If you are in the business of events publishing or if you simply wish to create exceptional ‘event discovery’ then you need to bring together three core principles to create the secret sauce, its the same for online, print and even mobile – like a good cocktail you need the correct measures of each.
Core Principles
1. Data: Events data is fundamental to your business and your success in delivering a customer experience that champions all others. The challenge is sourcing the data with a credible method and ultimately connecting with the event or venue owner who supplies the event information. I find the best solutions are usually the businesses focused on niche events as this makes what is a almighty job a little more scalable.
The Good News
- Events are being created every day
- Demand for events data is ever increasing
- Data quality has been improving and the need to promote event has become even more critical.
The Bad News
- Events information is still slowly making it online
- Event organisers have over 50 event listing sites on a local level and 100+ on a global level in terms of sites to choose from with which to make an event submission.
- Data quality across the board is generally poor, even where comprehensive coverage appears in area’s such as ticketed events, the quality if information can still remain poor.
- Events expire so you need a very strong collection strategy.
Companies to watch
- SpinGo – https://www.spingo.com/
- Line Up Now – http://lineupnow.com
2. Platform: You have two options here, self build your user platform or take one off the shelf. If you are looking to build a business on event discovery you will need to self build but be warned the journey is long, hard and expensive. You will also be dependent on data suppliers and commercialising your venture has proven difficult for decades. Both SpinGo and LineUp now supply plugin’s and / or a data via an API.
The Good News
- Creating event discovery is a lot of fun.
- You have some great companies to take best practice from.
- Pre built plugins will keep getting better as the provider rolls out more features and functions.
- Platforms suppliers usually can offer just data which can give you multiple options.
The Bad News
- If you are focused on building a business, you have to self build.
- If you have huge traffic such as radio stations, TV channels then the plug-ins are quick wins to a new feature.
- You will experience limitations on what you can do or build based on what events data you have access to.
- If you take a plugin / platform you will lose a lot of SEO value and you will not have much control over how it works.
Companies to watch
- SpinGo – https://www.spingo.com/
3. Premium: Turning you event discovery platform in to commercial success can be very challenging, you options include anything from Google ad’s, display advertising and sponsorship including ad’s on your outbound emails, all of which require you to have substantial traffic.
The Good News
- Event organisers have a vested interest in ensuring the event is successful, where ticket fee’s are included you will see higher adoption to premium ad methods.
- Budgets are moving from offline, direct mailers to digital
The Bad News
- The event premium offerings over to date has not been seen to yielded results so promoters are pessimistic to premium event marketing solutions.
- Most forms of event marketing target your current communities such as Facebook, Twitter, email lists etc.
- Can be expensive or very time consuming
Companies to watch
- Eventbrite – Ticketing / Premium – http://www.eventbrite.com/
- evvnt – Event Marketing – https://evvnt.com/
- Amiando – Ticketing / Premium – http://www.amiando.com/