Fair Booths Done Right: The No Tote Bag Rule

Transcript

Are you planning to setup a booth at a street fair or a carnival to promote your business? Hi, I’m Carmen Sognonvi.
Local events like street fairs or carnivals are really great ways to reach out to the community and let them know about your business, but there is one critical mistake you need to aviod keep watching to find out what it is.

By the way if you want to get a list of all the tools that I use to run the marketing in my business just head on over to CARMENSOGNONVI.COM/TOOLS. I’ll share with you a list of everything from who we use for graphic designing and printing to a really cool app you can use to track your flyer distrubution.

So, when my husband and I opened Urban Martial Arts which is our martial arts school in Brooklyn, New York back in 2008; we were really excited in our first year to rent a table at a big street fair in our neighborhood. I remember very clearly that I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea. So, I said to Serge “Listen this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to get 300 bright red tote bags made, print our logo on it big and bold, and we’re going to hand these out at our table.”

So, everybody walking by whose holding our tote bag is going to become like a walking billboard for Urban Martial Arts. Now, my plan worked pretty well. Everybody was really into the tote bags.

We ran out of the tote bags within about 45 minutes, but there was one thing I did not think about. That is that there was nothing about that giveaway that helped us hone in on our ideal customer. In other words, there was nothing about that give away that appealed specifically to people who had an interest in karate classes.

All we were managing to do was appeal to people who were really really into free tote bags. That’s really the problem with giving out promotional junk like tote bags or pen with your logo on it. This is what most businesses are doing at events like this, but it’s actually the wrong way to go.

Instead of giving out promotional junk, which all your going to do is have your stuff end up in the trash. You want to think about how you can give a free trial or a free sample of your product or do some kind of a give away in a way that will actually help hone in on your ideal customer.

The reason that doing a trial or giveaway is so important is because now your going to appeal to the people who have an actual interest in what it is that you do because if you’re not going away anything else just the trial of your product or service then there’s nothing left to appeal to the people that just really love tote bags. So, the next time you are going to have a table or booth at a trade show or a street fair or carnival I want you to stop handing out promotional junk.

Instead, figure out what kind of a free trial or giveaway you can offer. Now, when I do my presentation about old school marketing one of the questions that I often get is this: ” I have a business where my product or service is to expensive to just give away, what do you think I should just do instead?”

Here’s my answer, lets say for example that your an acupuncturist and you charge $100 per session, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense for you to be giving away free sessions at a street fair because you’re going to end up doing a lot of free acupunctures for the next few months then your going to go broke, right? So, what you can do instead is bundle your product or service into a larger prize and then do a raffle.

So, for example the acupuncturist could create a raffle where people put down their name and their email and their phone number for the chance to win a free year of acupuncture. So, that’s one way you can still do this free trial or giveaway idea even if your product or service is really expensive.

So, if you found this video useful I would encourage you to sign up to get email updates from me. You can head on over to CARMENSOGNONVI.COM/NEWSLETTER and sign up there. If you have a question you would like me to answer in a future video I quite a lot of Q&A videos so that’s an option for you.

Just email your question to me at INFO@CARMENSOGNONVI.COM. Ok, it’s time for some shout outs, and I’m going to do another instagram edition. So, here’s some shout outs to my instagram followers. Shout out to:
@askvinh
@nick_braveheart
@choosejoyfitness
@wiredpear

Thank you all for your awesome comments. I’ve linked up to there profiles below so the rest of you be sure to check them out. Thanks for watching.

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