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Effective Web Marketing
Some of the most powerful promotional tools your organization has
are the events you sponsor and host. The opportunity to promote
them is an opportunity to extend your brand. People attending the
event provide another chance for you to make a good impression.
For example, at an educational institution events are beneficial
in many ways:
• They support your core educational
mission
• They provide outreach to funding
and constituent support groups
• They provide outreach to the surrounding
community
• They support student, faculty,
and staff recruitment efforts, by demonstrating the vitality of
your institution and
• They help differentiate your institution
from your peers
Getting the word out about events and activities is a critical activity.
How the Web Fits In
New challenges accompany technology-driven paradigm shift from print
to electronic communications.
It used to be that the key challenge was to post information in
as many places as possible to reach the widest possible audience.
This involved significant investments in brochures, advertisements,
calendars, and flyers. Each sponsoring group could do its own thing
based on its needs and limited only by its budget.
The web and other virtual communications tools have changed the
rules. People go to web sites for detailed and current information
— especially for events. Applying old methods to this new media
only creates barriers that will result in “a failure to communicate”
— no matter how carefully you craft your message, few will
see it.
What Do People Expect of Your Web
Site
Having an understanding how people intuitively collect information
and expect to see event information on your site is essential to
successful event promotion.
The new rules are:
• Web users expect to see the most
relevant data at the top of the page; very few users will scroll
down to find information.
• Web users expect to find answers
to information on your events in no more than one or two “clicks.”
• Web users expect easy navigation
options including:
• Intelligent and context-sensitive
browsing
• General or free text search functions
• Fielded and advanced search functions
• Web users expect to see consolidated
views at the general “institution” view and pre-sorted
views at a department level
• Web users expect the web to be
their primary information source.
• You pages are competing for the
attention web users, if you don’t meet their needs, they’ll
ignore your web site and you’ll have a hard time getting them
back again!
• Web users expect answers on their
terms and don’t care about your internal issues and organization.
Getting the Most Out of Your Web Site
With the right tools you can easily meet both these user demands
and the internal challenge of collecting and maintaining your web
site’s content! Myxa’s eventDB sets a new standard for
interactivity on your site and allows your institution to meet both
its internal organizational and work flow needs by allowing each
organization/group/department to enter and manage their own event
data — while enabling the end users to easily see and search
that data on their terms.
Myxa’s eventDB helps you remove barriers that you face both
internally on the data collection side and externally in communicating
event information to your web site visitors. Myxa’s eventDB
allows you to provide a wide range of detail on individual events
that can help you improve attendance at
your events.
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Copyright
2002-2006 Myxa Corporation
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