A Web site used to be an extra — one more way for attendees and exhibitors to locate basic information about your show. Today it’s an essential and original element in the marketing mix. It offers attendees and exhibitors a way to communicate with you and with each other.

And a good Web site provides information and services that can’t be found anywhere else. Shows that are doing it right are using Web sites to create community, connect buyers and sellers beyond the show, streamline the registration process and provide robust original content throughout the year. Here’s a look at how three shows on the leading edge are making it happen.

EMBRACING THE EVOLUTION When the marketing team at the Licensing International Expo decided it was time to rethink its Web strategy, they could hardly expect the newly conceived site to increase traffic by 500 percent.

“We were blown away,” says Eric Wahl, Group Marketing Director for the Licensing International Expo. “I think we expected it to be significant because we knew our particular community was underserved online. But to increase 500 percent is unheard of.”

In Phase One of the site’s relaunch, Wahl and his staff challenged themselves to take a site that was basically an online brochure and turn it into a community-driven site that provides fresh content year-round.

To do this, Wahl and his staff decided to focus on three key areas — news, a blog and social networking.

“News gave us something to export,” says Wahl. “We could share it with our audience and they could subscribe to it. Other sites could link to it. It helped us come up higher in Google searches, and it gave people a reason to come back day after day.”

The show also made a big push on social networking, not only establishing its presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and more, but also actively encouraging and educating the community on how to get involved. “When we introduced Twitter, we sent out e-mails to give people instructions on how to get up and running with it,” says Wahl. “We linked back to an instructional page on the Web site and gave people the links to help them follow up. That enabled us to do a little bit more in marketing pushes knowing we would have the right levels of support.”

The strategy clearly worked. Last year, the site had half a million visitors for a show that gets 16,000 participants. But the bigger picture isn’t simply about numbers of visitors or page views. Instead it’s about measuring engagement.

“How do I keep people engaged?” asks Wahl. “If we can do that, people will talk about us more often, they’ll share our content with other people, and they’ll register earlier. It provides us with a good platform of numbers and information that we can feed to our exhibitors and prospects and say, ‘Hey, here’s this amazing community. Here’s the level of participation we have all year long. And you have an opportunity to interact with them all year, as well.’ It really does help push the concept that this show is more than three days.”

Wahl believes more and more Web sites will measure success by the level of engagement their visitors show. “Marketers, in general, are starting to point to engagement metrics,” he says. “It’s becoming more important than page views.” Wahl’s team measures how many pages a visitor looks at, how long they’re on the site and which of its pages are the most trafficked. “We can look at which news item was the hottest of 2009 and ask ourselves why that was so important to our audience,” he says.

Wahl also looks at inbound and outbound traffic as a measure of engagement. “I can see who’s coming in from a Facebook article about us or from a Twitter feed,” he says. “I see who’s bouncing to our magazine and who’s going out to our association partner. All of these are indicators of engagement in the community and how big our show is as far as mindshare within that community.”

For 2010, Wahl is focused on keeping the new model vibrant. That means complacency is not an option, and it’s why a second phase redesign was launched to take what was built in 2009 and make it more user-friendly.

Through surveys and analysis, Wahl and his team found that although their content was on target, its organization could be overwhelming for some visitors. So the staff homed in on four core audiences — attendees, exhibitors, press and conference attendees — and organized their content into four distinct Web sites that all feed into www.licensingexpo.com. There’s an attendee Web site that is the default, and three other buttons that take visitors to university, press and exhibitor sites.

“It was more important for us to hide the information that wasn’t relevant to you than to show you every possible piece of information we had,” says Lee Norris, Group Marketing Manager for Licensing International Expo. “We want visitors to get what they need in as few clicks as possible. We’re looking at all of our processes and stomping out friction.” Eliminating friction also meant reevaluating the information the show collects from exhibitors and attendees and making sure it only takes in what it needs. “We took our registration pages from 14 to four,” says Norris. “If you’re new to the show and we don’t have you in our system, it’s one additional page or 60 seconds. If you attended the show last year, you can register in one click from your Blackberry.”

Streamlining the site has brought results. The Web site’s registrations were up 30 percent last year and are already up nine percent this year compared with last. “It’s on us to make all this as easy as possible and to stay on the leading edge,” says Wahl.

On the development side much of this ease-of-use is expensive to implement. “The onestep registration from smartphones is not cheap stuff,” says Wahl. “But we know if we nail it, we’ll be the first to do it, and that keeps us relevant with our customers.”

And staying relevant is essential, which means this redesign will never really be over. “Every Web site should be dynamic,” says Norris. “We’re always looking at our traffic. We’re looking at who our audience is. And we’re trying to respond quickly to their evolving needs.”

“Every show should pick one thing to integrate or add new to its Web site every year,” says Wahl. “Even if you’re not doing a full redesign, add a new functionality. Bring in news through an RSS feed or post videos to YouTube and make sure those links come back to your site. It’s all about keeping it fresh and engaging the audience.”

STARTING FRESH EVERY YEAR CTIA — The Wireless Association certainly knows its way around a Web site. That’s because they design a brand new site for each show — and with two shows a year, that’s two new redesigns every 12 months.

There are several reasons behind this clean-slate strategy. First, for CTIA the Web site is integral to the show’s overall marketing campaign, and it’s essential that the Web presence is in line with that campaign. A simple facelift just wouldn’t allow CTIA to fully realize its marketing initiatives, says Heather Lee, Vice President, Marketing for CTIA shows.

