Over the past two months Hughes & Co. has been hard at work establishing a strong online brand presence for the Niagara Greek Festival. This festival just celebrated eight years with the largest attendance and strongest online presence they have seen to date. We thought we would bring you in the loop on how we did it so that your next event marketing process can be ironed out with effective social media marketing strategies that will generate big results.

 Creating a Beautiful Website

The first step in the online marketing process for the Niagara Greek Festival was the development of a strong online "home". The website incorporated some key elements to generate positive traffic and encourage users to spend time interacting with the content . 

• User Experience Design: we took a look at successful designs from other websites (including our own Refresh Event website) and incorporated various elements that have generated successful results in the past. This website got the consumer excited from the second they started navigating with an interactive countdown on the homepage and dynamic schedule of events.
• Valuable Content: the previous website for the Niagara Greek Festival had all kinds of content on the site that wasn't helping the site gain valuable traffic. By cleaning up the content and focusing on Search Engine Optimization, this website saw record traffic results for a diverse range of keywords including September Festivals Niagara, putting this event head to head with the largest local festival that the region sees all year, the Niagara Wine Festival.
• Beautiful Graphics: if there is one thing that you can learn from the Niagara Greek Festival online presence update, it is that users love beautiful graphics. A polished online brand presence lends to longer navigation time on the website, and this worked to maintain the attention of the website visitors that were driven to the site through locally driven content marketing and keywords.

Crafting a Social Media Lead-Up Narrative

The lead-up narrative is essential to event marketing success whether you are working online or offline. This is the success or failure of event marketing, especially in the social media realm where you really have to give your audience something to care about. The lead-up narrative will sell the event, so for the Niagara Greek Festival we came up with 23 reasons to attend the event (based on our timeline, we were looking at 23 days to make some magic happen). Here is an example:

Developing a Strong Social Media Presence

As a social media marketing agency in Niagara, Hughes & Co. has some experience in making a brand look excellent online. Using Facebook as our primary medium, we made the Niagara Greek Festival shine with a brand new Facebook page that was started 23 days prior to the event and saw incredible numbers thanks to interactive content and an engagement priority. Some of the strategies that we implemented:

• Daily updating of the Facebook feed with interactive and relevant content that called on personal experience, nostalgia and promotion. We did not post anything that would not serve the purpose of drawing attention to the event.
• Creative graphics that encouraged engagement and sharing. Each of the posts received substantial attention and that created a strong metric for our client. Social media marketing is enhanced by the skill of a graphic designer who can predict the perception of a post based on the visual aesthetic. This is a key ingredient to successful event marketing through Facebook.
• Daily Facebook contest to share and like for the chance to win $25 Greek Fest Bucks to spend on authentic Greek food. This empowered the Facebook fan base to enhance their own Greek Fest experience before they arrived. We posted pictures of the menu items on the website and used food items as a part of our daily countdown to encourage people to start planning their meal. Greek Fest saw record food sales for 2013... coincidence? Probably not. In fact, the menu page of their website was the second most popular page after the hompage!
• Consistent engagement with the Facebook users that interacted with the page was key. We saw beautiful conversations happening and we joined in! People who visited the page were greeted with warm welcomes to the festival, gratitude for their participation and encouragement to keep up the great involvement. Every social media marketing agency will preach this, check out the Facebook page to see how well it worked!

Gratitude

This is always a big part of success in social media. Say thank you, and do it often. People are not obligated to choose your event as the one they will invest time to interact with. Be grateful for their participation, and don't be afraid to tell them how great they are. If they choose you, you owe them a pat on the back. Don't forget it.

Results

The basic metrics of this campaign were as follows. In the 23 day lead up to the event, Hughes & Co. generated:

811 Facebook Fans

58,000+ Facebook Reach

2500 + Website Hits Daily (during event lead-up)

And our efforts contributed to by far the most successful Niagara Greek Festival to date. Our gratitude to the organizers for the opportunity to be involved. We can't wait for another great event next year!