Food Festival Advertising
These days nearly every major city in the world runs some sort of food festival or major culinary event throughout the year. For many cities Culinary Tourism is an important element in the promotion of the city as a culinary destination. Apart from that, food festivals bring a great deal of economic benefits to cities including accommodation, transportation, dining out and more. With this in mind it’s important to heavily advertise your food festival to ensure record attendance.
Digital Advertising is essential for Driving Ticket Sales for Food Festivals
For Food Festivals which sell tickets, it’s important to start generate sales as soon as you’ve signed your sponsors and celebrity chefs who’ll be attending. This can be started by running highly targeted advertising campaigns targeted at online food communities encouraging pre-bookings. It’s these communities which are committed to traveling around and going to the food festivals throughout the year; no matter where they are located.
To reach these food communities, the Gourmet Ads network can run targeted Food Festival advertising on food blogs, recipe websites and even food video sites to generate awareness and sales. Retargeting can also be used as a campaign tactic to drive ticket sales, reaching people that have visited your Food Festival website, but who haven’t purchased yet.
For a campaign to drive food festival ticket sales we’d highly recommend a multi month campaign as well as some Roadblock Advertising close to the event to really drive home last-minute ticket sales.
Depending on what the ticketing actually provides it’s ideal to run focused campaigns. For example, if a number of celebrity chefs will be doing cooking classes, you may wish to consider running exclusive campaigns around that celebrity chef till the tickets sell out. For gala dinners, these too could be a campaign focus for you. Just like popular musical artists, you want to generate sales and sell out as far out as you can before the event.
For regional or smaller food festivals which aren’t necessarily ticketed, the approach is slightly different. Your food festival advertising should be relatively short, i.e. like 10 – 14 days from the event but with high visibility. This will create high awareness of the food festival and will encourage attendance.
A strategy for gaining email addresses and generating buzz around an event is to run an online competition before the event. The prize could be say 20k worth of kitchen appliances or a complete kitchen make over. Entry is online and free, but the prize will be drawn a specific time and you need to be present in order to claim the price. This way you encourage people to attend the event.
Where possibly try and use rich media video to promote the event. Consumers find rich media highly engaging online and it could be one of the celebrity chefs cooking their signature dish. Whatever you can get from their publicist would be a great instead of trying to shoot some video specifically for your event.
Finally, Food Festivals typically have lower advertising budgets to work with, but Gourmet Ads can work with you and your team to design a bespoke advertising package which will reach your target audience. A strategy to pitch to your possible sponsors is for them to underwrite the advertising of the event and even build their name into the event, like many food festivals do these days. That way they win, and you win as you’re generating a great deal of interest and one target for record attendance.
So no matter if you’re organizing amajor events like the South Beach Wine and Food Festival in Miami, The Food and Wine Aspen Classic, The Rhode Island Clam Chowder Festival or a regional food festival. By Advertising Food Festivals with Gourmet Ads, we can help drive attendance and ticket sales.
