Web Marketing Tips for Festivals & Community Events

TransCanadaHighway’s self-serve toolkit makes it easy for all festivals and community events organizers to provide year-round visibility for event organizations, promote and fill both paid and volunteer positions, and promote their festival’s entire schedule. Post not only the festival itself, but all component events, using a “clone’ tool to quickly post similar events, and the ability to re-use/update events posted in prior years to save time.

Festivals and community events tend to recur annually, and run on tight fiscal budgets and often with extensive community and volunteer support. TransCanadaHighway can help Festivals and community events in a number of ways, and provides time-saving year-to-year continuity of marketing effort.

Make the Most of Your PROFILE

Add an organizational listing to promote your festival on an going basis, to raise year-round awareness, not just the week before the event(s)

1. Use the Description field to state your key branding message, and NOT SPECIFIC TO THIS YEAR’S DATE. TransCanadaHighway posts festivals by name so don’t risk your listing looking out of date right after this year’s festival/events (we’ve been around for 25 years and we’ve SEEN it happen!) so link to your website for each year’s info
   
2. Use the Description field to showcase your key events and activities by name (not by date). Talk about your audience and the types of events & activities, as well as key venues and major perennial sponsors
3. Use the Business Hours field to focus on the year-round office hours, or you might state that the office has limited hours other than a month before the festival.

Other general tiops for better listings:

1. The Name field should be your legal or registered name (and acronym, if any). Please to NOT use the name field for “SEO keyword spam”
2. The Description field should state your key branding message (and describe the area and its unique qualities in up to 1000 characters)
3. Your Google Address should match the address as it is displayed in your Google listings or on Google map (at the very least # street, city, province, postal code
4. The Tagline field should be a brief “elevator pitch” no longer than 150 characters
5. Your Image Gallery can include 5 photos or illustrations of your business, product, or services
6. Your Business Logo should be a small logo no more than 500×500 pixels and preferably square or round
7. Your Featured Images should be a wide “banner” image about 1300pixels by 500pixels (or the site’s software will crop it automatically)