Outdoor Events & Advance Ticket Sales

Press releases are a great place to create an early buzz for your event.  Press releases are also the starting point for future news articles on your event by the media. One piece of information you don't want to forget in any press release is mention of your event's web site.

Add Your Event Web Site to the Press Release
Adding your event web site to a press release seems like a perfectly obvious and logical thing to do. In fact it is so obvious that it usually gets forgotten.  Recently I had a client announce their event without including any information about their event's web site.  The event announcement was covered by several news outlets but only one news outlet mentioned the event's web site. Not including one simple sentence  about the event's web site probably cost my client a few hundred, possibly thousands of targeted visitors to their web site.

Each Time the Media Covers Your Event
Make the request to media outlets that every time they cover your event for a news story that the event web site also gets promoted. Having your web site included in a news articles or television feature is an excellent way to get free advertising and send qualified traffic to your web site. If the media outlet covering your event publishes an online article this can help boost your search engine rankings by virtue of back links. The more back links your web site receives from news articles the more targeted traffic you'll receive.

Have a Call to Action
It isn't enough just to list your web site in a press release. Try and give the reader additional incentive to visit or mention your event's web site.  One sentence should suffice. "You can get additional information at . . . " or "Purchase Tickets Online at . . ." are just a few ideas. You need to give the perspective user some reason to visit your web site beyond a passing mention.

Make Sure Your Site is Up to Date
Before you ask news services to mention your event web site make sure that your site is reasonably up to date.  There is little value in sending people to a web site that contains old and irrelevant information.  At a minimum update the home page of your event's web site. You don't need to do an entire overhaul of your web site immediately, but you should update the critical facts: who, what, when, where, and why.

All the information above seems simple and logical, but unfortunately gets forgotten on a regular basis. It is the small things that can really add up in the end. Getting news outlets to cover your event and mentioning your web site is one way of generating buzz for your event and getting great free advertising.

Want to get more great info? Check out the articles below:

• Why Well Planned Events Fail
• How to Get Them To Your Event
  
• Getting Them to Buy Tickets Early
• Turn Your Event Into an Experience
• Leveraging Your Sponsor's Digital Resources

• The Event Promotion System - Get 'FREE' Event Promotion & Marketing Video Training