Wait, Does My Event Need Its Own Website? best practices

Picture this: it’s time to start planning for that big event that your company will be hosting in about four months. You’re overwhelmed with everything you need to do — there are agendas you need to solidify, marketing materials you need to create out of thin air, and lots of tiny little details you’re worried will fall through the cracks. Where do you even begin? 

First things first, slow down and take a deep breath. We get it — these events can come with a ton of ideas and little to no direction of where to start things first. That’s why we’re here to help! 

Here at AddEvent, we like to consider ourselves experts in the world of events. One thing we know for sure is that you’re going to need to market this event — have a place to refer potential attendees, a place to advertise sponsors and a place to post the final agenda or speaker lineup. And that means it’s going to need a place to live online. 

Let’s figure out if your event is going to need its own website, or if a landing page will do. 

Website vs. Landing Page

A website is a series of interconnected pages, all published under a single domain name. Take AddEvent’s website, for example — we have a home page, an about section, different solutions pages, a blog page, etc. Each of these pages serves different purposes — some with the purpose of driving conversions and others intended to act as information. 

A landing page is just a single page of a website that was created for a specific reason. It could be a temporary or a permanent part of your marketing strategy. Oftentimes, landing pages are used for a marketing or lead generation campaign such as offering downloadable content in exchange for a person’s information or for targeted marketing to guide visitors toward a specific call to action. Similarly, they can be used for gathering event registrations.

How to Figure Out Which One Your Event Needs

Every event will be different — which means your marketing strategy and all your marketing assets are also going to change based on a couple of key factors. 

For one, your event goals. What do you hope to achieve with this event? After all, 31% of marketers believe that event marketing is the most effective tool they’ve got – but what does success look like for your business?

Here are a few common ones we see a lot:

• Gathering new attendee information for future marketing purposes & lead generation
• Selling as many tickets to the event as possible to maximize profitability 
• Creating brand awareness for new customers
• Promoting a new product or service by educating attendees

Another thing to think about is who your target audience is for this event. Is it new or existing customers? Is it a certain demographic or industry? Or, are you launching this event to do some important market research?

Once you’ve ironed out these details, it should be clear whether your event is better suited for a full website or just needs a landing page this time around. 

Situations Where a Website is Important

There are some very obvious instances where a website is the only way to go. For example, major conferences and trade shows, multi-day events, webinar series, or multi-week courses are all cases where a robust website will be the best solution. 

Consider if you’ll want room to grow this event in the future because one of the downsides of setting up a landing page instead of a website is that it can limit what you can do down the road. If you’re considering making your business networking conference an annual event or potentially growing these events into a separate business, you’ll want to use a website sooner rather than later. 

But in a lot of other cases, a landing page should suffice. 

Let’s Talk Landing Pages

There are benefits to utilizing a landing page for your event — for one, the time and money required to get it set up and live. If you can build it in the backend of your website easily, then you’re in a strong place.  If you don’t have that luxury, you will need to purchase a new website domain name, get it registered, get the pages designed and live, QA the website, etc. A landing page will get you to where you need to be much faster.

But if, for some reason, it’s not so easy for you to add a new landing page to your website, there are other ways to work around this. 

Take, for example, AddEvent’s event landing pages. When you set up a new event in your AddEvent calendar, AddEvent will automatically create an event landing page that outlines all the details of your event — and you can give attendees the ability to RSVP and add the event to their calendar from this page. 

Here’s how it works:

1. Once you’re in the AddEvent dashboard, find the calendar that will hold this event. Select the event icon to go to the Event page. 

2. Each event you create will create a unique landing page that can be used for sharing your event — it’s automatically generated when the event is first created. 

3. You can be as detailed or generic as you want with your landing page. Here are a few of our favorite examples of custom landing pages to show how you can really spice things up!

Example of an awesome landing page, built by the AddEvent team!

Another awesome example of what your events page could look like!

→ AddEvent Pro Tip: Did you know that you can create a custom landing page for your events, or you can use the standard template that we provide? On the event creation page, you will just select the template you want to use for the landing page. 

Once your landing page is live, there are a ton of ways you can use it to get the word out about your next event:

• Share the page’s URL on your social media pages 
• Link it in an email
• Hyperlink the text in a PDF file

If you want to associate your event with your website, there are also a few ways for you to do that as well. 

Embed the Calendar or Events List into Your Website

If you have access to your website and have multiple events you want to promote on it, you can embed the calendar and/or the events list to give a snapshot view of all the things you have coming up. Here’s an easy guide to learn more. 

From the embeddable calendar, users can subscribe to your calendar of events, go to your landing pages for each event to RSVP, and more. 

→ AddEvent Pro Tip: Your embeddable calendar can also be customized! There are two options: quick customization and custom calendar templates. This allows you to customize the features, default options, color, theme, etc. to match your website perfectly. Check out this cool feature to enable dark or light mode on your embeddable calendar to seamlessly blend in with your branding!

Embed an RSVP Form

Similarly, you can embed the RSVP form into your website or landing page to help boost registration for your event directly from your site. AddEvent’s embeddable RSVP forms also display all of the event details, so your users will get all the information they need about your event without ever having to leave your page. 

When it comes to finding the right home for your next event, we hope you’ll consider trying AddEvent. With customizable options and tons of built-in sharing capabilities, our event marketing platform can help you get even more visibility for your event. Sign up to try it for free!