What Does it Take to Turn a Tiny Expo into a Huge Success?

I don’t know whether I told you but a couple of months ago I was asked to take on the promotions and marketing for a small health expo called the You Can Heal Yourself Expo

Well, a lot has happened since then…

Profiling the You Can Heal Yourself Expo

The first job was to profile the vision and mission of the organisers, nut it all down to a few simple statements that captured the essence of what the YCHY Expo was all about and why they were organising it. The You Can Heal Yourself Expo had run last year in a much smaller town, in a much smaller way, however even though everyone who exhibited at and visited the expo loved the ethos of the Expo they all asked for one thing – a more central location.

The You Can Heal Yourself Expo is dedicated to focusing on health care services and products who also reflect our ethos of education before sales – “you can heal yourself”, an absolute passion for helping people to help themselves, and high ethical standards.

So, once we had the Expo profiled and our vision, mission and why statements we could go ahead with new planning.

Planning

Planning turned out to be a lot easier than we first thought as once we had chosen the location in central Maroochydore, the rest just seemed to fall into place. Plans included more advertising sponsorship like radio and television to compliment the large print advertising sponsorship by the Sunshine Coast Daily, poster and flyer sponsorship.

We also looked at different exhibiting options and decided on a mix of open spaces (more affordable to last years exhibitors and professional booths to encourage a higher standard of business exhibits. We then looked at our promotional options and there were a lot of them, we had to nut out the options that would work best for our Expo without straining either the budget or the team.

Of course all of this planning had to be in line with the original mission statements as well, ethics, education, you CAN heal yourself etc.. so we included wonderful invitation only speakers, we were a little choosy with our exhibitors, we wanted to include the local community and give them a space and time to demonstrate what was available locally, we also wanted to create a festive air for the expo so we invited people to put on fun displays and demonstrations, laughter sessions, an open mic session on the Saturday afternoon as a prequel to the Saturday Evening Concert – now this was fun!

Execution of our Planning

First step more sponsorship we approached a local radio station Hot91.1, and after the first 30 minutes not only were they on board they were enthusiastic, in fact our first 30 minute meeting finished over 2 hours later… and have become even more enthusiastic over the past few weeks, LOL. So loads of radio ads over the 3 weeks immediately preceding the Expo have been arranged. We also have on board poster and flyer sponsor and CopyWizz have been amazingly helpful and all 3 sponsors are on board for next year as well. We are also in talks with Channel 7 Prime for next years Expo – so exciting!

We checked out booth hire and settled on the good people at Perrys Exhibition Solutions PES and they have been so helpful, so that was another job out of the way. They helped us measure up the entire space we are using called ‘The Hub’ a part of our sponsorship deal with the Sunshine Coast Daily and are providing and erecting the booths for the Expo.

Next we had to look at getting the word out first to potential exhibitors and then to Expo visitors, so promotions went into high gear and included social media, health group newsletter ads, last years exhibitors, people and businesses we already had some relationship with, notices about the Expo on event listing sites and health sites… Exhibitors came from everywhere, all said they loved the ethos behind what we were doing, many signed on immediately we have exhibitors from Victoria, New South Wales, Gold Coast, Brisbane and Toowoomba as well as local businesses from our own Sunshine Coast. In fact we have sold out of exhibitor spaces 4 weeks early when other expos are struggling to fill their events.

Next Phases

Now comes the main promotional focus for getting visitors to the expo and this rests mainly on awareness and captivating reasons to come along, our promotional ideas include: presentations about the Expo, Newspaper ads, a competition in the Sunshine Coast Daily to win a good bag with over $400 worth of prizes in it donated by Exhibitors and other businesses from the Sunshine Coast, editorials, radio advertising and spoken promotions, social media, event listing sites, articles and editorials in magazines, word of mouth, and so much more…

Would you like to have a more in-depth look at how you can do this for your next event?

Watch this space, it’s coming…