Oregon Country Fair is a yearly event that is loved by thousands of Oregonians and others from around the country.
The Oregon Country Fair begins on the Friday of the second weekend in July every year. The fair is a non-profit organization and as such has a board of directors. Additionally, the management structure of the Oregon Country Fair is typically composed of an Executive Director, an Operations Manager, a Site and Facilities Manager, and a team of volunteer Back Up Managers, otherwise known as BUMS, who serve as representation for the fair’s paid management staff for the duration of the event.
Wikipedia
The first fair, organized by Ron and Robin Ulrich, was held in Eugene over the weekend of November 1–2, 1969, on Eugene’s Hawkins Heights.[4] It was promoted with the tagline, “come in costume”
Wikipedia
Creating A Buzz
The Oregon Country Fair has done an amazing job with creating a buzz around their event. Some of that buzz is created each year by sharing social media posts on popular sites like Facebook and Instagram.
On their Facebook they keep fans up to date on who will be at the fair and where they will be located:
On Instagram they do a great job of highlighting each of musicians that are playing at the fair:
Another reason for the buzz around the event is that they have such a large group of fans that come back year after year. This is shown off perfectly in The Oregon Country Fair Facebook group. Customers will use this group to take it upon themselves and share their love for the event:
A part of that group that helps to make the event so magical is the volunteers. They also take part is posting about the event on the Facebook group.
The community is truly what makes this event something special.
Marketing and Promotion Checklist
After the word of mouth buzz comes the marketing and promotion for an event. This is one thing that OCF excels at and that other event organizers can learn from. Follow along with the below checklist:
- Come up with a marketing budget that you and your team are comfortable with. Make sure there is some flexibility around this budget as you will likely need to alter it depending upon where you are seeing the biggest ROI (Return on Investment) from.
- Allocate each ad platform budget so that it is split up around the biggest platforms: Facebook and Instagram ads, Youtube Ads, Spotify and event Google Ad words.
- Create a timeline as to how long you want the budget to last and how far in advance you want to start the budget. A good example of this is find out how many months before the event you want to start and find a specific day (Maybe a weekend as fans will likely not be working) so that you can create a buzz around the ad as soon as possible. You also want to factor in that you will want to start small with the daily budget until you find content that is working well and you can then raise the daily amount.
- Pull together as much ad content as you can: Static images (with 25% or less text on them), Videos with music (try to keep them around 15 seconds or less), Videos with natural or ambient sound (If this type of video works for your event).
- Make sure you have tutorials and walk-throughs ready to go for each platform so that if you are in a pinch you know your way around the ad platform. Then start the ads.
Checklist Broken Down
When it comes to OCF and creating their ad budget, they knew right off the bat which ad platforms were going to get ads in front of their fans. So we started with those platforms and then went from there with the budget: Instagram, Youtube and Spotify. So we came up with an amount for each platform. The flexibility came into play when they decided to also split some of the Instagram budget with Facebook.
*Facebook is a great ads platform because you are able to create an ad and then decide where exactly you want that add to be shown. So you can create a full ad that is only shown on Facebook or one that is only shown on Instagram.
Coming up with a timeline was important for the fair so that we could get a buzz created for the event well in advance but we also had to time it to where we did not run out of budget the week before the fair when a lot of last minute customers would be purchasing tickets.
Oregon Country Fair had a plethora of great content! When it came time to talk advertising they had tons of static images both from past events as well as artist spotlight images for this years performers.
Their was also a robust amount of videos that included artist performances with added music to them as well as more ambient videos that used the sound straight from the video. OCF is a perfect example of an event were ambient videos do very well with the fans. For some it reminds them of past years at the fair and their personal experiences or it showcases a really fun time that they could have should they buy a ticket.
Marketing Continued
One of the decisions that the fair made was to create Spotify playlists that showcased the artists that were performing at the event. This is a great way to give a shout out to the talented musicians but also to give fans a taste of the music that will be at the fair.
Spotify is a huge streaming platform so this is always a great place to promote whether it be paid promotion (through commercials for Spotify users) or simply creating playlists for free that customers can stream.
If you are interesting in checking out the playlist you can do so here:
Another important piece of marketing (Especially for events with Music) is showing off the lineup for the event. Oregon Country Fair highlights this perfectly by sharing the events lineup on their website, in Facebook and Instagram ads as well as on social media posts on their website.
They also did a great job of highlighting the headliners on the list by giving them spotlights posts and ads as mentioned earlier in the article.
If you are interested in checking out the OCF 2024 lineup you can do so here: https://www.oregoncountryfair.org/the-event/the-lineup/
Conclusion
Oregon Country Fair has done an amazing job promoting there event and creating a long lasting buzz that sticks with so many of their fans year after year.
If you are looking for a marketing plan for your event be sure to emulate OCF’s because they know what they are doing! And if you are interested in attending the fair be sure to pick up your tickets at: https://aftontickets.com/event/buyticket/qpxv84l9e1/oregon-country-fair-2024
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