Promotion Machine!
What is sweet, delicious and goes great with a pint of beer? Chocolate! In fact, chocolate is a particularly great flavor enhancer when paired with certain styles of beer, especially stouts. How do I know this? I intern at a company called City Food Tours and it recently kicked off its Sam Adams Beer and Decadent Chocolate Tasting which takes place the 2nd and 4th Sundays of each month at the Sam Adams Grille near Allentown, Pennsylvania. It is one of the two brand new tours the company has launched during the past few months (I blogged about the Prohibition Cocktail Tour a few weeks ago).
The promotion of this tour turned out to be a bit more challenging than I had expected. Promoting tours or tastings that City Food Tours launches in Philadelphia are like clockwork because the residents of our city and the immediate surrounding areas know the brand and have been on some of the tours. This time around we were dealing with a completely new geographic market that we would need to heavily saturate with news about our new beer and chocolate tasting. Researching Lehigh Valley media outlets was key in tackling this tasting’s promotion. So, that is exactly what I did. I posted notices in The Morning Call‘s respective website, LehighValleyLive.com, DiscoverLehighValley.com and plenty more outlets that I thought would help me get the word out. But as time was dwindling towards the first day of the tasting, no tickets had been ordered by any customers. It turns out all my effort was worth null! Unfortunately, a few dates needed to be rescheduled so we could try to spread more word around town.
As I went about researching more ways to promote the tasting, I found out that the best way to do so was to hit niche websites like craft beer blogs and restaurant review sites. I hadn’t realized that this event, that I thought everyone would enjoy, is actually quite an esoteric one. So off I went, posting to beeradvocate.com, craftbeer.com and smaller websites alike. I also ended up re-posting to the original media outlets from before (to my chagrin). This technique seemed to have worked this time around as tickets seem to be selling much better than before. The picture associated with this posting shows my desk riddled with “table tents,” promotional tools that sit on top of tables and bars at restaurants. I put together each one in a flash, hence the title of this posting. If you’re 21 or over and would like to attend this event, click here.
