As a graphic designer and website developer it was logical that this would be my task. Already on the edition of last year, we had flyers ready. In total we printed 12500 A6 flyers for the jugglers (in English and Dutch), 5000 A5 flyers for the locals of Meerssen, 1250 program books for at the convention and 100 posters to spread around schools, campings and shops in Meerssen. Our target groups were the jugglers, the locals, youth circuses and the tourists. Every target group meant a different way of the use of media. I see the marketing campaign as very successful since the convention had the most participants of the last 5 years with a total of 430 visitors!
Jugglers / Youth circuses
To target as much jugglers as possible, we went to a lot of juggling convention before our own one to hand out flyers. Something new I introduced was to invite popular jugglers and include them in a convention trailer. People became really enthusiastic because of the trailer and saw which awesome jugglers were coming. When giving a service like this convention, it is important to show physical evidence in order to gain trust that they don’t make a miss purchase. This is something I learned at the USE learning-line course New Product Marketing. For the Youth circuses we had a special discount offer. When they came with a group of minimum 10 people, they would get a €10 discount. In this way, they promote the convention for you and invite people to join. By this we gained around 40 participants of youth-circuses, which normally would be only around 10.
Locals / tourists
At first we had the plan to do a whole school trajectory with juggling workshops, but unfortunately we didn’t got the funding to do this. What we did was perform for free on all the 4 primary schools of Meerssen and also perform at activities in Meerssen so after the show we could hand out flyers. The hardest challenge was to try to explain what the convention is to non-jugglers and what locals could do at it. They have the idea it is for jugglers only, but this is not true. So we made a flyer specified on the locals with an overview of the activities they could do at the convention. Also I made a special trailer for the locals to show how a convention looks like. We place advertisements in the local papers but also in the Limburger, a newspaper with around 870.000 subscriptions. Also we sent press articles to all the local press and even got an item on the local TV-station of Utrecht.
