What is the best event listing site for my event? [infographic]

This week we collaborated with Richard Green the Founder and CEO of evvnt about why it’s so important for an event professional to use event listing websites to promote their event. Richard also shared with us his best practices when creating your event listing..

“What you have to understand is with 74% of customers looking for events via Google, the listing site is a fantastic vehicle to enable the customer to find the right event. In my world Google Search is the first step towards event discovery” Richard Green — CEO & Founder of evvnt.

74% of people on listing sites arrive there due to a Google search. That means people are actively searching for your events and are finding most of them on the event listing sites. The issue is, most event organizers already list their events on an event listing site at some point of time, though they do it late, occasionally and only on the targeted / local sites that have small user numbers.

So.. what is the best way?

Here’s an infographic we’ve put together which includes a list of the best listing sites via MEQUODA and their characteristics..

1. The benefits of listing your events:

• It’s Free and or AMAZINGLY COST EFFECTIVE compared to other types of media
• It’s audience is targeted
• Listing submission index well in organic search
• Event listing sites push content to mobile, mobile = cool
• Hyper localised content via the event location
• Event submissions end up in event listing email newsletters to LARGE customer lists
• Event submissions can end up in print (Time Out Mag)
• Event Listing sites drive ticket sales = FACT Check out more great tips on writing the perfect event listing

2. How to optimize your listing

• The listing title is CRITICAL — Make sure it’s compelling, informative and concise
• Content is KEY — Be descriptive and provide the public with great compelling content that shows them your event is not to be missed!
• Hashtags are essential — Make sure you use relevant unique hashtags — the hashtags you’d like your attendees/public to use when talking about the event on social media
• Use GREAT long keywords — Those three/four word phrases which are very, very specific to your event. You see, whenever a potential attendee uses a highly specific search phrase, they tend to be looking for exactly what they want to find. For example: “startup events in Michigan” or “events for students in Chicago” etc..
• Speakers and artists are ESSENTIAL — The reason you have them speak at your event in the first place is because they have substantial value to add to your audience. These figures have large, specific, communities that follow them.. For that reason mentioning them in your event listing can add great visibility to.
• Promote ONE link — Try to avoid spamming your event listing with lots of links that lead to many different places. This can confuse your audience.. keep it to your landing page (that should be your ticketing page as well)

3. So where is best to post your listing?

• Best listing sites are ALWAYS local, industry specific and targeted sites — it’s always the niche, small, personal sites who have good content or on the other hand the more established site like Lanyrd that have EXCEPTIONAL SEO and can offer great visibility to your listing through the large amount of traffic that comes to their site.
• If you want your listing out there fast, on all these sites and want a final report that includes analytics about ticket sales and revenue generated.. we recommend evvnt as they get to 100% of the available market via API, robotic forms, email and manual submission teams!
• Big tools such as Cvent, eventbrite and etouches are great, but have big extensive networks, which are not necessarily targeted to your attendee market.. so you should use them in addition to the other smaller and more targeted sites..

Most of the actual attendees who find the event have come in via a Google search.. You limit your potential reach by only having a small limited number of sites promoting the event — THINK OF THE POSSIBILITIES — DIVERSIFY!

Originally published at www.zoliro.com on August 17, 2015.