MARKETING RESOURCES IN UNEXPECTED PLACES:

By Mandy Watson

How to Leverage Existing Programs to Bring National Attention to Your Event

Few would dispute the important role marketing plays in the events industry. After all, you can’t host special events without guests. Yet, many event organizers frequently struggle with the challenge of coming up with innovative marketing strategies. Conventional media marketing may be the backbone of the industry, but, in a post-COVID world, conventional marketing might not be enough to get people to attend your event. Sometimes it is helpful to take a closer look at your event and see if there are programs that are already in place that you can exploit for marketing potential. In this article, I will discuss how we used a small program at our Fall for Greenville food festival to tap into a previously under-used marketing resource which resulted in national media attention for the festival.

History of Fall for Greenville

Fall for Greenville is a dynamic three-day event put on by the City of Greenville Parks, Recreation and Tourism department. The festival features over 45 of Greenville’s finest restaurants and over 200 menu items. A Top 20 Event in the Southeast, Fall for Greenville is one of the largest free admission food festivals in the region attracting between 150,000-200,000 people from across the Upstate and beyond. In addition to its diversity of food, Fall for Greenville is known for its free musical entertainment performed by local and regional musical talent on five different stages. Additional ancillary events include a Thursday Night Kick-Off Concert, a variety of children’s activities, culinary demonstrations, wine tasting, beer garden featuring 20 craft breweries, restaurant competitions and much more.

As with many events, Fall for Greenville had an ever-evolving marketing plan. When the festival started in 1982, the focus was to offer an event for the immediate community and showcase what local restaurants and businesses had to offer. With that thought in mind, Fall for Greenville focused on building good relationships with most of the local media outlets including print, radio, and television media. To this day, we maintain great relationships with our local media partners through media sponsorship packages. Our team works with our partners to create comprehensive advertising packages leading up to the festival weekend for maximum exposure locally and regionally. We also work with our Visitor and Convention Bureau who provides important metrics from past years to allow us to better target our advertising.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, the in-person festival was cancelled, and the events staff pivoted to a virtual event. This allowed us to still provide something for the community and it allowed us to keep relationships with our media partners, so we were prepared for the next year’s event. In 2021, the festival was held, but the events team focused on the local and regional markets for advertising since flying for events was still not recommended. During this time, however, we were already looking ahead to the 2022 festival. We really started looking for ways to expand our reach to a national level assuming that most COVID restrictions would be at a minimum in 2022.

The Turning Point: Post-COVID Plan for Expanding to National Media Coverage

While Fall for Greenville had a great relationship with what’s considered traditional media, we realized that we hadn’t really tapped into some of the more non-traditional options such as social media, travel writers, and influencers. We started to brainstorm ideas of how to use these new tools to our advantage to help bring people back out to our events. We looked at the programming at our festival to see if there was anything that we could use to expand our marketing reach. One program that stood out at our festival was The Silver Spoon & Sugary Spoon Food Competition.

Silver Spoon & Sugary Spoon Judging Program

The Fall for Greenville Silver Spoon & Sugary Spoon Competition gives participating restaurants the opportunity to be recognized for their top menu item in two categories, savory and sweet. The top three menu items are selected in each category and awards are presented to winning restaurants at the festival. Many vendors display these awards in their brick-andmortar locations throughout the year. While this has always been a popular program, we were typically pulling judges from other City departments or from the Fall for Greenville Board of Directors. We came up with the idea of using the food competition to get influencers & travel writers in the field to come to Fall for Greenville and participate as judges in the 2021 festival. We were hoping that their participation in the 2021 festival would result in national advertising for the 2022 festival.

Once we figured out the avenue for getting influencers here, the first step was to figure out who to invite and how to get in touch with those people. To do that, Fall for Greenville partnered with a local PR agency who specializes in bringing outside media to Greenville. We worked with the agency to invite six judges from all over the country to come experience Fall for Greenville. These judges included writers from Garden & Gun, Southern Living, GQ, and various other freelance writers from large publications. We worked with the agency to create a comprehensive itinerary for the judges throughout the festival weekend. The goal of this itinerary was to not only showcase the festival, but to also showcase the City of Greenville and the surrounding County.

The judges came into Greenville on the Thursday before the festival and they were presented with welcome packages that included products that highlighted the festival restaurants and vendors. On Friday, we hosted an introductory get together where City leadership came to speak about Greenville. We also went over the judging criteria and rules for the competition. The judging criteria included taste, appearance, creativity, and explanation of dish. The judges were then given a score sheet and a judge badge which would allow them to come to the back of the food tents to receive a sample from the food vendor. The restaurants were directed to provide a smaller portion of their menu item since these judges were having to sample over 50 items. We also asked the restaurants to provide a description of the menu item to explain why they chose the dish and what it meant to them. This was the restaurant’s chance to “sell” their item to the judges.

