In ten weeks time, the first Nottingham Well Being Show of 2019 opens its doors:
Liz Clark MD of LizianEvents writes about the promotion of the Well Being Shows:
The Nottingham Show is a springboard for new Community Members and as Visitors know it is an extraordinary event. There is a constant demand by Community Members to be part of this event; the success is a reflection on how The Community has influenced their Visitors. And does this mean we will put up the poster and trust to past achievements? No way! We will promote this show with the same vigour as we have demonstrated over the last eighteen months. I have Ten thousand flyers printed and Jon, and I will be circulating them from next week onwards. All Community Members must be certain our policy of consistent promotion is here to stay, show after show, year after year. We are dedicated to the future of The Well Being Shows and the success of The Community.
Promotion Promotion Promotion
It is only ten weeks before the first Well Being Show of 2019 opens its doors. The Nottingham Show is a springboard for new Community Members and as Visitors know it is an extraordinary event. There is a constant demand for Community Members to be part of this event, a reflection on how The Community has influenced their Visitors. And does this mean we will put up the poster and trust to past achievements? No way! We will promote this show with the same vigour as we have demonstrated over the last eighteen months. I have Ten thousand flyers printed and Jon, and I will be circulating them from next week onwards.
Although the dust has hardly settled after the Lincolnshire Well Being Show two weeks ago, there’s no time for rest. It’s a little over two months until the next show in the LizianEvents calendar, and the preparations are well underway. The next show is also the first of the new year. Here I am talking about the new year and you’re probably only just thinking of Christmas – that’s the way of the event organiser, always planning ahead and working on the next project.
Before I talk about promotions for next year, let us take a look back. April 2017 we were approached and offered dates and venues that were booked for the remaining months of the year, after considering all the facts the two venues are chosen were Newark Showground and Lincolnshire Showground. Why those two? Consider Lizian are based in Nottingham, Newark and Lincolnshire Showground are within an hour’s drive away, easily accessible. We had just 6 weeks before the first of the shows – at Lincolnshire Showground. The first priority was to validate and verify the database we’d inherited, and combine with our own email contacts. And then the promotion began in earnest – flyers printed and posted out to Lincolnshire Showground catchment area; literally, thousands of envelopes filled with flyers, address labels and stamps stuck on and dropped into the post box. In addition to the posted media, we worked in earnest to create awareness of the event on all social media platforms and LizianEvents News came into being with daily posts.
Promotion is key to all the shows, and that has meant targeted postal mail shots, email campaigns paid for promotions on social media and getting out and about handing out flyers and posters in the surrounding areas of the venues. The amount of time invested in promoting the shows runs into hundreds of hours, hundreds upon hundreds of pounds paid in postage – following the first round of postal flyers and the stamp sticking it was decided to do the job properly with a Franking Machine and thousands of flyers and posters were printed.
Something is obviously working as show on show numbers of visitors steadily increased, and it is clear from the prize draw entries that at each show we are attracting new visitors. This is a significant marker – attracting new visitors to the shows is the objective.
Although we’ve always distributed flyers prior to shows, this year we’ve upped the pace, and for the past eight months Jon and myself have spent two days every week promoting all of the shows by getting out and about in Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire, armed with flyers and posters, walking miles, meeting many people, talking to people about all things associated with becoming a Well Being. Rain and shine, we’ve been out there, promoting and planning. And each show, we’re seeing more new faces – introducing visitors to our dedicated Community Members and their products, services.
At the last Newark and Lincolnshire events, we conducted a visitor poll – Visitors were given a blue counter when they entered and asked to put it into the pot which described how they knew about the show:
1 Previous Show
2 Social Media / Email bulletins / Internet
3 By Post
4 Picking up flyers / Seeing the Banners
5 Told by a Friend
All were happy to do this and at the end of each show we counted up the tokens.
Both events produced the same results: the top two were ‘Previous Show’ and ‘Social Media’
‘By Post’ had just 9 tokens at Newark and only 4 at Lincoln
Bearing in mind that we had a little over 800 visitors at Lincoln, I think you’ll agree that 4 people attending due to postal communication is an very expensive exercise. To this end, we have decided to scrap postal mail shots, concentrating our efforts on distributing flyers, social media, email bulletins, and the internet. The financial savings made on postage will be ploughed into paid for promotions across social media platforms, and website growth.
Our Community Members play a key role in the promoting of all shows, as they share posts, in turn raising awareness and benefiting the whole community.
We are committed to continued growth, rest assured we’re immensely pleased with the success of this year’s events and the achievements of the whole Community and will continue to work towards greater success for all in the coming year.
Many Thanks For Reading My Article:
Liz
Liz Clark – Organiser of LizianEvents