Marketing with Zvents – SEO and Shopping in One

The announcement has been made, not long ago I left HP to join the brilliant group of folks creating a remarkable event search technology at Zvents. Considering yourselves Mr. and Ms. America (not Mr. and Ms. Marketer), I’d be remiss (and not doing my job) to not mention that Zvents is where you want to go to discover things to do; as an index of concerts, festivals, classes, parties, activities, and movies, users turn to our temporal and location based search technology to find out what’s going on, when, and where. Give it a shot; it truly is an impressive engine even aligning restaurant and bar recommendations with events for a complete experience.

The real question for you is how to leverage the platform to promote your products or services. When we think of events we typically think of those I’ve listed above, popular activities in which one can attend or participate. We easily overlook the fact that many of our more traditional daily activities are functionally events and therefore relevant to our product. Consider that your consumers shop during sales or line up around stores for new product releases. New home buyers visit open houses to evaluate opportunities and car dealers regularly hold special events to move vehicles off the lot. We attend conferences and seminars throughout our workday to stay on top of the latest developments and continue our education with classes of personal interests. Sales, new product releases, classes, showings, these are all events that should be promoted through Zvents as Williams-Sonoma, for example, is doing now.

As Zvents’ audience looks for things to do this weekend, their attention can turn to things you have going on in stores.

1. Submit your store location if it is not already indexed
   
2. Enter sales, product releases, in store classes, or celebrity appearances; events that attract customers

The marketing opportunity is not limited to retailers. My friends from Toshiba are a preferred brand at Circuit City; releasing a new Tablet PC is just the kind of event that will drive enthusiast demand to the store. Find the Circuit City locations and announce the date of the release. And if consumer products can promote events related to the product itself, why can’t they feature endorsed or sponsored events to promote their brand? (The Wizard of Oz, by the way, is one of my favorite conspiracy theory movies)

We all know the first destination to which most of our audiences turn to find something. A Google search for Barnes & Noble in Long Beach returns a paid BN result, a Google map and some local results from Universal Search, and there, 2nd in the SERP, a link to Barnes & Noble Long Beach at the OC Register. As a search technology, SEO is critical and Zvents content is highly optimized to ensure the best search experience with comprehensive and relevant integration with the engines. The content you submit to Zvents is so well optimized we’ll often get your brand / your store / your event, very prominent placement.
“But that is OCRegister.com not Zvents isn’t it?” Zvents even throws in promotion of your events through major newspaper and internet partners throughout the country.

With Promotion of your event, SEO, inlinks to your site, and distribution through other major publications, check out Zvents. I’m sure you’ll fall in love with discovering things to do but you’ll also discover a new marketing channel.