Event-Based Marketing

Introduction

In this Growth Engine Pit Stop, I want to talk about event-based marketing. The time of this recording is June 2018, we're a couple of days away from the World Cup. It just got me thinking a little bit, really, about some of the successes that we've put in about marketing campaigns for our customers. 

When the euphoria is up and for any of you guys who are old enough to remember when England won the World Cup last, it's about 50-odd years ago. So, we try every year, every time the World Cup comes out we get the euphoria, we hope it's going to be this year. Whether it's the Euros, whether it's the World Cup, but it's not just related to football, really. 

Major Sports Events Marketing

Obviously, it could be Wimbledon for tennis, it could be Grand National, and these are just sporting events like Formula One and Silverstone. I'm sure there's a lot of other events out there, charity events and St. George's Day, St. Patrick's Day. 

A whole host of what are called calendar events. Bank Holiday weekends, Small Business Saturday, all these types of things that people like American Express sponsor and such as. So just wanted to share this quick video with you just to say give some thought in your business and what I recommend that you do is sit down, if you've got a marketing team they should be on this anyway.

If you're a smaller business and you don't, just sit down as a management team and sort of look through the calendar. If you go to Google and search events of whatever year, 2018, 2019, if you're forward planning that far, and just look at each month. Especially if you're in B2C, in retail. It's a great way to sort of, align your marketing with marketing that's already done. I want to share a real quick story that we did way back in 2000 and 2002 I believe it was. 

MINI’s Adventure

Again, for you guys who are old enough to think about when the new Mini was released, in about 2001, 2002, and they had adverts all over the television, all over the radio with a Mini adventure. That was their strapline. There was a new Mini out, and it says do a Mini adventure. 

They put this little sort of snippets on TV and radio. I remember we did a radio campaign on Real Radio at the time. We did a Mini adventure with Lease 360, which was our company at the time. We said you can get the Mini adventure with the Lease 360 starting from, whatever it was, 159 pounds a month. 

That at the time, that was a competitive deal, for a Mini. We backed and we sort of swiped and deployed that Mini campaign, because Mini and BMW were putting hundreds and hundreds if not millions of pounds behind that campaign to promote their new car. 

It became a little bit of a cult icon of a campaign. So we just sort of mirrored our adventures, talked about all the things that you could do why buy when you can lease, and things like that. Do a Mini adventure with Lease 360. 

So that's just a line in a new car launch, backed off a manufacturer's car launch. But obviously you could do a World's Cup campaign, a sweepstake with your customers, I know Curry's PC World on TV do that, if you buy a television to watch the World Cup on, over a certain size you get a 1 in 20 chance of winning your money back, so you basically get the TV free. 

That's obviously a line in the World Cup sort of theme to their aim of selling more flat-screen TVs. So the quick tip is, look at January, all the way through to December, look what's going off, whether it's in the sporting calendar, royal weddings, Small Business Saturday that American Express get behind like I said earlier. 

Put some little mini-campaigns behind it. Email your customers, get your telly sales team on there, drop a little direct-mail piece in if that's what your business needs. Or some flyers in your local shop. Put a little Facebook campaign behind it. 

Ride that wave and that euphoria. Out of all that, let's hope England do well. Obviously good luck to all the countries out there. But here, the success of, we're all rooting for England. Whether we will be disappointed again, and we go to 56 years of hurt, I don't know.