Every year, the festival and outdoor event season brings a wave of excitement for independent brands across the UK. High-profile launches, like Jeremy Clarkson’s inaugural Farm Fest at Stoneleigh Park in Warwickshire, are billed as massive celebrations of food, drink, and countryside shopping, promising access to tens of thousands of eager visitors.
By all accounts, these large-scale events are a massive hit with the public. Organisers frequently welcome over 50,000 visitors across a single weekend.
But behind the scenes in the trading areas, a very different story often unfolds. While viral sensations like Spud Man absolutely smash it, social media was regularly filled with videos of small independent vendors packing up their stalls early, some holding back tears after a brutal start to trade. During the Farm Fest launch, some traders estimated that up to 90% of the 400 exhibitors failed to break even or make their costs back.
As a Midlands-based agency, we love a massive festival and always want to see local event scenes thrive.
However, these mixed reviews spotlight a harsh reality every independent brand faces: Is exhibiting at a major show actually right for your business?
Before you fork out a substantial amount of money for a pitch at the next big event, here are four critical things you need to weigh up.
1. The ‘Product Fit’ vs. Visitor Logistics
Before booking a stand, you have to think about the physical reality of how people experience a festival.
Is your product an impulse buy? Is it a hot meal or a quick snack they can consume right there and then? If so, festivals are prime territory. But if you sell heavy, bulky, or highly specialized items, you are fighting an uphill battle against customer logistics.
People do not want to carry a heavy stoneware vase, a giant dog bed, or a piece of furniture around a 300-acre muddy showground for eight hours.
Mind you, anomalies do happen. We once went to The Big Feastival in the Cotswolds and our friends impulsively bought an entire chicken coop. The husband literally had to leave his wife behind at the festival, drive the coop home because it wouldn’t fit in the car with both of them, and then drive all the way back to fetch her!
Unless you are banking on a rare husband-abandons-wife-for-a-chicken-coop scenario, you must ask yourself: How easy is it for someone to buy this and get it home?
2. Beware the ‘Exposure Trap’
“Think of the brand awareness!” is the ultimate event marketing mistake.
Let’s be completely honest: brand recognition is lovely, but exposure doesn’t pay the electric bill. Vague positioning cannot justify a pitch fee that runs into the thousands once you factor in stock, travel, staff, and accommodation.
If you are paying a premium to exhibit, you cannot just hope for the best. You need a rock-solid, active strategy to convert footfall into measurable metrics. If they can’t buy from you on the day, how are you tracking them?
- Are you offering a digital incentive or competition to capture email addresses?
- Are you handing out location-specific discount codes for your online shop?
If you don’t have a plan to turn passing crowds into tracked leads or immediate sales, you are simply paying a lot of money to stand in a field.
3. The “Field of Dreams” Fallacy (You Have to Do the Work)
One of the biggest mistakes small businesses make is assuming that paying a pitch fee guarantees a crowd. It isn’t a case of “build it and they will come.” You cannot simply rely on the event organisers to do 100% of the marketing work for you.
If you want to see a genuine return on investment, you have to drive your own footfall to that stand.
- Utilise your database: Have you emailed your existing customers and subscribers to tell them where you’ll be? Can you offer an exclusive “subscriber-only” perk or free gift if they visit your stand?
- Social media promotion: What are you putting out beforehand to show people you are attending? Are you sharing the behind-the-scenes prep, your stand number, or a map of how to find you in a crowded field?
- Local PR: Can you leverage the event to get some local press coverage? If your business has a unique hook or a new product launching at the festival, pitch it to local journalists or event bloggers ahead of time.
Exhibiting gives you the platform, but the pre-event promotion is entirely down to you.
4. The Risk of the ‘Inaugural Show’
First-year festivals are an incredibly high-risk gamble for small businesses with tight budgets.
No matter how experienced the organisers are, a brand-new event will always suffer from teething issues. Whether it’s confusing footfall layouts, poor signage, teething issues with the site maps, or unpredictable weather patterns, year one is always a learning curve.
While massive brands can absorb the cost of a quiet year-one layout mistake for the sake of long-term positioning, a small independent vendor usually cannot. If your marketing budget is precious, it is almost always safer to sit out the launch, watch the feedback from the sidelines, let the organisers iron out the kinks, and aim to trade in year two instead.
Look Hard at the Numbers
High-profile events will always be a vibrant and exciting part of the business calendar. But for small business owners, the inevitable seasonal drama serves as a stark reminder to take off the rose-tinted glasses when it comes to event marketing. Look hard at the numbers, analyse the practicalities of your product, and make sure you aren’t trading your hard-earned cash for a slice of empty exposure.
Your Outsourced Event Marketing Manager
When you are investing valuable time and resources into an exhibition, product launch, or regional show, you can’t afford to just cross your fingers and hope for footfall.
Having Piece of Cake Marketing step in as your dedicated Event Marketing Manager means taking the guesswork entirely out of your pre-show and on-the-day strategy. With a decade of experience across the Midlands event scene, we ensure your pitch fee translates into tracked leads, database growth, and real-world sales. We don’t just help you design a pretty stand; we act as the strategic driver that mobilises your existing audience, crafts targeted pre-event social media campaigns, and captures local PR opportunities to ensure people are actively looking for your stand number long before they even arrive at the gates.
Planning your marketing calendar for the upcoming event and exhibition season? Don’t leave your ROI to chance. Let’s have a chat about how we can help you build a robust event marketing strategy, from pre-show promotion to lead capture on the day. Get in touch with the Piece of Cake team today!