There is nothing worse than planning an event and having nobody show. It’s something that event planners have been dreading for years and it’s where EventKloud is coming to the rescue. The company provides a complete suite of products and applications that allow events and the people in charge of them to make sure people show up and have everything they need before, during and after the event.
It can be a lot of work to market an event. All of that work probably won’t disappear if you use EventKloud, but it’s possible that your workload could be reduced and that you could reach more people by using the service.
So that’s EventKloud for its users. I’m going to look at this new startup from a business blogging perspective. The company is already doing some great things on their blog to attract new potential customers. I’m going to look at a few of the good things they’re doing. Hopefully it can serve as inspiration for your own business blog.
1. Combining Customer Questions And Trends
Twitter has been around for a few years now. It’s hard to believe how it’s evolved over that time while still staying relatively the same, simple app, but this isn’t about that aspect of Twitter.
Twitter remains a trend in the business and marketing world. And EventKloud combined the Twitter trend with something that its customers are probably asking about – live tweeting events.
If you’ve attended a conference or another type of event you may have followed the event’s hashtag or the official Twitter account. When there is a speaker or while another event is happening it’s common to see regular up-to-the-second updates on Twitter. It’s one of the cool ways people have adapted to use Twitter.
I’ve done this at business events to make sure I don’t miss important things from speakers. But I also follow a few writers during Green Bay Packer games. They see things I miss.
EventKloud provided some great tips in this post on Live Tweeting.
A big key to successful business blogging is focusing on the questions your customers care about. It makes sense that event coordinators would be curious about how to improve their live tweeting and EventKloud provided great guidance.
2. Newsletter Signup
When you first arrive on the blog you’ll notice a few calls to action for the EventKloud newsletter. There is a bar at the top and a small pop-up. It’s a great tactic to use on a business blog.
Blog posts are often the first touchpoint a potential customer will have with your brand. They’re looking for an answer to an industry question they have. So they want to get to the content and if you do a good job providing the answer they’re going to want more. It makes sense to ask them to signup for future content via a newsletter. It can work better than sending them to your contact page or to your services page.
3. White Paper And Course Signups
To build on the idea of getting people to signup via a newsletter, EventKloud also offers other content as more enticement to signup for an email program. Visitors can get a free course on doubling engagement at events and a white paper (not sure if they’re the same thing).
This is a tactic I see many companies doing on their blogs and it’s a great tactic. You will get some people to signup with the enticement of more great blog posts in the future, but you can get even more if you offer something right away like a course, white paper or guide.
4. How To Content > Why Content
This is a great post on how to get more press coverage for your event. The key to that is the how to part of the title. The entire post has tips on exactly what readers can and should do to get more press to increase attendance and awareness for their next event.
People like how to content. They can be convinced that they should do something, but that’s the easy part. You can tell someone to do something, but by giving them step-by-step instructions you’re giving them something actionable that they can do. This saves them the time of figuring out how to do it for themselves.
Your business blog becomes much more valuable when you move beyond the why content and into the how to content.
5. Creating A Calendar And Brainstorming Many Ideas
EventKloud seemed to be posting pretty often leading up to July of this year. Then things got quiet on the blog until recently. It’s great that they’re back in the swing of things.
It’s not uncommon to see business blogs kind of go quiet for months at a time. It’s especially common with startups because businesses are busy. There are always things to do and it’s hard to prioritize blogging.
What we use at GBW to help with this is the process of creating a content calendar. We call it a schedule and each of our clients has one. We create it for them and it’s really for whoever is doing the writing for the blog. But you can use it to work with whoever needs to approve the content.
The calendar is one part, but you have to fill it in with ideas. Many businesses and bloggers get hung up with coming up with ideas. They sit down because they need a post for tomorrow and they sit there trying to think of something to write.
We separate that process and it works well. We create the schedule and brainstorm a few months worth of posts titles and ideas. We discuss and finalize these and add them to the schedule. This way you can login and start writing because you already have the idea.
When we get down to about a month left of titles we do the brainstorming again.
Final Thoughts
EventKloud seems to have a service that is really needed. There are all kinds of events out there that people need to hear about. And EventKloud is making it easier for event planners and coordinators to market the events they are in charge of, which is great.
And EventKloud is doing great things with their business blog. I can see them really connecting with that event planner and coordinator and becoming an authority in the industry. I hope they keep moving in that direction because they’re already off to a great start.