If you are a business owner or perhaps a marketing professional, you may organize and hold events throughout the year to attract prospective customers and engage them with your brand. Having an event calendar on your site can help you let visitors know your event schedule and allow you to display important event details.
In this article, we’ll start off by discussing what an events calendar is and why it’s important to have one. We’ll also introduce you to the Event Espresso WordPress event calendar.
Let’s begin.
Article Outline
What Is an Events Calendar?
An events calendar looks very similar to a regular calendar that you can use to mark events and reminders. The difference is that an events calendar that’s embedded on your WordPress website is fully interactive and displays the events for your organization.
The great thing about event calendars is that they are usually one-size-fits-all solutions. What this means is that they’re not industry-specific and you can use their available features to:
- Inform your website visitors about events that you have scheduled for the week, month, or year.
- Provide important event details such as event name, description, start, and end date, time, and venue or event location.
- Link to the event registration page so an attendee can register for an event.
- Showcase events that are important to your business, industry, customers or community. Not all the events on your calendar have to be specific to you. Or you can have multiple types of calendars to attract different audiences.
Here are examples of some types of businesses that use event calendars:
- Non-profits. Non-profit organizations use event calendars on their websites to promote all kinds of fundraising events.
- Classes and workshops. Online course instructors use event calendars to let students keep track of class schedules and share details about upcoming workshops and seminars.
- Community events. Event organizers who plan community events post event calendars on their websites to let people know about upcoming events such as festivals and farmer’s markets.
- Business meetings. Businesses use event calendars to post details about upcoming meetings and appointments.
- Churches. Churches and religious organizations use event calendars to promote all sorts of events including Bible study, gatherings, retreats, classes, and support groups.
Now that we have a better understanding of what event calendars are, let’s look at why picking the right WordPress event calendar is important for your organization.
Why You Need a WordPress Event Calendar
Your website is essentially an information hub that prospective clients and customers visit to find out about your products and services. You have to make sure you’re presenting all of this information in a way that’s easy for visitors to find. For this reason, having a functional, interactive events calendar on your website is essential – especially if you organize many events throughout the year.
An interactive event calendar improves your website’s user experience by making it easy for visitors to keep track of upcoming events. It also increases user engagement by encouraging prospective attendees to interact with the calendar and register for events.
If you have social media profiles set up for your business, you can link to your event calendar page from social media posts and bios. This increases your event’s online visibility and makes it easy for your social media followers to discover the events you organize.
Events calendars can also help improve the search engine visibility of your business website. Through proper SEO implementation, you can make your events page rank high in Google search results for your event keywords.
Another reason you need to have an event calendar on your WordPress website is that it allows you to display both static and interactive information. If you ask attendees to register for your events, having the option to add a button or link that takes visitors directly to your event registration page is important. Your event calendar can be automatically updated when you publish a new event.
Event calendars are good for attracting audiences. You can post a calendar of your events, events that are important to your industry, cross-sell events of related businesses, or be a resource for your community.
Introducing Events Calendar Add-on for Event Espresso
Event Espresso is an event management plugin that helps event organizers accept registrations for all sorts of events including seminars, training classes, workshops, courses, charity, and nonprofit events, and more.
When you add the Event Espresso Calendar to your event registration solution, your events will be automatically published to your calendar page every time you create a new event.This way, your site’s visitors will be able to browse upcoming events (based on a date that suits them) using your event calendar and start their registration.
The Events Calendar add-on for Event Espresso lets users display events with featured images and color-coded event categories. In addition to this, prospective attendees can use the calendar’s filter options to view all events of a specific category or those that will take place at a specific venue.
Be sure to check out this demo of the Events Calendar add-on for Event Espresso.
Key Features:
Let’s look at some of the key features of Events Calendar add-on for Event Espresso:
- Interactivity. The Events Calendar add-on creates interactive event entries. While important information is displayed at a glance and on-hover, visitors also have the option to click on the event they’re interested in to launch a pop-up that displays more information and an event registration button.
- Mobile responsiveness. The Events Calendar add-on can adjust its display of information based on a user’s device.
- Support for iCal download links. Events Calendar supports iCalendar (or iCal for short). iCal is the standard method used by computer systems to transfer calendar information. Your site’s visitors can use iCal download links to save event information directly to their device’s (e.g. computer, tablet, mobile phone) calendar.
- Filtering options. It lets users filter events on the basis of event categories and event locations. This makes it easy for prospective attendees to find events they’re interested in or view events that will take place at a specific venue or location.
- Shortcodes. Adding a shortcode automatically displays an event calendar on your site’s front-end. If you add a featured image to your event, it will also be displayed in the calendar. Shortcodes make it easy to add event calendars to pages, blog posts, and widgetized areas such as sidebars and footers.
Conclusion
If your organization hosts events throughout the year, you could certainly benefit from displaying an event calendar on your website. It’ll help your site’s visitors discover upcoming events, make it easy to promote events through social media platforms and increase your event’s visibility in search engine results pages.
We recommend going for an event calendar solution like the Events Calendar add-on for Event Espresso that lets you display both static and interactive information. This way, you can direct attendees to your event page to complete their registration.
Get started with your event calendar today using Event Espresso!