The Importance of a Festival/Event Name…

One of the most important decisions any new festival or event committee must make is the naming of their event! Your festival/event name should tell potential visitors exactly what the event is all about. Before choosing the name, organizers have to decide the main purpose of the event. That is, is it a sporting event, an art show, wine festival, music festival, etc? Once a theme has been agreed upon, you need to decide if including your geographical location in the name is necessary. Depending on the type of event or area, adding your location may be positive or negative. Sometimes if you have a broad based event, you might want to have a general name and then a number of sub-names. A good example of a broad based event is the Kitchener-Waterloo Oktoberfest. The main name tells where the event is being held and what the theme is, Oktoberfest. Within this great event they have a number of events. These include such events as their Oktoberfest Thanksgiving Day Parade, the Miss Oktoberfest Gala Ball, Oktoberfest Idol and the Onkel Hans Food Drive! In fact, they have over 40 different events! As you can see, all these names connect with the main festival plus they suggest what the sub-events are all about. Choosing your name carefully is not only important for event identification, but it is additionally important for event marketing and promotion! This is especially true for internet promotion on your website. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts agree that one of the quickest ways to gain page ranking on one of the main search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing/MSN) is to have keywords (your event name) that potential visitors, on the internet, will use to “search” for events like yours. This is why your name is so important. The internet has now become one of the most powerful and least expensive marketing tools available. Let’s say you live in a town called “Acme” and you are holding an art festival. You’d likely want to name your event the “Acme Art Festival”. Then when people make their event search, they will likely type in the words “Acme festivals” or “Acme Art”. If they do, your events name should be listed on the first search page. Of course there are other things you need to do to “optimize” your website, but a “smart” name is one of the main keys!