The judges had from noon on Friday to noon on Saturday to taste every restaurant’s menu item and give them a score. On Saturday afternoon, the judges got together to deliberate the scores and pick the winners. That night, the PR agency took the judges out to showcase other local businesses in the Greenville County area. Sunday afternoon, the restaurants were presented with their awards.

It is important to note that there was no agreement in place that required the judges to publish any article about Greenville, and Fall for Greenville had no say in what, if anything, was written about the festival. This was just a way to showcase Fall for Greenville and Greenville itself and we hoped that the judges would be impressed by the uniqueness of the festival and the surrounding area.

What We Learned from the Program

The results exceeded expectations. The judges came to the 2021 festival in October, and by December, multiple articles had been written in nationally published magazines. In the lead up to the 2022 festival, there were 246 mentions of Fall for Greenville leading to a reach of 4.2 million people. These mentions came through multiple platforms including blogs, podcasts, articles, and videos. This media coverage provided free national marketing for the festival and ultimately lead to a record-breaking 2022 year. For the 2022 festival, we had a 36% increase in pre-sale tickets and tickets were purchased from a record-breaking 33 different States and 2 Countries. Some festival vendors reported an increase in sales of 45% and one local business reported they made more than six times their usual profit that weekend. We received amazing feedback from the judges and many of them walked away with great ideas for articles. A lot of the judges loved Greenville so much that they came back to visit throughout the year, and they continued to write articles about, not only the festival, but also Greenville County. Because of this we were able to request more funds from our local County ATAX for the 2022 festival since we could show that Fall for Greenville was bringing national attention to the region. A bonus was that most of the judges were posting about their experience in real time throughout the event. This content, along with the content that our social media team put out, helped to keep patrons engaged throughout the weekend and it offered up another perspective of the festival. While our staff is very familiar with the ins and outs of the festival, it was refreshing to get to see the point of view of visitors who had never been to Fall for Greenville before. It offered great insights to our team of what appeals to the patrons who are attending the event.

The benefits of this program extended beyond just media coverage for the festival. One thing that we noticed was that restaurants started to submit higher quality menu items for the food competition once they found out who the judges were. The restaurants wanted to really showcase their talent to the judges and, as a result, multiple restaurants in the festival ended up having articles written about them in these national publications. Since the start of the new judging program, we have consistently seen an improvement in the number and quality of applicants and menu items each year.

Building on Success: Expanding the Program

Encouraged by the success of this new approach, we were able to build on our program in 2022 and we again invited national media members to the festival for judging. These judges included writers from Food & Wine, the New York Times, GQ Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, National Geographic Traveler, News and Culture, The Kitchen, and Eating Well. This expand- ed program resulted in more accolades for the festival, including a recent recognition as a TOP 10 Fall Event in Southern Living.

Looking ahead to the 2023 festival, Fall for Greenville has booked a record-breaking 12 judges. These include writers from Garden & Gun, Esquire, Travel + Leisure, and USA Today. New for this year, we are also including experts in entertainment writing. This promises to bring a unique focus to the festival’s musical entertainment in addition to the spotlight that we place on our food vendors.

A Ripple Effect Across Events

The success of this program wasn’t limited to Fall for Greenville alone. Once we saw the potential, we decided to extend the program to our 2022 Christmas Parade, where we invited 3 podcasters from the podcast show Deck the Hallmark to be the judges. Not only did they judge the parade floats, but they live-streamed the parade to their audience of almost 40,000 people on all their social media platforms.

Conclusion

As a result of this marketing approach, we have been able to show a direct link to increased revenue and attendance, and we have had multiple reports on increased tourism throughout the year based on articles directly related to the judging program. This program has not only placed the festival in the national spotlight but has also elevated the profile of the entire region. One of the main strengths of event planners is to learn to adapt and pivot when needed. While many of the repercussions of COVID-19 were negative for the event industry, it did allow event managers an opportunity to look at their events with fresh eyes. In this case, the marketing plan that we had was working, but we just needed that one extra thing to push us over the edge. By looking at our event and re-evaluating existing programs, we were able to harness the power of an untapped marketing resource. So, take a moment to look at your event programming, you may be surprised what you find.

Mandy Watson is the Special Event Manager for the City of Greenville in Greenville, SC. Since 2015, she has served as the Saturday Market Coordinator and the Operations Coordinator before moving to the Special Event Manger position in 2020. Mandy oversees all permitting requests for the City, along with all onsite logistics for events including operations, volunteers, and entertainment.