How do you increase attendance? Attract new patrons correct? And to attract new patrons, fair management needs to do some research and make some decisions. First, what demographic are you trying to reach?
How do you determine which group to focus on? We have found this information in our survey. By doing a survey at your fair to learn about the current attendees and identifying patterns. If you aren’t collecting demographic information annually or at least every other year you have no data to make good decisions. Your survey must include age (or a range), gender, zip code and ethnicity at a minimum.
We recently discovered a significant increase in our attendance by the asian population using our onsite fair survey. Further research indicated that our community demographic had changed as well. We quickly realized we needed to make some adjustments to our programming to begin the process of attracting the growing asian demographic in our community to the Fair, and, naturally, increasing attendance at our fair.
Based on our fair survey from a three year period we chose to focus on the top two growing sub-demographics: chinese americans and indian americans.
The next decision was made to create 2 new festivals during the Fair featuring chinese american and indian american entertainment, food, vendors, contests, etc.. We’ve already been doing this in the hispanic market with great success. Over the past 3 Fairs, we have been working with a team from the local Univision TV/Radio media group. The Fair purchases advertising on their TV and Radio outlets and pays for entertainment. Univision helps promote our hispanic event, Festival Latino, and arranges for the entertainment. In addition, the Fair provides marketing collateral in spanish for Univision to distribute at events they produce or events they attend. It’s been a successful process, so we decided to try the same process with these two new festivals.
We contacted our media buyers, who did research to determine which media partner would be the best partnership. Stay tuned for updates as we go through this process.
