You may know when an event is coming up for your brewery, but when should the public know about it?
If you start too early, will you lose their focus? If you start too late, will they be busy and not come? It’s a balancing act that is never fun to try to guess.
Cascade Brewing will try to make the initial announcement on social media as a post three weeks prior and Marketing Manager Nicholle Signore said they also create an event on Facebook so people can reply whether they plan on attending.
”In recent years we have seen a steady decline in the number of people who engage with the Facebook event posts,” she cautioned. ”The majority of our social media followers interact more with our Instagram.
”Typically, we can gauge how excited people are about an event by the amount of time we see a post gets shared.”
After getting that info out, Cascade will promote the event in its IG stories 2-3 times a week leading up to the event.
”We do one more hard post exactly seven days before the event, and once more 24 hours before, and then live stories throughout the actual event,” she said.
For Cascade, they don’t advertise any more than three weeks before the event because Signore said they don’t want the details to be forgotten or lost in the mix.
LUKI Brewery will try to put any upcoming events on media calendars – their own and local entertainment websites – the minute they have a confirmed date, explained founder Jeff Smith.
“There’s no reason not to — even if the event is still weeks or months in advance,” he said. “Of course, if you don’t have any relevant details as to what’s happening, this doesn’t make sense.
“This is important with ticketed events; we want to have as much runway as possible for promoting and selling the event. Although about a month out from the event we begin some level of email and social media marketing. We generally don’t get aggressive with promotions until about two weeks ahead.”
But ‘lost in the mix’ will still happen.
Scratchtown will post monthly, weekly, and sometimes daily, and Caleb Pollard said they still miss customers.
“Heck we have promotional calendars in our bathrooms, taped to the paper towel dispenser, and we had a customer miss our holiday hours even when they had been in before our holiday closure,” he said as an example. “They’d used the bathroom, used the paper towel dispenser, and still missed it. Sometimes nothing works!
“What I’ve found to be important is to be relentless in promotion and share compelling posts that capture attention.”
Is there such a thing as too much promotion?
“Yes, email blasts from companies lately are really starting to piss me off,” Pollard said. “Daily emails from the same companies (some small, and some quite large), and that’s just way too much for me. It makes me loathe the companies and stop doing business with them.”
Two weeks prior has worked best for LUKI, Smith said.
“It’s soon enough to give advance notice, but not so early where potential guests could forget about them, or ads get too repetitive,” he said. “We’ll start with a post that is very visual and specific to what’s happening. Then we’ll casually mention the event coming up in the body text of future posts. We also try to do recaps on Sundays of what is coming for the week, as it’s a really good idea to have a single post that clearly shows what’s coming – events, food trucks, or beer releases… or all three at the same time.
“The biggest cautionary note is to vary the content. If you post the very same picture over and over again for your trivia night, it won’t get noticed after a while.”
Signore shared this big event checklist with us as well:
- 3 weeks out: Create Facebook Event & 1st post to announce event on IG/FB/Twitter
- 2 weeks out: Run 2-3 IG/GB stories about event
- 1 week out: eBlast announcing event with all details
- 5 days out: Post on IG/FB/Twitter about event
- 1 day out: Reminder post about event on IG/FB/Twitter
- Day of: Live stories of event
- Monday after event: Thank you post to everyone who attended
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