What, when, place, price

This is the mantra for any event advertising whether printed or on the web. It’s extraordinary how often one or more of these things is missing – and the reason usually is that the person preparing the ad is involved in the project and missing information is passed over.

Breaking it down

What...

Assume very little or even nothing. At a recent startup fest, there were prettily named ventures – all the usual suspects: poisonous animals, constellations, birds of prey – but little else to give away what they were trying to do. By the way, “providing solutions” is not any kind of a giveaway.

When…

Include the year! Web pages have a habit of lasting a long time (for good reasons) and just putting the day and month can be misleading a year or two later.

If you expect to start an event at a particular time and on time, build this into the time you show eg 7:50 for 8:00.

Place…

Usually this is not too much of a problem, but if you are expecting people from a distance then be explicit about parking locations (names, GPS locations, rates), public transport (which bus stop, frequency of services), bicycle security and even walking routes.

Price…

Don’t be shy about showing the price. It’s always a nuisance to have to go through to an online booking system, particularly a third-party one, to find out prices.

...and maybe a hashtag and website address too

Even if you aren't going to get into the trending topics on Twitter or Facebook, a hashtag is searchable, so it can be a good thing to have in your content.

Having the website address in the content may be a bit less obvious because the visitor is on the website (doh!). However, should they ever print off a page, then it may be useful to a reader.