Booth at local Festival

[SilverLeaf]

Fall is festival season and I'm considering renting a small booth space for an upcoming local festival; mostly to help get my name out there and hopefully grow my local network. I'm thinking of maybe also having a drawing for a prize of some sort (possibly a small Android tablet or something similar) to create some excitement and collect contact info for further marketing. Has anyone had any success doing this? Any helpful hints or words of advice?

[Magic Miguel]

callthatgirl has recommended this and also to have a fish bowl to collect people's business cards so you can reach out to them in the future to network and make connections. I would highly recommend it but I would also try to see if the festival relates to what you do at least in some sort of way. You wouldn't want to be at a low rider car show and have a computer repair or IT booth since it really doesn't relate to low riders too much.

[3ft]

Great topic, I have the local festival coming up in October and have been pondering what to do. We are directly on Main St. - no thru traffic for 2 days during the festival - was contemplating trying to either get a booth directly outside the office, or just do something IN the office to try and attract folks.

The festival has zero to do with computers, and I seriously doubt we'll see any direct sales during the 2 days the streets will be closed...not sure how to capitalize on this, other than just an opportunity for free advertising.

Or I may just close up and take a mini vacation.

[mau64]

I just recently did this, but sadly the town didn't market it much and it was kind of a flop. No big deal though, I plan on attending more festivals in the surrounding counties.

[jamston]

I was thinking of going to my local comic-con. I'm lucky enough to know the guy who runs it. My plan was to build a couple of nice looking gaming pcs, water cooled, lots of nice lights etc, have it running something cool by one of his other sponsors perhaps. Also get a couple of booth babes in to dress as something gamer-y, let people have free pics with them and give out flyers and have some sort of give away.

All this kind of depends on what size you are and how much cash you have and if you sell custom PCs, but i think there's something there at some level for a few different size businesses.

[PCX]

During the fall we have a lot of events, festivals and fairs that we do every years. It is well worth the money. We still have customers coming in from events 2 years ago. We mostly just set up a booth and hand out fliers. As you can imagine, we get a lot of people who ask questions about our services and how much they cost. We then get their names, numbers and email addresses and ask them if we can contact them later on in the week to schedule a time for them to come in or give them a quote on their repairs. We also ask for anyones information who says that they are for sure coming in and then we follow up on them a week later. This year, we will be doing the same thing, but this time we will be getting some slat grids and lining them with retail items that we sell out of the store.

[ArtemusComputerTechnology]

Local festivals are cool. My first one was last year and I also did one this summer. Had fun. Sold a few items old and new. Some items I had lying around.

[Tomlin Technology]

The most important thing to do is when you get a lead at a festival or event, make sure you get THEIR contact information as opposed to just giving them your contact information. Also make sure you strike up a conversation with everyone possible at every event, even if it's just saying hello to everyone who walks by.

[dgast]

Originally Posted by Magic Miguel

callthatgirl has recommended this and also to have a fish bowl to collect people's business cards so you can reach out to them in the future to network and make connections. I would highly recommend it but I would also try to see if the festival relates to what you do at least in some sort of way. You wouldn't want to be at a low rider car show and have a computer repair or IT booth since it really doesn't relate to low riders too much.

I believe that Callthatgirl has a good idea here, but I would take it further and instead of collecting business cards, I would give away a laptop (refurb of course) and have them fill out a card with name number and email addy to build the database. They should also take referral cards, which I do by taking my business cards and flipping them over and having a $10 off wording added to the referrer and the referree with a name and email address of the person giving the card out so I can email them and thank them for giving out the card and to let them know they get $10 off their next service. If you have the give away it would not matter what type of show you go to.

[callthatgirl]

I still get calls from an event I did almost 4.5 years ago. Give cards, take cards, it all has extreme staying power for us.