CadmiumCD website experts Erin Fields and Marianne Bryant recently held a webinar on getting the most of your event website. This article brings together their best insights.
Branding isn’t just an added benefit. It’s essential to your event, and especially your event website. Here are a few reasons why:
1. Branding Creates a Consistent Experience
Have you ever signed up for a service before being redirected to a website that looks completely different? It’s confusing, frustrating, and doesn’t make you want to engage with that brand. Consistency is key in engaging in building trust with potential attendees, and cementing trust in current members and customers.
2. Branding Makes Your Event Recognizable & Trusted
Speaking of trust, great branding helps you position your event as a leader in your industry. If your branding is even slightly better than your competitor, you’ll instantly earn a leg up which can mean more sponsors, more attendees, and more clout.
3. Branding Can Generate Revenue
All of this leads to more revenue in the short and long terms. More attendees means more opportunities for selling memberships, products, and services.
4. Branding Builds a Common Theme for Your Event
Events at their essence are about bringing people together. Having a strong brand throughout all elements of the event (starting with the website) helps develop a community. Attendees tend to identify with the event theme which is usually informed by branding.
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At our very own users group, CadCon 2019, we worked hard to think through the above points.
Consistent brand experience? Check!
All the way from registration to the app, users experienced a consistent theme, colors, and images. We used the event website as the “tentpole” item so that all data and activity was centered around this tool.
Recognizable and trusted? Check!
CadmiumCD users recognized the company’s branding, but the event also had its own unique brand as well. We went with a space theme for this event and made sure that this theme was recognizable from beginning to end. But the theme was also consistent with our company branding, using a complimentary color palette and styles so attendees still recognized it as a CadmiumCD event.
Supports revenue generation? Check!
Event sponsors were listed on the website as product partners, adding value to the company brand (by offering solutions to problems our software doesn’t cover) and acting as a resource to users/attendees.
Building a community and common theme? Check!
The 2019 CadCon brand was built around the space theme, providing a fun recognizable storyline for attendees that carried through to session names and event elements (like a reception at the Maryland Science Center). Attendees loved engaging with each other through the activities built into this theme.
Let’s talk about content! It’s important to have a good strategy for collecting and sharing content in a meaningful way.
Traditionally, meeting planners would collect content via email and track everything on a spreadsheet. That just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Modern content management relies on software tools that make it easy to collect materials from speakers, track what’s been submitted, and easily publish it to your event website.
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One client restricts audio recordings to their premium package. So, if an attendee wants to access content post-event, they would need to upgrade.
This is an excellent way to up revenue and restrict who gets access to this important content.
In order to drive sales of the premium package, this client advertises the benefits on their website. They also created a flyer to display on site to drive their attendees to the registration desk to upgrade, pictured below.
This is a great example of having control over the content and getting the most out of your attendee registration.
The attendee website experience is a bit like being in a session. You want your attendees to be able to find and understand the information presented in a clear and easy way. You also want to give them tools to interact with their personalized content and share information with other potential attendees.
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Many clients provide great instructions to their attendees on favoriting items to add them to their schedule. Highlighting this feature and giving a quick blurb about how to use it is a great way to engage your attendees with the site.
One client also uses color coded tracks to make it easy for attendees to find the content their looking for. At a glance, they can see the different types of presentations being offered, and easily add them to their plan for the event using favoriting.
Events generate a lot of data. From passive data (like website visits) to more active data (like attendee feedback), it’s important to know how to collect and use this information to improve your events and websites in the future.
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