Linda Sparks | Successful Event Promoting

Promotional Power from Within

January 4, 2011 By Linda Sparks Leave a Comment

Paul is technically “the organizer” but he’s not in charge of promotion. Promotion is someone else’s job. Clearly though he has oversight for the area and a tremendous amount of interest. Let’s face it, as organizer he can plan and organize a remarkable event, but if ultimately it is poorly attended, his hard work (and major investments in programming) will be underappreciated. AND without adequate ticket sales, net proceeds will be weak, and that puts next year’s event into jeopardy as well.

The set up….

I want to thank my friend Paul King, Executive Director for Victory Days for the inspiration for this blog post…Perhaps I’ll even get a series of posts out of this thread. We’ll see how far we get on the topic with this post and what remains to be discussed. Your comments will help to guide the future of the discussion.

I want to share the declaration that I’m truly committed to being-of-service to event organizers through this blog site. So recently, when I was experiencing a bout of writer’s block, I reached out to Paul for some problems to help solve. I love to help solve problems so this got my juices flowing.

So here’s our working topic….If Paul’s not the promotions guy, what’s his practical role in successful event promoting?

One of the first things that come to my mind is the organizer’s role in selecting and shaping attractions. Paul is in a unique position to select and shape individual attractions which contain the maximum amount of promotional attributes …I call these promotional attributes Attractor Factors™ and believe they play a practical role in achieving the attendance and ticket sales goals of your event.

To gain promotional perspective, it is useful to divide attendance goals by the number of major attractions and come up with a benchmark number. An attendance goal of 40,000, divided by say 10 key attractions, means you should select and shape each attraction to attract a minimum of 4000 visitors through each special interest group (SIGs).

I did some research for a client once to enhance the Attractor Factors™ for car shows. I learned that a typical community car show will attract in the neighborhood of 3000 visitors. But if you include a cool vehicle available for sale, promote a celebrity appearance, and feature a vehicle from the period that is famous or notorious, you can potentially triple the number of collectors and hobbyists you might otherwise attract. That’s pretty cool! Every weekend, car enthusiasts have many shows to choose from around the region. More of them will select your event, even if it is a bit further away, if you give them enough stand-out reasons!

If Paul increases the Attractor Factors™ of 5 or more of their featured attractions, he just might qualify for the promoter of the year award!

So select some outstanding food and beverage options, because great food always attracts, heap on the hospitality options because you know people love to be catered to, and seek out the kid friendly components that match your event theme because Mom’s buy most of the family entertainment packages and they know what it takes to impress the kiddos.

There’s definitely more to say on this topic so we’ll pick up here next time. Paul and I would love to hear your thoughts so please join in the conversation. We look forward to your comments.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: attractor factors, car show, event promoting, event promotions, kid friendly, promotional power

7 Steps to REALITY in Event Promotions

December 28, 2010 By Linda Sparks Leave a Comment

Many events are organized and produced by volunteers, hobbyists, and a string of paid or trade contractors operating in small niches or silos.

And…regardless of how great the cause or exciting the theme, there are always a lot of distractions. It’s called Life! Whether the distractions are day jobs and family or conflicts and time warps the results are often the same:

Fewer visitors than hoped for,
Less revenue than expected from all profit centers,
Inadequate proceeds to distribute to worthy causes, and
Increased sustainability risks that put your event’s future at stake

Improve your odds of getting great results by developing and implementing a strategic promotions plan for your big event. I recommend a REALITY based approach that will help rally the troops around the right stuff!

Establish a plan that is completely RELEVANT to your goals and the purpose of your event.
Your selling system will be more EFFICIENT if you take an inventory of all your event assets and put them to work helping you sell more tickets.
Make sure that all of your promotional tactics are ALIGNED for maximum return on investment.
LEVERAGE is critical for tapping into the synergy inherent in all of your event income streams.
Being genuinely INSIGHTFUL about event marketing will position your organization as a trusted community partner.
Attracting your ideal TARGETS can simplify your marketing immensely.
Getting to YES, with adequate frequency is what it’s all about, so concentrate on your best channels of opportunity, measure what matters, and celebrate success!

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: channels of opportunity, event income streams, event marketing, measure what matters, Reality

Liar, Liar Pants on Fire

December 1, 2010 By Linda Sparks Leave a Comment

Why is it that so many events claim to be about raising money for worthy causes, but don’t actually distribute more than a token amount?

Are they liars or failures?

