Last night my community enjoyed the Second Annual Tasting the Town, a food festival held at the Humble Civic Center.  I wasn’t able to go until later, but even at 8 pm with only an hour until the event closed, it was still hopping, so I can only imagine what it was like earlier.

The event is organized by Lake Houston Area Events, which is the team of Jennifer Jozwiak (aka the Coffee News lady) and Tiffany Bauer of Power Promotions.  I am actually working with them on a web site for a new event they are launching in 2011, the Lake Houston Area Home and Garden show.

Besides the fact that the event was an opportunity to get together with friends and enjoy great food from area restaurants, the thing I loved about it was that it was a great marketing opportunity for businesses . . . and not just food related businesses and restaurants.

After organizing an event myself for six years, I know that the key to enduring success for an event is not just the attendees but the businesses that participate and sponsor.  It is so important to create an environment at the event where businesses can connect with new potential customers and strengthen ties with existing ones.    Your event’s success hinges on the success of your vendors and exhibitors.

That was the motivating factor behind all of our decisions for the event that I managed and it is obvious that Tiffany and Jennifer have had that in mind as well at Tasting the Town.

This event was a no brainer for area restaurants; however, they also created several marketing opportunities for nonfood related businesses which I think were absolutely brilliant.  Nonfood related business could have a table in the entrance hall to the event, they could sponsor one of the seating areas, and they could also be a sponsor for one of the beverage booths.

Events like these are a chance for a business to capitalize on an audience that they wouldn’t normally have exposure to.  However, while some of the businesses did a better job of engaging attendees than other, there wasn’t one that didn’t fail in least one of the three critical points to connect with customers.

But here are some good examples of small business marketing at the event.

Serna Insurance was one of the sponsors of the beverage booths where they staffed the booth and handed out the drinks.  Their method of getting their information in the hands of attendees was to secure a promotional pen with a band around the drink bottle or can.  It was an ingenious idea.  I would have liked to see them also have a method of collecting names and addresses, like a raffle, drawing, or a Facebook contest, but they did do a good job of sending something out that had their company information.

There was another restaurant, I couldn’t tell you which one though as they didn’t make it over to me, that had servers circulating through the event with trays of samples and inviting people to visit their booth.  They were being proactive about getting people to come to them.

The Winery of Kemah was there with a booth in the Wine Walk.  They were the only exhibitor that I saw that had a sign up for an email newsletter.   Having a newsletter sign up was good; however, the signup was just a blank notepad with a pen and absolutely no explanation of what it was for.

Also, it was just sitting there.  No one was encouraging people to sign up and there was no mention of any benefits to do so.  When I went through about a half an hour before closing, there were only about 15 names on the list.  Now I will sign up for it because I look for things like that and I want to see what people are doing.  But in general, you need to be a little more proactive than that.  I also recommend following up with people after an event and thanking them for stopping by your booth.

The other place where I think the Winery of Kemah may have lost new business opportunities that while they had several different marketing pieces available for people to take, not all of them had their web site listed on it.  This is a huge mistake.  People aren’t necessarily going to take every single item you have laid out.  I know that I didn’t.  If you don’t have your contact information on every single piece, how do you expect people to contact you?  Don’t make them track you down.  Make it easy for them.

(After I published this, I went through and visited some of the company sites.  The domain that I found on one of the marketing pieces for the Winery of Kemah that I linked to above actually goes to an error page.  I did find another piece with a second domain name . . . but as I’ve said before, this is one of the worst things you can do.)

One of the areas that I saw that the majority of restaurants failed to do was make it easy to tell what they were serving.  There was a lot of great food there, but most of the time you had no idea what it was.

For example, HEB had a huge spread with three different entrees, wine samples, and several different desserts.  I am assuming that all of the components are available to purchase at the store, but I have no idea what any of them were. There were no labels, no menus, no suggested shopping lists . . . nothing.  The only thing I saw was the weekly circular.  The wine they were sampling was amazing (I like sweet wines.)   I asked the lady giving out the samples if she had something with the name on it.  She didn’t, but suggested that I take a picture with my phone, which is a resourceful suggestion . . . but come on . . . seriously, make it easy for someone to be a buyer.

The Chinese restaurant, Grand Garden, was the only one that I noticed that clearly labeled the entrees they were serving.

Also, there was a huge opportunity to get customers for the holiday entertaining seasons, which I think was largely missed by the majority of businesses there.  The only businesses I saw promoting it were catering businesses . . . and they didn’t have any sort of contact capture system in place.

This is the end of September.  People are going to start making plans for their Thanksgiving, Christmas, and holiday parties.  Besides the catering, I know that many of the businesses that participated in the event also have event and party rooms.  None of them were promoting it.

in general, these types of missed opportunities are very common at events like these.  The primary reason I offer the Exhibitors’ Edge seminar is to teach small businesses on how to make the most of their participation in events and festivals in their community and the best way to include events in their overall marketing plan.  I will soon be launching an on demand version of the seminar, sign up for my mailing list for advance notice.

All in all, it was a wonderful event and I hope that the participants are able to benefit with new business from the attendees that Jennifer and Tiffany worked so hard to attract.