With warm weather setting in, outdoor summer events serve as an excellent source for generating leads, making them worth including in your brand’s marketing strategy. However, making them work in your favor can be a challenging task. By using a little imagination and creativity, you can significantly boost your summer outdoor marketing initiatives rather than limiting yourself to traditional marketing ideas.
Read on to know some of the top tips you can use to attract leads to your next outdoor summer festival:
Host Your Own Event
Hosting your summer event is an excellent idea to attract new leads. While it takes some extra time, planning, and work on your end, it can help you tremendously in setting up a successful event in terms of your marketing efforts.
Some of the ideas to do this include:
- Hanging large outdoor banners to welcome guests to your event
- Making use of flyers and other marketing material before and during the event, along with specifying the entire schedule of events, highlighting your business information with a map of the event location, and distributing freebie coupons
- Designing some kind of funky wristbands or tickets to highlight exclusivity for your guests.
All these activities can give you an excellent opportunity to let your attendees enjoy the event and organically associate your business with hosting cool and fun summer events for their clients.
Choose Outdoor Displays Wisely
Any summer festival is incomplete without outdoor displays such as step and repeat banners, flags, and other promotional materials. They offer several different ways to attract the attention of both existing clients and prospects. The kind of display you choose plays a key role in attracting prospects and should be used as a tool to help achieve your desired business objectives.
Likewise, if you have a new product, service, or a limited period offer that you would like to attract customers to, outdoor displays should be used as a way to give your attendees exclusive first access to it, thus increasing the chances of them promoting your product/service. Try promoting with a sidewalk sign that tells visitors to come to your display in order to gain access to an exclusive offer.
Offer Summer Specials
Regardless of your niche, customers across the board love the idea of a sale. Since outdoor summer festivals are a time of leisure, it is a great place to provide limited-time offers and attract clients.Think of investing in summer specials, giveaways, or other fun marketing products to both attract customers and promote your brand.
Depending on your niche, these can be mugs, pens, magnets, etc. You can also think of items such as caps, hats, or t-shirts for a special summer giveaway. This will help you further promote your booth/business when attendees wear them around. Remember that fun and exciting giveaways are a great way to market your brand long after the event is over.
Host a Summer Photo Contest for Visitors
Organize a fun photo contest on your business’ Instagram or Facebook page that encourages attendees to share with everyone about their summer plans. You can also think of a unique summer theme idea that is related to your business to ensure more participation in the contest.
Having such an event not only ensures personal engagement, but also gives you the advantage of free user-generated content to help you bring a lot of targeted traffic to your social media platforms. To make it more interesting, you can also include an added incentive, such as a discount or reward for customers who get the most likes and shares on their photos.
Get Social
Building a presence on social media is another interesting way to attract leads at upcoming summer festivals. You can either create a hashtag for your own events or research how the event is being handled on social media platforms. All you need to do then is remain active on your social media channels before, during, and after the event to create buzz and attract customers.
Being social is the perfect way to display your commitment to the event itself as well as your audience. This also allows you to build connections and have real conversations with your leads and prospective clients. You can also post pictures, fun facts, and videos of the ongoing event to build momentum and also reach out to people who are attending.
Include Experiential Elements in Your Marketing to Build Connections
Offering an experience to your audience is a powerful way to build connections and attract them to what you have to offer. Remember that brands who use experiential marketing to reach their audiences always enjoy a competitive advantage that traditional marketing often fails to deliver.
This makes it really important to capitalize on conversations and let attendees enjoy an experience that helps them remember your brand well past the summerl. Leverage these experiences along with your marketing products and street teams to reinforce what your brand stands for.
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