I think the determination is simple, but you guys decide for yourself.

If organizers are planning from the beginning to co-op the public’s goodwill toward a worthy cause and to coax community support for their own event by-way-of sponsors, visitors, and suppliers –without an equal commitment to generating adequate proceeds to share, do you think they are liars or failures?

If an organization performs poorly in the process of planning, organizing and implementing a financially successful event and there are no significant proceeds (profits) available to share with their designated causes, are they failures or liars?

This may seem a harsh perspective to some, but I hope you’ll try to see it as a practical reality check!

Cause Marketing, as a practice, is an honest, respectable, and productive element of a strategic marketing mix –especially for events.

To ensure compliance with the “respectability” standard (honesty), it is critical that an organization is truly committed to producing a profitable event and consistently allocating a reasonable contribution to the designated causes.

To avoid failure every event should strive for a balance of power that includes: (a) generating sufficient revenues to ensure charity donations, financial reserve, adequate operating budgets, (b) producing an excellent entertainment experience, (c) maintaining the standards of a high-performance organization acting as good stewards of all the resources the community provides

Sustainability of your event, and that of your designated charitable causes, lies in the balance of power that you build into your Strategic Roadmap. Set a good course and enjoy the ride!

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: cause marketing, community support, event proceeds, strategic roadmap, sustainability

Getting Volunteers Involved in Promotions

December 1, 2010 By Linda Sparks Leave a Comment

Volunteers make passionate fans. They are often emotionally involved with your subject matter or your charitable causes and are therefore, well-positioned to be major influencers for the event. They have large personal and professional networks of their own and now with social media tools…a platform for their voice!

Some practical goals for this unique group of influence are…

Directing traffic to the event website

Building opt-in lists for event updates

Generating warm leads for group ticket sales

Putting a familiar face on a particular sponsor development proposal

Becoming the subject of a human interest story—or helping to identify others that would draw interest from far flung media outlets

Develop a communication plan to provide volunteers with promotional information and specific calls to action on a weekly or monthly basis. For best results, keep this promo oriented outreach separate from operation updates. We need everyone involved with your event to accept their personal role in the promotional process.

Create the promo tools in advance specifically for this key audience such as:

Website and link to opt-in list

Copy and paste email signature messages

Forward ready e-mail offers designed to share with others

Pre-approved blocks of content in order for your event to be represented consistently

Volunteers are typically involved in your event for personal reasons. These reasons can lead to opportunities to tell human interest stories. An event with a broad geographic appeal can use these volunteer human interest stories to garner media coverage in multiple markets. Work to identify a number of volunteers with interesting stories and ties to various media markets.

Volunteers can naturally become discouraged when important promo tools are not available when needed. Respect the time and energy of the key audiences your event counts on; this will exponentially increase your sustainability.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: communication plan, event, promo tools, sponsor development, volunteers

Developing the Communication Plan

December 1, 2010 By Linda Sparks Leave a Comment

……Part 3 in the Beyond the Press Release series

Hopefully, you’ve built a strong list of groups of influence (key publics) for your event and established some serious expectations (goals) for each specific group. I promise you that these groups are going to be big help in reaching your event’s ideal targets, so it’s critical to reach out to each of them in meaningful ways.

Develop a specific communications plan for each group of influence. You’ll need a communications task and timeline that encompasses your event’s 12-month promotion cycle. Get into the habit of sharing relevant information and resources with your groups of influence early in the event cycle and they will be able to do more for you. Remember they have deadlines of their own and it’s always easier if they don’t have to squeeze you into their outreach at the last minute.

Give consideration to an appropriate level of depth and frequency? What types of information would each group find interesting or relevant? Your communication plans will be based specifically on the goals you established for each group.

Gather the supporting documents and collaterals (promo tools) you’ll need in order to maximize your impact with each key audience. Your event promotion team is creating a tremendous amount of promotional material and collateral, you should maximize it by sharing it with all your groups of influence. I always like to create a gallery of promo objects to keep at my fingertips –items I can easily tap into when preparing a routine update to my groups of influence.

What promo elements do you have available for sharing? Developing this communication plan sooner in your timeline might also inspire you to get some of your collateral materials ready sooner. Timely production of collaterals seems to be a perennial issue for the annual events I know.

Implement your plan and you will benefit exponentially from building relationships with your key audiences.

