Winter Fairs Can Boost Your Income and Profile

Stands are a great marketing option for holistic practitioners any time of the year, but winter and Christmas fairs are incredibly effective. These fairs are often the busiest of the year, filled with people in a festive mood wanting to find gifts for loved ones and spend money. It’s a great opportunity to boost your income as well as build your local profile.

Finding Affordable Stands

While stands at local events are often priced as low as £10 for the day, larger events can charge premium rates beyond the budget of many holistic practitioners. Do your research to discover what’s available in your local area and you may be surprised at the options.

Check out local shows, festivals, artisan markets, craft fairs, wellbeing fairs as well as winter and Christmas fairs for opportunities to set up stands.

Collaborating with another small business owner who provides complementary products and services to you can be a good way to cut costs. It will also give you someone else to work with and ease the pressure of manning a stand for the day.

Set a Goal

Rather than just booking a stand and rocking up to see what happens, have a goal in mind. For example, to sell X products, sign up X people to your email list or, find X new clients. As with all your marketing, you should always ask yourself why you’re doing it.

By knowing what you want to achieve from your stand, you’ll be able to focus your efforts and get the most from it.

Select Your Offers

Think about the last time you went to a winter market, what attracted your attention? Whilst many stands selling trinkets and food thrive at these events, you need to consider how you can make your offers relevant.

If you make products, how can you package them into gift options for people? If you offer services, you could create vouchers or package them into a gift that someone would want to give by adding something relevant and tangible like a beautiful notebook that can be wrapped up with a voucher.

Make Your Stand, Stand Out

When you’re in a busy environment, you need to make your stand visible to attract attention and create a good experience for everyone visiting you. Try to find out where your stand will be and what’s provided by the venue as this will help you to bring along everything you need.

Have a sign with your name or logo and what you do to help people understand at a glance what you do. A plain table can be easily dressed using a tablecloth (or a single sheet, or throw will also work just as well) in your brand colours.

Add height and interest with items that have relevance to your discipline. If you have the time and budget, have pull-up roller banners created – these can be used over, and over again (as long as you don’t make them seasonal). If not, get creative and think about what you can do with what you have available. For example, one of my clients uses tall branches from her garden with fairy lights and twine to hang things from and it looks amazing.

Add a little Christmas feel by dressing your stand with a few carefully selected decorations that fit with your colours and complement what you offer. A few fairy lights will help light up your stand, especially on darker days as well as adding a festive touch.

Prepare Your Essentials

If you’ve had a stand before, you’ll have a good idea of the different things you need to have. If not, take a look at this list for a few ideas of what you might need:

• Notepad and pens
• Calculator
• Money belt and change
• Card machine
• Paper bags
• Price tags
• Leaflets and business cards
• Food and drinks for the day
• Warm layers, hat, scarf, and gloves

Market Your Stand

Use your social media profiles to let people know you’re going to be at the fair and invite them to come along to your stand. Your clients will drop by and say hello and the busier your stand looks, the more it will attract other people to visit it.

Marketing Materials

Make sure you have leaflets and business cards that people can take away with them and if you sell anything, pop a copy in the bag so people have your details.

Have a QR code displayed at your stand and included on your materials. This will allow people to use the camera on their phone to access your website or email sign-up form while they’re at the fair or at home.

Make Your Stand Interactive

Depending on what you do, how can you make your stand interactive for those visiting it? You could have samples of products people can try like hand cream; you could have things that they can smell like essential oils or taste like herb teas.

Is there something you can demonstrate about how you work that would grab attention? If you offer hand reflexology, could you do little demonstrations with visitors to your stand?

If you don’t have relevant products, remember people love to talk about themselves so be friendly and chat to everyone and ask questions - you never know where a conversation could lead.

Measuring Your Success

As with all marketing, you need to know if it works and whether you want to do it again. Review how the event went after against the goal you set yourself. If it didn’t go as well as planned, ask yourself:

• Was it the right fair for me in terms of location, how it was organised and advertised?
• Are the visitors the right type of customers for me?
• Did I put on a good show with my stand and how I presented myself?
• What could I have done differently, e.g. being able to take card payments instead of just cash?

And remember, the impact of the event could be delayed. Your efforts of networking with visitors and your fellow stall holders can provide you with new clients in the following months.

If you want to attend a fair but are struggling to get everything sorted out for it – I can help you. I’m offering a limited number of Strategy Sessions where I will work with you to plan and prepare for an event in one half-day session – let’s have a chat about it.