A savvy event and media business professional would have gone through a process of some kind of re-invention over the past months. New product development scrums, value proposition get togethers, tech stack investments and dare I say it "virtual event pivot".

The few that may still be on the fence, I suggest ask themselves a question:

“What do you have in place to protect yourself / board / investor from a future pandemic or material disruption to the live events model?”

If you don’t have an answer to that question, your business at serious risk. Times are very tough, and very likely you have been doing everything you can, I respect that.

With this post I want to help frame the thinking and share the key pillars that have to be considered when you undergo this process.

This is no longer about digital marketing or marketing automation. It's about the digital transformation of marketing, sales and operations. It doesn't matter where you started your journey, organisations need to view this as a holistic process that comprises of 5 key stages. Miss one of them and you simply won't have a robust go-to market strategy, whatever your new re-invented business looks like.

One thing is clear, in order to increase website visits in the events world you need to spend money on advertising or you need to focus on writing value adding-content that will drive free and organic traffic.

This is where SEO comes to play. Without good SEO you simply won't be found by search engines and without SEO you'll need to pay to get the traffic you need! No one really wants that. The problem is that most people think SEO requires a lot of technical knowledge. That's absolutely not true. 

At BrightBull we're pretty proud of the content we write and our organic traffic represents more than 60% of our total. We follow very simple rules to ensure we're staying current and relevant for our audience and subsequently Google.

You do not need to hire an SEO agency!
Get your team on it.

This post was updated on 24th August 2020.

One thing is clear, in the world of events to increase website visits you will need to spend money on advertising or you will need to start writing value adding-content that will drive free and organic traffic.

What is value-adding content? The term refers to content you produce for which your sole intention is not to sell but to educate, inform or entertain. In my world event generated content meets the education and information purpose by default. Event organisers should not have any issue with publishing top notch relevant content in the first place. The challenge is repurposing it efficiently to drive engagement and as a result of that engagement intiate/spark/stimulate interest in future events you have coming up.

There are unlimited amount of website developers that can build websites, the big problem is which one to choose? Almost every person I meet that has had their website developed asks someone they know or trust “Who built your website? Do you know a good web development agency?”

 I don't know how long you spent on your last B2B web build but I'll bet it was quite a while. Months if not years. So, it might seem crazy that I'm going to teach you to draft an effective page for your next event in just 30 minutes. But I am. 

A B2B event website generally has a limited shelf life and needs to materialise incredibly quickly compared with it's B2B brand, product or service cousins. It's for this reason that we don't want you spending months creating it. In short, it just isn't worth your while. Instead follow this simple method and you'll have the bones of your site down in as little as 30 minutes...

Event marketers are wising up to the fact you need to think about optimising for mobile. Usablenet have revealed that 52% of B2B customers now use smartphones to research products for their business, and mobile users now account for 16% of B2B website traffic. Those numbers are only going to increase.

Your event homepage is a really important platform for promoting your B2B event, and getting it spot on will make you stand out from the competition. There’s some cool stuff you can do, and some really innovative approaches to tackling both the layout and the functionality – but first you must perfect the content, and the elements and steps that are absolutely imperative.

These are 17 of the best examples of B2B online communities launched by event organisations, or companies with a strong event presence. Most of them center approach on simplicity. We hope this ebook serves as some inspiration, or a means to show your teams that it doesn't have to be complicated. 

You’ve spent a great deal of time creating a strong event brand – the name, logo, theme or topic, format etc – but potential delegates still don’t appear to be engaging with you online. Your event website homepage is arguably the most powerful tool you have at your disposal to market your event, and reach potential delegates, and doing it well can impact registrations enormously. So what might you be getting wrong? Here are the nine most common mistakes event marketers are making, and how you can avoid these pitfalls.

I think most of you know that Seth Godin is a big favourite of ours. One of his most popular posts (albeit 5 years old) is "How to Create a Great Website". To the point and spot on.