Watch my next post for a draft approach for one of my all-time favorite key publics, the event volunteers.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: communication plan, event promotions, groups of influence, press release, promotional material

Know Your Groups of Influence

December 1, 2010 By Linda Sparks Leave a Comment

……Part 2 in the Beyond the Press Release series

When you are promoting a large-scale community event, there are lots of people who can help you get the word out about your event. So let’s get organized about it.

Make a list of all the groups you should be talking to. Think in terms of anyone who may have an interest or a stake in the success of your event? Who can help you influence increased attendance and ticket sales for your event? Consider including mainstream media that encompasses your entire geographic target market as well as specialty media that relates to any key attractions you have planned.

Be bold and set some specific goals for each group. What practical role will each of these groups of influence play in your promotional outreach? By considering how each of your key publics fit in with your event you will be uncovering lots of new opportunities for PR.

Corporate Sponsors are always a great starting place. They represent a very important group of influence for most events and they also have a major stake in the overall success of the event. They’ve already agreed to be a sponsor, so our communication with them now is focused on how they can help us influence others.

Many sponsors have high-traffic websites, lots of customers, suppliers, and professional colleagues. We want to share information about the event with them and get them to distribute it down stream strategically to everyone they communicate with routinely. I recommend doing a bit of recon, to determine just how they can be of the most help. Set some goals around your new info.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: community event, groups of influence, PR, press release, sponsors

Beyond the Press Release

December 1, 2010 By Linda Sparks Leave a Comment

In the event industry, we think of Public Relations mainly as publicity –we call it PR for short. All too often, event PR efforts amount to acquiring a small local media list and dribbling out the obligatory press releases to announce our event. All the while hoping this minimal effort will generate extreme interest on the part of the media, causing them to write about our events profusely, and thereby drive tons of consumer traffic to our event.

Biggest problem with this approach is that it is essentially ineffective at both engaging all our key publics and driving traffic to our event. So the goal of my post today is to broaden the perspective of public relations to include audiences (publics) beyond the first tier media partners, and communication tactics (relations) beyond the basic press release.

I believe that by strategically expanding your PR efforts, you will also reinforce the sustainability of your annual event. Try using these 5-steps:

Make a list of all groups you should be talking to (key publics)
Set some specific goals for each group
Develop a time-organized plan for communicating and achieving the goals you set for each key audience (relations)
Gather all the supporting documents and collaterals needed to support your communication outreach
Now, implement your plan and evaluate results (effective public relations)

In my next post on this topic, we’ll consider how we might strategically expand the typical list of key publics and just what influence we hope to have on them.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: communications outreach, event PR, press release, public relations, sponsors

Bake a Bigger Pie

December 1, 2010 By Linda Sparks Leave a Comment

The primary function of the event organization is to bake a bigger-better pie. In other words, the organizing committee essentially gathers-up all the choice ingredients and converts them into something bigger and better —A yummy event pie!

This concept is one of those absolute truths in the event community regardless of how proceeds are distributed –whether you’re a charity or for-profit event.

Let’s start with the something better… Most of us would prefer a slice of pie over individual cups of sugar, flour, milk, and pinches of various spices and flavorings. Likewise, the production of an entertaining and educational event makes visitors appreciate all the individual elements all the more. The event pie is in fact better because of the proximity and combination of all the special ingredients.

It’s the concept of bigger, where many event organizers lose traction…Events are often the beneficiary of a lot of in-kind and reduced-rate resources (ingredients) and it is the productive conversion of those resources into something bigger (the pie) that gives them their real power.

Successful event promotions are an essential class of ingredients. If the goal is to bake that bigger pie, then the ingredients need to be selected and scaled appropriately to fit the recipe. In the event world, a successful outcome often boils down to maximizing attendance and ticket sales. It is not enough to acquire a mismatched collection of free or reduced-rate promotional inventory (ingredients). There must be a strategic approach to acquiring ALL the necessary ingredients and incorporating them at precisely the right time in the process in order to bake a big enough pie to serve all your stakeholders.

Sponsorship is another essential ingredient for most events. Sponsors support your event in the hopes that their investment will be worth more (to them) as part of your something bigger than it would be on its own. Let’s face it, sponsors have options, they could simply write their check directly to the cause and know they are doing good. If their goals are pure business, they could invest directly in a simpler form of business promotion—like buying their own TV ads, billboards or public relations campaign. Investments in sponsorship, as part of a company’s overall marketing mix, actually do require a unique effort to ensure return-on-investment (ROI).

P.S. If you’re new to this blog, you can learn more about me and my resources here>>

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