Second, in an incredibly dynamic industry where technology is constantly changing, a fresh approach every year is essential.

“We do a very different show every year because the industry changes so much and so rapidly,” says Lee. “There is so much new stuff every year. It’s easier for us to just wipe the slate clean and say, ‘These are our goals and objectives for this show. This is the campaign. This is the messaging.’ Just start anew.”

Although the prospect may seem daunting, experience keeps the process streamlined and the elements that work are carried over to become the building blocks of each new site. “Philosophically, we start from scratch with each Web site,” says Lee. “We’re not tied to anything we did in a previous year. However, because we’ve been doing show Web sites for so long, we’ve gotten to a point where we know what works. And our Web company is very good at keeping on top of user behavior, what architecture works, how much is too much navigation, etc. So we start fresh in terms of design, but we carry over some of the architecture because it works, and we know it’s user friendly.”

CTIA’s current site architecture includes three major building blocks. The first is the home page navigation, which is organized into 12 links, each representing the most innovative new areas in wireless technology — everything from smart energy and wireless health to cloud computing and retail solutions.

When visitors enter the site, the first thing they see is this simple and streamlined list of topics that allows them to immediately identify the one that best fits their interests. Clicking on the link brings the user to a page that displays all the programming the show will have on just that subject. In one click an attendee can have access to all the core content that will draw them to the show and help them make the decision to attend.

“Maybe I’m in health care or I’m in the utility business, and I don’t understand why you’re promoting a wireless show to me,” says Lee. “But I see ‘smart energy’ and I know that’s relevant to my business. So I click on it and I see a whole list of programming that’s related to smart energy, and now I’ve got my reason for attending the show all on one page, right from the home page.”

Getting visitors the information they want in as few clicks as possible is essential to any successful show site. And getting those visitors registered with just as much ease is the second major building block in CTIA’s site organization. Show registration is set up like a standard online shopping cart, making registering for the show as easy as ordering on Amazon.com.

The shopping cart was Lee’s brainchild and has been a part of the show Web sites for about two years. Each element of the show — from conference sessions to keynotes to special seminars and the exhibit show floor — can be added individually by each attendee to an online shopping cart.

“The idea was that by the time people get to the registration form they may have forgotten what they saw on the site. They’ve forgotten exact names of programs or exactly what they were interested in,” says Lee. “So why not make it easy for them to build their registration while they’re looking at the content?”

On top of ease-of-use, the system also makes it easier for attendees to register for a more comprehensive package. “You get something tailor made for you,” says Lee.

The third building block of every CTIA show site is the recently expanded social networking features. The key is making it as easy as possible for visitors to share information from the site with their social networks. CTIA encourages interaction through social media every chance it gets. “On the Web site and in e-mail blasts we constantly direct people to our fan page on Facebook and to LinkedIn. We include that just about everywhere we can,” says Lee.

CTIA’s Web strategy takes the best of what works and makes it fresh every year. “We never want our attendees to feel like it’s the same show over and over again,” says Lee. “It’s important for us to maintain our core audience and for that audience to see that we’re delivering something new every show.”

A SITE FOR ALL SEASONS When Natural Products Expo (NPE) decided to redesign the Web sites for its three shows — Expo West, Expo East and Natural Products Asia — there were two main reasons. First, it was time for all three sites to have a similar look and feel.

“If you looked at each of our sites you wouldn’t necessarily know they were from the same company,” says Katrina Harms, Senior Web Producer at New Hope Natural Media. Harms and her team felt they were missing an opportunity to extend the reach of all three shows by tying the branding together. In addition, all three show Web sites were going through a complete redesign each year. It required a lot of manpower for what started to seem like little reward. “We had to step back and ask ourselves if the benefit matched the effort,” says Harms.

When the staff started the redesign process — which will be unveiled to promote NPE’s 2011 shows — stability and flexibility needed to be married in just the right way.

Before laying out new architecture, NPE sent post-show online surveys to attendees and exhibitors asking how they use the Web sites and what the sites could do better. “Our analytics showed patterns that helped us determine whether people were getting to the information they were looking for quickly,” says Harms. That data was used to streamline information in the new architecture. “We eliminated half a dozen pages,” she says.

NPE’s research also showed that the new architecture should focus independently on its attendee and exhibitor audiences, making sure that each group could easily and quickly access the information it needed without being diverted.

The other thing NPE visitors wanted was the ability to get to the most updated information first as the show gets closer. That meant making sure the NPE staff could update the site easily and in a way that organized the content based on timeliness.

The key to making this happen was to simplify the process on the backend so that it was easy for staff members to update the site regularly and to make decisions about where certain information should be placed. “We built a tool that will give the marketing managers a way to put important information wherever they feel it’s necessary quickly and easily,” says Harms.

Social media is a big part of the new design as well. There are links to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and prompts to help visitors share information they find. “Social networking has been a great place to have more conversational interactions with our attendees and exhibitors. We definitely want to promote that and help it grow,” says Harms.

NPE’s new site design is a model for any show looking to create something it can hold onto for a set period of time. It was created to be stable yet flexible with a framework that allows for tweaks and changes that will keep each of the sites under its umbrella relevant. Harms is confident NPE will find success with this because it did the research first, and it built the backend software necessary to make small tweaks easy.

Lee Ann Murphy is a freelance writer. She is the former managing editor of Event Marketer magazine.

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