Party Rental Marketing: Build the Best Event Business Website

Section 3

How Do I Develop a Party Rental Web Design Strategy?

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.

1. Determine Overall Goals for Your Event or Party Rental Website

As an event professional, your main goal is most likely to have someone submit a quote request or get in touch with you about booking your business for an event. You may have some smaller website goals, such as completing the sign-up for your newsletter, or downloading a how-to guide. Whatever it may be, you want to direct your visitors to the proper spot to complete these goals.

2. Choose Your Business Brand Image

What message do you want to send to visitors when they’re on your website? What makes you different than your competitors? Everything on your website, from the colors and fonts, to the images and layout you choose affects a visitor’s view of your brand.

3. Create an Outline of Your Site Map

While you’ll eventually want a digital site map (typically in the form of an XML document), you’ll first start out with a physical outline of how you want your website to be built. This means drawing out the way you want your menus and pages to link together.

4. Set Pathways for Visitors To Reach Your Website Goals

If your main goal is to get a visitor to contact you to start the quote process, then you want to make that as easy as possible for them. This means adding links to all your pages that go to the contact form, wishlist builder, or landing page. This can be done by adding calls-to-action (CTAs) or hyperlinks.

5. Continuously Measure Results and Make Improvements

Your website will constantly evolve as you get to better understand your traffic patterns. Use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to measure the success of your website. From there, you’ll be able to make the best decisions for your event business.

There are lots of common mistakes that event professionals make when it comes to building a website. We’ve listed the top 10 common website mistakes to avoid, with tips and tricks to do so, on our blog. Read more here.

Section 4

5 Top-Level Tips for Website Strategy

1. Use a Flexible Platform

As a professional in the events industry, you have an eye for which pieces of inventory go together. A client, on the other hand, may be clueless. Some customers have a hard time knowing what exactly they want for their special occasion and find it difficult to visualize the event as a whole when browsing through items piece by piece. Giving your clients the ability to envision their dream event with a package of items that are often rented together is the way to go!

And, when you’ve displayed your inventory to them in the form of a package, you’ve made it that much easier for them to (quickly) become a paying customer.

2. Know When to Outsource to a Developer or Designer

When you offer packages online, you hit the search engine optimization (SEO) jackpot. Essentially, you’re showing that you offer what potential customers are looking for. For instance, if someone wants to plan a vintage wedding, you may decide to offer a Deluxe Vintage Wedding Package. When someone types “vintage wedding” into their search bar, your website is more likely to appear!

Offering packages is also great for traditional word-of-mouth marketing. When a client has a seamless experience with your event company and the packages you provide, you can bet they’ll be more likely to refer you to a friend who’s planning their next event.

3. Include the Basics

Packages are a great moneymaker for event companies of all types. When you neatly bundle carefully selected items into a complete package, this is your opportunity to up-sell! You’ve saved the client time on deciding which pieces go well together. The client doesn’t have to know you added a bit for that service— they’ll just be happy with how easy it was to find the pieces for their dream event.

4. Sync Your Inventory With Your Website

Packages are a great way to up-sell clients while giving them a way to see the whole vision behind an event. They’re a great moneymaker for event companies and are in high demand from people looking to celebrate their special days. While there are some packages that every event business should offer, you can also get creative and come up with your own custom packages. This is easy to do in Goodshuffle Pro and is a fun way to spruce up your inventory collection and website.

5. Show Your Pricing

By hiding your prices, you’re asking potential customers to make a leap of faith by reaching out to you. They’re much more likely to just go somewhere else where they know what to expect. Prices don’t scare away qualified customers — they simply weed out unqualified leads.

Section 5

All Things SEO for Events Professionals

What Is SEO?

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:

• It brings in more new, qualified leads to your business.
• You drastically stand out from competitors.
• It’s cost-effective, since you’re targeting people who are actively searching for information on a certain topic.

There are many benefits to event companies when they spend time creating an SEO strategy.

What Are Some of the Benefits of SEO?

• More brand credibility and recognition
• Higher click-through rate than paid ads
• An increased return on investment
• Constant opportunities for improvement
• Accessibility to people of all backgrounds with with varying degrees of technology experience

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.

Three Core Components of SEO

• Formatting and HTML
• Content
• Technical aspects

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.

Section 6

UX Basics for Event Professionals

What Is UX?

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.

Why UX Matters for Your Event Company’s Website

User experience is important because it:

• Engages and entices visitors
• Solidifies a first impression
• Makes it easy for visitors to complete the ultimate goal (e.g. submitting a form, sending an email)

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 Tips for Beginners

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.

The 4 Guiding UX Principles

The four principles are:

• Design with the user in mind
• Be consistent across all content and pages
• Clarity is key
• Simplistic designs are often the best

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

Section 7

Website Audit Checklist for Event Pros

What Is a Website Audit?

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:

• Improved technical website performance
• Better SEO
• More paying customers

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.

Areas to Observe in a Website Audit

You should always review:

• Content
• User journey and experience
• Optimization for search engines
• Technical performance

Take a deep dive into your go-to website audit checklist by downloading this free checklist now: Website Audit Checklist for Event Profs

The 5 Best Website Tools for Event Pros

1. Woorank

Woorank provides a lengthy site analysis report that dives into a bunch of different areas, including SEO, usability, social media, and more.

2. Moz

Moz is an all-in-one SEO tool that highlights broken links, duplicate content, issues with meta descriptions, and more. You can check your keyword rankings and your inbound link status here as well. Moz Pro is great for conducting a competitor analysis too.

3. Check My Links

This free Chrome extension detects and highlights broken links on any webpage. Say goodbye to 404 error pages with this handy tool!

4. Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider

Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider looks at your website and flags any areas that require SEO improvement. Audit redirects, find duplicate content, generate site maps, and more with this tool. You can crawl 500 URLs for free to try it out.

5. Google Search Console & PageSpeed Insights

Interested in using some of these tools for your own website? Read our full list of the top 10 free (or mostly free!) SEO tools for event profs.

These free tools from Google give you insight into your entire website’s performance. Learn hot keywords in your market, find URL errors, and identify areas of improvement for page load speed.

Section 8

How Does Event Rental Software Empower My Web Design Strategy?

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 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.