The Book on Marketing: Create a Newsworthy Event.

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I wrote yet another book! This one is pretty big, actually, with over 90 chapters, all of which are rather meaty. The book, The Book on Marketing: No More Excuses for Marketing Inaction, can be pre ordered or, depending on when you see this, purchased by clicking the link HERE. A new chapter will post daily for close to 100 days and then the book will be available for immediate purchase instead of just preorders.

I also released the rough drafts of the book chapter by chapter on my website and you can read what I wrote and get the gist of the chapters. Honestly, you don’t even need to read the book. There is enough information between the blog postings and the resources pages found HERE that the rest of the book might just be fluff.

With that said, the blog is a very first draft, mostly notes, of the final book. It’s out of order and a tad messy. This gives you a peek inside my writing process where I do the technical, eclectic part first and the voice tends to change depending on the topic I am discussing and the research I did for the chapter. Paraphrasing from common knowledge sources in the first draft gives it that eclectic look and feel. So please, enjoy my scattered brain and typos in this draft of The Book on Marketing: No More Excuses for Marketing Inaction.

The book itself its a much easier format to read plus adds a lot more of me into it as it goes on with real world, easy to grasp examples where I could put them and honestly, I would truly appreciate your purchase.

Create a Newsworthy Event.

On Friday, October 30th at the local bowling alley, some people sat up a blood drive. They worked with the local Red Cross. Bowling alleys get busy in bad weather and the bar at the bowling alley was doing a costume contest that evening. The people setting up the blood drive were working with a local political candidate and one has a sense of humor so it was named “Blood Sucking Politicians.” All people running for office that year were invited to attend and because of the visibility, would be shamed for not attending. They could work the crowd of people and ask for votes but also had the opportunity to donate. They offered cash prizes for their own costume contest and the bowling alley offered a free round for anyone who donated. The event wrapped up at 6PM and was done in time for the bowling alley to get busy. 

The local radio stations were invited out if they wanted to broadcast from it and one of the politicians offered to pay for a live remote for one of the local stations while the other came out as a community outreach event and really helped get people interested in the event. Press releases leading up to the event, Facebook invitations, social media reminders, and Eventbright direct invitations were sent out to as many people as possible. $200 was spent on social media promotion split between Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. A hashtag was created for the event so people could post selfies of themselves with a needle in their arm while in costume as they donated and they had a hashtag to use plus  a list of good local hashtags was shown to them. The hashtag was promoted on all major social media sites and the local participants really pushed it hard. 

In the end, it was a huge event that made the bar, the bowling alley, the Red Cross, the donors, and the politicians all very happy and this is something completely fictitious that never happened, but an idea I have personally kicked around. Why am I using it as an example? Because of the potential an event like this would have for publicity of the brand (the organizer) who is putting it on. Charity is great and really helps increase outreach. 

Write your good press releases as described elsewhere in this book and you will have an event to remember. 

The nice thing about the title of the event and being in a book is that it is now copy-written as part of this book and my personal property…but please feel free to use everything I just gave you for an event with credit given to me (@TheMichaelBeebe on all things social) and stay out of La Porte County, Indiana. I haven’t done anything with the idea yet, but I would like to. It is a great event idea and would have a huge impact on a lot of people plus it’s great promotion for those involved. I bet you could even have politicians sponsor the costume contest with prizes. 

Imagine if you’re the campaign advisor who puts this event together and it goes off successfully. How about a car dealership? They have big parking lots. Perhaps tie it in with a free car wash for a donation. Be creative, but you can always put on an event for next to nothing and the Red Cross will set up the Bloodmobile for five people sometimes. They need blood so bad, they may not require any sort of minimum donation amount to drive it out to your event. 

Toys for Tots, coat drives, canned food drives for local pantries all work great for events like this or mix a few together and shoot for as much altruism as possible and though you’re not making direct money off of an event like this, you can create a lot of social capital for your brand.

Make sure to get a lot of photos and post them on your social during and after the event.

I include this in the Section on written marketing because this will be press release heavy, but the main goal is to get members of the press, all of the press, out to your event to see what you are doing and to write up high value feel-good press on your brand. 

Thank you for reading this little piece of The Book on Marketing: No More Excuses for Marketing Inaction. If you received any value from what you read, I ask you to please consider purchasing this book by clicking HERE. Thank you for everything!