Content Strategy and Event Planning: Athens Resturant Week

Summer 2024

Overview

One of the main reasons Visit Athens GA hired me was to provide support for Athens Restaurant Week, one of their largest summer events. Officially, I was a marketing and event planning intern, but I filled in to support other departments as the project spanned multiple roles.

Over the course of the project, I would recruit over 50 restaurant clients, maintain communication and build good relationships with clients, create and manage social media and email marketing campaigns, and design promotional materials for clients and marketing events.

The Challenge

My manager tasked me with recruiting at least 36 restaurants for Athens Restaurant Week. This was daunting, as I had never recruited clients before, but the challenge made it exciting. Following the first stage of recruitment, my next task would begin: marketing the event to the public through as many online channels as possible. Finally, during the week Athens Restaurant week spanned, I would have to be avaliable at any moment to offer support to clients and keep a steady amount of promotional content posted to our socials.

The Process

Recruitment

To effectively recruit, I first consulted my manager about strategies they had previously used to recruit to fill the gaps in my knowledge. Following that, I researched old marketing materials, phone scripts, and lists of previous years’ participants to determine the best approach.

In the end, I devised a three-pronged engagement plan, comprised of online, in-person, a phone engagement and communication. For each client, I first went in-person to introduce myself to the manager and pitch the event to them. If they were interested, I left my contact information, along with a flyer I had made that addressed FAQs and outlined what would be expected from their participation.

Once I had an extensive contact list, I began an email marketing campaign. Using constant contact, I sent out at least two emails a week encouraging clients to market Athens Restaurant Week to their diners and on their own social media channels. I also made a separate email campaign for potential clients, which focused on describing the business opportunities the event presented to encourage recruitment.

Finally, I stayed in touch with restaurant managers and owners through regular email and phone communication. I worked with them to create personalized marketing materials to promote each restaurant to diners, and incorporated their feedback into my designs. Through maintaining engaged communication, I was able to build positive relationships with clients that will last between them and Visit Athens GA long into the future.

Marketing

Throughout the recuitment phase, I was also creating marketing materials to advertise Athens Restaurant Week to both businesses and consumers. I worked with the marketing and communications managers to plan two campaigns, one for marketing and one for social media.

For marketing, I was tasked with creating online materials, such as email blasts and newsletters, as well as contacting restaurant clients to encourage them to participate in marketing efforts. Additionally, I made each restaurant personalized menus and content that were posted on AthensRestaurantWeek.com to advertise what they would be serving during the event. The materials I created would help support the ad campaigns my manager was running in local news outlets, social media, and online. I also reached out to local government and news media channels to inquire about them supporting us by mentioning Athens Restaurant Week to their consumer contacts.

For social media, I worked with another intern to begin accumulating a backlog of photo and video content that we would use during Athens Restaurant Week itself. We went to over 50 restaurants to shoot videos of the items that would be on their prix fix menus, and talked to the managers of each restaurant so that they could tell us directly what aspects of their business they wanted highlighted in our social media coverage.

Results

In the end, I recruited 56 restaurants for Athens Restaurant Week, a 64% increase from the previous year. Out of those, 92% said they experienced greater traffic during Athens Restaurant Week than usual, and said that they would participate the next year. 64% of the restaurants I recruited had never participated before, and 8% were new businesses.

Leading up to the event, AthensRestaurantWeek.com and VisitAthensGA.com experienced a 23% increase in site traffic. The social media campaigns, combined with my marketing efforts, led to a 47% increase in engagement on Instagram, with the most popular video reaching over 42k views.

The email campaigns I created for businesses had a 74% opening rate, and the ones I sent to consumer had a 32% opening and click rate.