Event Venues London | Digital Marketing Search Trends

In our new series of digital marketing blogs, we're going to be giving London venues and event suppliers insight into the latest trends of the planner, searcher, buyer of London's venues and events, and then how we use that data to help you engage with them.

Finding the right balance

There are many elements to look for when targeting your audience and finding the balance is tricky. Do you search by volume of searches, easily achievable rankings, competitive rankings, quality of search, number of conversions - the list can sometimes seem endless (and confusing) and it takes a lot of practice, specialist (digital) skills, expertise, clever tools, and time. The balance is like a lot of businesses I guess: try and forecast the trends and react to the way your customers behave in real time. That's the balance we're going to be focusing on in 2019: Seeing into the future and reacting to the present (by looking at the past??).

Target audience

What we do know is that our target audience is not only a varied one but is also a reactive one.

Varied because they have a variety of roles. They can be professional event planners who work within brands, event agencies, increasingly PAs and then what we like to call 'accidental' event organisers. The type of person who (maybe in a weak moment before they realise what they've just agreed to), stick their hand up in a meeting and agree to organise the company Christmas Party. They could be HR, sales, marketing, accounts - you name it, almost anyone 'could' be your target audience and that makes targeting quite tricky. And when you consider how important the Christmas party market is to the industry (check out our venue performance report, which reveals Christmas' data), it's no wonder these 'accidental' organisers are coveted. Couple the randomness of those individuals and the randomness of London's event spaces and that makes for an interesting cocktail.

What to look for

What you need to look for are things like search term, search volume, google trends data and keyword research to find out what people are searching for. Then, you can adapt the content on your web site to match those terms. Sounds easy right? It isn't! Trust me. That's why we're going to help you out by regularly providing insights from our site, which is focused on London's corporate events scene.

What we're always looking for are search popularity and search trend data, which in turn shows us the intent of the searcher. I won't be giving away too many clues as to what we're seeing/experiencing (we don't want our friendly competitors picking up on all our insights ;-) ) but we can provide some areas of key intent and therefore help you to react to the market.

Conferences

The most significant area for us recently has been Conferences and more specifically conference ideas. It's no surprise that conferences are a popular topic. We know that from not only years of collecting data AND our experience but also from our benchmarking report, which tracks exactly that kind of data. We match Google's search trends with our site trends and then ultimately the industry's real and actual data (our benchmarking report/data set). That combination is unrivalled in today's market and enables Londonlaunch to have a complete picture of what is happening from the start of the (search) process to the finish.

Conferences are one of the staple diets of the events industry, the other is Hotels. Even though there are literally thousands of alternative conference venues and ideas (see my earlier point) Hotels are still one of the go-to types of venues for events. Hotel venues always come up top in keyword search popularity. If you're clever, you could target that keyword web search query even if you're not a hotel, knowing that it has a lot of volume and intent. Be careful not to hoodwink the user though, they don't like that and will exit your site very quickly if you're being too cute.

Other popular terms

The other 2 popular terms/phrases/keywords last month were Corporate Hospitality and Team Building. Both these terms are not surprising: Corporate hospitality is still a 'thing' even after the anti-bribery act 2010 and Team Building is still very much in vogue. Some would argue more now than ever as we all focus on welfare and balance in the workplace. Everyone knows enjoyment reaps the reward and there is solid evidence to support the case that engaging and working with your workforce is unquestionably beneficial to the brand AND the bottom line.

Check out our most recent Team Building blog for ideas

Summary

So there we have it: Conference ideas, hotels, corporate hospitality and team building are the key phrases of the month.

We look forward to checking in next month

Londonlaunch, Digital Marketing team