Promoting Your Events and Festivals

It’s useful to look at your space as a venue and a place for consumers to experience a brewery’s brand.

The audiences to attract are your current regulars, prospective new customers and your community.

With so many events these days, it is important that your events set your brewery apart. When creating events focus on these three aspects:

• Quality – start with your community and create an event that is relevant, engaging, and fun.
• Education – the pursuit of great beer is a never-ending education.
• Excitement – you’re not just inviting in guests, you’re telling a brand story.

We will consider 2 Types of Events, with each Type increasing in complexity and resources needed:

Simple and Recurring.

In this type you can run yourself without outside help.

Popular Examples: Brewery Tours, Trivia, Comedy/Open Mike Night, Live Bands, Bingo, Happy Hour, Beer Dinners, Bottle Shares, Food Pairings, New Beer (Bottle or Can) Releases, Yoga, Runner/Biking Club, 

At a minimum, here are the best ways for promoting these types of events:

• Facebook Events. This is the homepage for your event. Make sure to include all the pertinent details.
• Posts to your Social Media platforms with a link to your Facebook Events page.
• In-house posters
• Email: include a call out in your newsletter with the link to the Facebook Events page.
• If this is a recurring event (for example a Runners Club), have regulars post about the event (influencer technique). Then use their re-post their content to your platforms (user generated content technique).

ROI: how can you calculate your return on investment and effectiveness of these Simple and Recurring events? We recommend you track and assess these four metrics:

1. # of participants
2. Total sales during the event
3. Average transaction amount during the event (did you see an increase?)
4. Costs to promote the event

Big Day(s).

This type, you run yourself, involves vendors and sponsors, and requires outside help.

Examples: Beer, Street, and Music Festivals; Anniversary Parties; Marketplace with local vendors; Beer Week Events at your brewery.

To promote these types of events:

Pre-Event

• Create an event #hashtag
• Facebook Events. Again, this can be the homepage for your event. Make sure to include all the pertinent details.
• In-house posters
• Email:
  • Send an invitation to your list with a link to your FB Event page and Eventbrite if you are selling tickets.
  • Include a call out in your newsletters leading up to the Event with the link to the Facebook Events page.
• Have staff wear any special event merch you’ve created in the two weeks leading up to the event
• Invite local social media influencers and beer bloggers as VIPs.
• Create a VIP list of local celebrities. Send them an Evite. Post about their appearances if they RSVP (with their permission).
• Put up flyers or posters in neighboring businesses
• Develop social media plan/schedule for posts promoting the event. Include paid Facebook and Instagram ads. Incorporate video.
• Get a solid social media plan/schedule from your event vendors (make sure the food trucks are posting about the event). Make sure all posts include the event #hashtag.
• Hire or assign a staff person to photograph/videograph the event.

At Event

Develop social media plan/schedule for posts at the event. Incorporate video. Be prepared to leverage User Generated Content. Include posts with local celebrities and influencers that attend.

Post Event

Develop social media plan/schedule for posts after the event. Incorporate video and leverage User Generated Content from the event.

ROI: how can you calculate your return on investment and effectiveness of these Big Day(s) events? We recommend you track and assess these four metrics:

• Attendance (could be number of wrist bands used during event) Total sales during the event
• Total costs to produce and promote the event

Beer Festivals

The GOOD THING about Festivals is that they bring 75 to 200 people to you.

BAD THING about Festivals is that you’re there with 30 to 100 of your competitors.

Well known Festival examples: GABF; FoBab; ; Cigar City’s Hanapu Day, Great Taste of the Midwest, and Modern Times’s Festival of Dankness 

Festivals employ our favorite promotional technique: product sampling!

They’re also opportunities to:

• deliver an experience
• sell your branded merchandise
• capture customer info such as email or cell phone number (if you have a texting program)
• drive traffic to your taproom with a bounce back offer

To promote your attendance at Festivals:

Pre-Festival

• Add the Festival to your Facebook Events.
• Include your Festival participation/schedule in your email newsletter.
• Include posts about the Festival in your social media calendar/schedule

During Festival

Assign a staff member or brewery ambassador to do a social media post from the Festival

CRITICAL: Be prepared to capture the email address of people that visit your tent and sample your beer. This is the biggest missed opportunity we see in a brewery’s participation at Festivals. The opportunity to capture email addresses for future communication.