As an event professional, your website serves as a digital showroom to showcase everything you offer. It's your opportunity to market your event business to your clients while they're on the go. It's also one of the best ways to make a great first impression, since most people scope out a business online before making a purchase. If your clients are pulling up your website and your competitors' websites to compare and contrast, you want to come out on top by emphasizing what makes you unique.
In today's age, it's expected that every business has a website. Organic search, which occurs when someone Googles something (types a query into a search bar), is becoming a huge winner of website traffic that later converts into paying customers. Having a website means that your business is more likely to be found by clients who are looking for the services you provide. If a website isn't part of your event rental company marketing strategy, you're likely missing out on a large number of leads for your business.
Your website also makes your party rental marketing and general business efforts more measurable. Wondering how many eyes are on your inventory? Curious to know which of your services people are most interested in? How about the number of quote requests you get each month? All that and much more can be found by digging into your website analytics. With this information in hand, you're well equipped to make even better future decisions for your business.
Either you have a website already, or you're looking to build one. How do you go about creating a website strategy that's going to work for you and your event company? Web development for a strong party planning website takes research, effort, and time. However, the results pay off when you have an influx of clients coming in because they saw your professional, polished website.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of creating a website that can be found by search engines. You've spent all this time creating a website— don't you want people to see it? SEO is one of the best marketing strategies for event professionals because:
There are many benefits to event companies when they spend time creating an SEO strategy.
Through a combination of different strategies, you and your event company can move to the top of Google, grabbing the #1 spot over your competitors.
Everything from titles and alt text, to blog posts and keywords for event management, to page load speed and backlinks impacts your SEO. Measure your success with various tools so that you know where you're acing the SEO game and where you can make improvements.
If you're not getting discovered on Google, you're missing a key part of a successful event, party, and wedding rental marketing strategy. Build your event business today with our all-in-one guide to SEO, full of easy-to-follow steps.
UX, or user experience, is a user's overall experience with a product. It typically refers to ease of use and functionality, as well as how enjoyable the product is to use. You want to design a website that gives your visitors the best possible user experience.
SEO is what first gets people to your website, but UX is what makes people stay.
The whole point of UX is to create a positive, enjoyable experience for anyone who visits your website.
Just starting out with UX? Read our Beginner's Guide to UX for Event Profs now!
UX is incredibly important for any event professional's website.
When thinking about UX, you consider everything from fonts and color scheme, to calls-to-action (CTAs), plus the time it takes for the website to load. Do you have lots of stock photos or confusing language? Both of these make for a less-than-ideal user experience. You should also ask yourself if you are giving your users a clear way to contact you or take some other next step.
You can learn a lot by running a miniature user test, in which you have a friend or family member who isn't familiar with your website explore it. While they click around you site, have them voice their thoughts out loud. What are they clicking and why? Learn what they like and dislike about the experience so that you can make improvements going forward.
You should also pay attention to your own experiences on others' websites. What frustrates you when you visit a new website for the first time? Is there anything other websites have that you really appreciate? Take a look at your competitors' sites as well, so you can see the areas they excel in, as well as the areas of opportunity.
Free Infographic Download: 6 Ways to Improve My Website's UX
A website audit is an examination of your overall website, as well as the individual pages. When performing an audit of your party planning website, you should look for factors that may be causing harm to your search engine optimization or user experience.
The benefits of a website audit are:
When you are able to find errors and fix them, your website will be in its best shape. This means more happy, paying customers for your event business.
It's important to know what to pay attention to and measure when performing a website audit. After you've analyzed your web traffic and page performance, you'll have a good idea of your business goals for your website. Do you want increased traffic? More conversions? A more professional user experience? Whatever your goal is, be sure to have it in mind when you're performing your audit.
Take a deep dive into your go-to website audit checklist by downloading this free checklist now: Website Audit Checklist for Event Profs
Websites are becoming more important than ever as customers continue to gravitate toward online shopping. As your digital showroom, your website should represent your brand and be well maintained, meaning updated information and no broken links, etc. Keeping up with this can be complicated and time-consuming, especially at the pace of the event industry. This is why smart software that empowers your website strategy is a serious life-saver!
It's no secret that the faster you respond to a potential client, the more likely you are to earn their business. In addition, the younger generation doesn’t like talking on the phone and wants to be able to shop any time, day or night. You can give them a way to get that instant gratification while still maintaining full control of the sales process. You can also enjoy the benefit of walking into your office and already having potential new revenue sitting ready for you.
We've got the solution to satisfying clients' desire for instant gratification. Goodshuffle Pro offers the popular Website Wishlist Integration to pair with your website. Potential clients looking to start the rental process can submit a wishlist on your website of all the inventory pieces they'd like to rent. A proposal is immediately created in Goodshuffle Pro, which you can then tweak as desired before sending the official quote. You still maintain full control over when the quote is sent.
Because Goodshuffle Pro automatically syncs your inventory to your website, you no longer have to worry about updating your site with new pieces. This means you save hours of valuable time that can be put towards other high-level activities. Keeping the inventory on your website up-to-date is important, so you need to make sure that it's easy to ensure that this happens. We help you with this by feeding all changes you make to your inventory in Goodshuffle Pro into your website automatically. Goodshuffle Pro users have seen up to a 95% decrease in the amount of time they spend on their website. Learn how Cam Petty, Owner and CEO of Render Collective, used Goodshuffle Pro to enhance her business's website.
Looking to completely revamp your website, or even build one from the ground up? Work with one of Goodshuffle Pro's preferred partners to create your dream website.
