Cheesy Marketing that Worked – A Case Study

Last Saturday I spent an hour surrounded by cheese lovers at the Prahran Market Cheese Festival. The place was packed – so much so that getting anywhere near actual cheese was a tough gig! It was all good fun, albeit with a serious purpose for the market traders. I’d love to know how many extra kilos of cheese walked out the door of the market that day, and how much more cheese will be sold there over the coming weeks. Everyone was given one of these nifty little booklets as they arrived. It’s packed with information about cheese varieties, choosing and caring for cheese, and lots of ideas about cooking and serving. Just reading it made me drool. It’s a terrific example of thoughtful, beautifully designed, useful information given to exactly the right audience. What can we, as small business owners, learn from this event? 1. Go where the right buyers are – or create reason to attract them. The cheese festival had been heavily promoted online, in social media, local print media and at the market, guaranteeing a huge crowd of enthusiastic foodies. Where do your buyers gather? Could you participate in an event that attracts those people? Or partner with businesses with the same target audience to create an event? How many more people could you reach if you were connected to the network of another business or three? 2. Give generously. Let your audience experience your product or service in a small but tangible way – enough to whet their appetite for something more substantial. There were queues for tastings all over the market – giving plenty of time to read that little booklet while you waited. Together with plenty of chances to purchase cheese based foods, there was loads of cheese eaten and going home in shopping bags on Saturday. How do you give people a taste of your service? Do you use ebooks, or trial offers, or low cost demonstration products to let people try before they commit? 3. Be memorable. Together with an immediate experience, make sure you give something tangible to remember your business, and a reason to come back. I’ll bet lots of people hang on to that little cheese booklet, and buy more and different cheeses because of it.