Recently, our founder and our graphic designer volunteered to handle the digital marketing for a new community event in Niagara, St. Catharines Wingfest. The event brought the community together to decide who made the best chicken wings in town, with all proceeds going to Community Care, a local organization that strives to meet the needs of the less advantaged in the community through emergency services, a food bank and many other needed services.
No matter where your event is (or what it is, for that matter), you'll be facing competition for attention, attendees and engagement. Our unique challenge was marketing an inaugural event with zero existing market share or awareness in a market already saturated with charity events and not lacking in food-based entertainment. Suffice it to say, even with a fun idea like a chicken wing festival and a committed group of board members, it would not be easy to achieve our impressions and attendance goals.
Our efforts were able to generate tons of impressions for the Wingfest's digital presence, and most importantly, helped keep the event full of attendees all weekend long. And we did it all without using any traditional advertising and by spending only $282. Here's what we learned along the way about successful community event marketing in year one.
The first thing Wingfest needed was a unique and recognizable logo. This would serve as a building block for our branding and marketing initiatives. It's also important to recognize that a logo and a brand are not the same; see our blog on branding for more information. As an inaugural event, we had the opportunity (and the challenge) of starting with a blank canvas. Some community events, in an attempt to be noticed, try to closely replicate or reproduce a popular existing logo. Others attempt to defy design convention in order to be noticed. We found that the winning formula balanced these two temptations.
Thanks to work of exceptional local graphic designer Jordan Versluis (http://www.jordanversluis.net/), Wingfest was given a logo that was unique and memorable that respected classic design elements but still had a distinctly modern design.
As a new community event with proceeds benefiting charity, our challenge was to create engagement without breaking the bank. One of the best tools to help overcome this challenge is an optimized event website. With our new logo informing our branding and design, we created a Wingfest event website optimized to quickly tell visitors about the event. Flow was of the utmost importance in order to require the least amount of time to process the necessary information, including date, location, vendors, musicians and more.
Another goal of the website was to clearly market who the event was benefiting. While website visitors are going to be intrigued by the details of a community event, it is the community benefit that will often make them commit to attending or supporting. Our website made it clear that this would be not just a great event for the community, but also one that benefits that very community in a specific and direct way.
Our goals for social media were: 1. Stretch a tight budget and 2. Prioritize shareable content over repetitiveness.
To achieve the first goal, we employed Facebook and Instagram sponsored posts that targeted VERY specific audiences. This allowed us to reach the demographics we needed to without requiring a large spend that would be outside of our budget. In order to effectively achieve this, we narrowed down our target audience as specifically as we could, and let that inform both the content of our posts and who we paid Facebook and Instagram to ensure saw our content.
To achieve our second goal, we determined what the strengths of our event were: our vendors, our logo, our location and the competition to determine who made the best wing. By engaging with members of our targeted demographic, we were able to determine these strengths would resonate on social media. Our social media posts were designed to succinctly convey information about our strengths through graphics and photos. Finally, we ensured these posts had the best chance of being shared by settling on one hashtag (#stcwingfest) and tagging relevant users (such as the social media accounts for our vendors.)
When marketing a community event, you'll be competing for attendance and dollars with other events and for engagement with everything else that draws attention online and on social media. It's also likely you'll be doing this without a large budget. If you're looking to market your community event, take these three quick lessons from us:
And don't forget, if you're in St. Catharines next summer, be sure to come check out St. Catharines Wingfest!