Making Events Part of Your Business
The great Maya Angelou said I’ve learned that people forget what you said people will forget what you did but people will never forget how you made them feel.
That is so true. Right? I see that in marketing too all the time. If you can make your marketing and have an emotional connection. It is remembered so much so much further and so much better. I want to talk to you today about event marketing and tell you about how this can be the answer to that of how you can make people feel the essence of your brand the image you’re trying to portray and and the attitudes you put in building and creating your company and brand I had a friend of mine who own a bunch of mattress stores and he came to me and asked for marketing help and he said that he had this one store in this location that just wasn’t up to part with the other stores. It was was doing a lot less business and he couldn’t figure out why and he’d been in that location for four years and he asked me take a look at it and I went in and I saw everything was going on and long story short I could see right away. The biggest problem was he was not anchored in the community.
So here’s some of the things that we did to make this happen is first of all, we wanted to to get the word out. Now we knew we had a low budget so we went and met with some of the media and we put this great plan together. We told them about it. We told them all the fun things that are gonna happen. But then of course, they tried to sell us on on spending money on media and we’d already decided we weren’t going to do that and people would say well why even meet with them well because I wanted to plant the seeds and I told them that the day that we had this big event.
I know we can’t afford to do radio or anything like that. But if your stuff falls through at the station, please come to our event. We’d love to have you there. It’s gonna be fun. It’s gonna be great. There’s gonna be lots of people involved then the next thing I did is, I took the owner with me and we went around to all the neighboring businesses around there and we met with them and we said hey, we’ve got this huge event coming up. We want you to be a part of it too. Please put out tables and put out samples or do whatever you want to, but come be a part of this event, which was neat to have more people involved. But also they told their friends they told their raving fans. They told their customers about this event. So it helped draw more people to it.
One of the next things we did after that was decided. Okay, we’re gonna involve the schools because when he involved schools most parents feel like hey if my kid’s involved I want to be there. I want to see it. I want to support it. So I’ll tell you the the series of events that that went through this and we’ll go through it first. We started with a flag ceremony and the national anthem. So we had ROTC from one of the schools. We also had some people from a close by Air Force Base come down and do the flag racing and then we had the school singing Club come over and sing the national anthem. So all their parents came to support right so we had quite a few people there any passing cars coming by would also join in. We also took the time out along the parking lot and said going bananas crazy day sale. Now. The reason why we went with that theme is one of his other stores had a gorilla costume. So we brought that down. We had somebody in the gorilla costume out waving at traffic right by the going bananas.
So anybody that’s driving by sees something’s going on anybody that’s coming into Target to Park see something that is happening. So then after a little bit we had been adding contest huge been adding contests with the person in the gorilla suit.
It’s kind of neat is about this time of day all of a sudden in the morning the radio station largest radio station showed up remember we couldn’t pay them but they wanted to be a part in whatever they had canceled. So radio stations come in to a radio remote put their big Inflatables up and are making things happen. So that’s right as we’re doing and helping us announce this managing contest with the guy in the gorilla suit. Then a little while after that we had the Pep Squad from the other one of the other high schools come and we did this huge. We had even take video for some of the websites and some of the other news going on the local area. So we had great coverage from the media. We had lots of people that came out to the parking lot. Lots of people drive by sought now remember we want to be top of Mind most of us. Don’t buy a mattress that often right? It’s not like we’re buying one every month. So we knew that whatever event we had. We wanted to sell a bunch of mattresses, but we also needed to plant an anchor seed in people’s minds so that when they did need a mattress they know where to come. Well it worked out great. We doubled our cells that month of what the usual amount was that they’d have.
And here’s the neat part is we never went below that number ever again to double apart that he was in that location for several years after that and he always kept it above there. Now, you say well, why did one promotion do that? Well, it wasn’t just the one promotion.
It was the one promotion that made it sticking people’s mind and then we were able to just just I occasionally do a little reminders and people would call him up and text him. Hey, he showed me one text.
I thought was so awesome is the lady said Remember the event we had in your parking lot. That’s actually described it. Well, I’ve got two grandkids coming. They need box beans and mattresses and don’t go cheap on me. Here’s my credit card number. Let me know when they’re ready to pick up. He never got that stuff before all of a sudden he started getting stuff like that. He started getting cards from the community for Thanksgiving for Christmas and it made it part of the community. So This event we could have sped all now, we’re going to spend a whole bunch of money on whatever Billboards or whatever it and it didn’t work. But because we took the time to to involve local people we took time to invite people all of a sudden people had this great feeling about this location and their business increased. So as you go out there, here’s my challenge to you as you go out there and plan for events. And I know with some of the things that have happened last couple years people have looked at events differently but events are still one the number one ways for you to let people feel who you are to to create a feeling that they’ll remember so they come back to you. So as you’re planning your events plan to make that emotional connection.
What am I going to do to make them feel good? What am I gonna do to make them enjoy themselves? What do we gonna do to make them remember my business in a positive manner? I guarantee you you’ll reap the rewards not just for the one event.
But ongoing after that the people will remember you when they need to purchase your product or service go out and do that make events part of what you’re what your business is about make events part of your image your attitude. I guarantee you’ll see the results and this has been our point of view.
