How To Promote Events Online, Profitably
The best two ways of generating more revenue from your events are to either increase customer base, or the revenue from each customer. The former is where the OneSportEvent promotion system can work wonders for you.
For the best results you need local, targeted coverage. If you don’t have targeted coverage, your practically throwing your money away. There is no point advertising your marathon to people that don’t run, or your triathlon to people than can’t swim. Sure, some people will take on the challenge, but your dollars to profitability ROI will be pretty poor. Undifferentiated marketing has to be very, very cheap before it’s worth spending your time on it as your better putting your money into something that gets real results.
Similarly, local advertising works best. Again, people may come from all over the world to attend you event – and those people are prepared to pay a premium – think about that for a second; but not to let slip too many secrets about that, there is no point spending money on google advertising that is clicked on by people 5000 miles away who will never come to your event. Believe me, a lot of this happens! Just this morning google was showing me adverts for a certain marathon which is literally 11,682 miles away which honestly I will not get to.
We also see a lot of event organisers wasting money with google, facebook and microsoft keywords targeting keywords incorrectly. A good example is this – say you live in a city called narnia. We often see this, but advertising the keywords as “narnia marathon” is a very expensive way of operating, because at that point the web users is a stage two buyer – they already know exactly what they want and if you’ve promoted your event enough, then they will find your website in google anyway through a natural SEO way.
It doesn’t matter if your website is on the top of google for your event or not, as long as your event is findable in the search engine, as all roads will lead back to your website anyway.
I’ve seen more than one event fail due to lack of participants and/or sponsorship, ultimately fixed and variable costs must not just be met – but surpassed by a large margin, so unless you are just in it for ‘fun’, profitability is key. Event organisers who spent their marketing money and time (and that’s a whole other blog post!) wisely will be able to increase both profitability year on year, and the really smart ones work with us to generate passive revenue in the downtime between events, which I intend to write a blog post on time permitting!
About me:
A keen endurance runner, with a MBA from Henley in the UK, for which I spent a lot of time researching and writing on competitive advantage in the online environment. I am a director for two software companies and a consulting company, and previously ran a software development operation for AUT for 11 years. I also hold a Bachelor of Business, and in my youth completed a three year diploma of computing where I was top student.
Our Process Is Unique
OneSport address the targeted coverage naturally. We are attracting a community of like-minded members from walkers through to runners and endurance athletes. However, although our website attracts thousands of visitors, we are actually building communities on local club websites and sporting blogs. This means you get free advertising right to club members, and local visitors!
Club Calendar Plugin
Over 900 clubs and blogs have already downloaded our new events plug-in, and about 300 are trialling the new mapper plug-in, which will soon be featured in runners world and cycling magazine. We provide these clubs free calendar, fitness and scheduling tools, and in turn they list your events on their websites in near real-time. For example www.wmc.org.nz is has integrated one of our components into the events tab on their website, which as I write this is promoting events and sending local visitors through to event organisers just like you.
When you promote an event in your area, we actively seek out clubs and organisations in that area that might want our free fitness tools.
Best of all, you only need one place to update your event details, and any organisation using our shared database gets the information distributed to them, and to their visitors, magnifying your exposure.
We don’t do spammy advertising on our website, but we will promote your event on our primespot location and in potentially as a natural blog post, see http://www.onesportevent.com/primespot for more information; a have a limited number of spots are available so contact us to get on the waitlist for a month that suits you.
Feedback
Event organisers have told us we have a super smart trifecta, a win-win-win for clubs, us and you – so we can all grow together. Every day we’re bringing in new walkers and converting them to runners and shortly we will be sending our visitors to local clubs as well as local events!
“Thanks for your help guys, you have made it super easy to get our event info out to new customers!”, Brendon Downey, http://www.runwalk.co.nz/
“It is a great website and event system. Really nice to post an event compared to some. It looks great and awesome to be able to pop our Wild Turkey images up.”, Shaun Collins, http://www.lacticturkey.co.nz/
Tips for promoting events
Visit your event page and click ‘reccomend’ to reccomend your own event. We’ve found that people don’t like to to be the first person to reccomend an event but if someone has reccomended it, or better, get a few of your friends to also reccomend.. then they are more likely to reccomend it to their friends, which is what you want for extra coverage.
Create a course map. Course maps are independantly promoted on a seperate network of websites using our mapping tool so you can double your exposure and target different sites to – for example we have hikers sites and even tourist information directories (we didn’t anticipate this!) using the mapping and routes tool to promote interesting routes or walks in their area.
To promote your events now, please visit http://www.onesportevent.com/promote-event
Leave a Reply
Loading ...