success illustrates what happens when you align your product marketing with your audience.

Good sales result when marketing activity is properly aligned with an organization’s audience.

Watching financial analysts trying to explain Apple’s performance and projections got me thinking about this equation.

Apple’s audience has changed profoundly in the past two or three years. Apple used to sell high performance computers to a small audience of UI geeks; now it sells handheld digital devices to the masses, with pricepoints ranging from dirt cheap (iPods and low-end iPads) to pricey.

In other words, Apple’s new profits are coming from a new fair-weather audience of people who like a pretty, easy-to-use, fun gadget.

And Apple’s changed its marketing to reach that audience as well as its traditional one.

This is a lesson worth studying. Somehow, Apple’s leadership has managed to avoid continuing to design products for themselves and has stepped outside of their own heads (and their friends’ heads) to design gadgets for the man on the street.

This isn’t the only reason why Apple succeeds, but it’s a key part of the equation.

I mention it because I see so many organizations these days obsessed with what key insiders think is important rather than what consumers (and their competitors customers) are looking to buy. You can call that vision, but it’s pretty narrow vision. For your organization to succeed, you need to get into your customer’s heads — and not just the dozen or so customers you play golf with.

(I have to note that when Apple gets into its customers heads, it seems to be looking at their dreams as well as their conscious expectations.)