Denver Grilled Cheese Festival Social Media Marketing

390k Facebook & Instagram impressions
400+ new likes on Facebook
200+ new Instagram Followers
700k people reached via the Event Page
8.6k clicks to the DGCF website
$30k+ in revenue

About the Project:
The Denver Grilled Cheese Festival (DGCF) recruited the help of the McLernon & Co. social team to promote their event, between August – November of 2018. The Grilled Cheese Festival acted as a Fundraiser for Imagination Library of Denver, a local organization founded by Dolly Parton that mails free books to children from birth until they begin school.

From the start, in August, McLernon & Co. saw the value in promoting this event heavily on Facebook and Instagram using a variety of engagement-based tactics organically and through paid efforts, with a goal of increasing awareness to drive ticket sales and event responses.

The Tactics:
Organically, McLernon & Co. strategically planned out our efforts to ensure that each post on Facebook and Instagram were educational, inviting and included mouth-watering imagery. Offering question and answer posts, restaurant sponsor posts and high quality professional images of the tasty grilled cheese being offered at the event, while always giving a link to purchase tickets.

The McLernon & Co. Team also utilized a Facebook Event to spread awareness and communicate with interested and RSVP’d guests in an effort to streamline communication and build excitement, leading up to the event. We wanted to create a tangible Event that attendees could share and invite their friends to on Facebook. We also wanted to track palpable event metrics, including geographic and demographic information about who attended or was planning on attending our event.

Paid Social Efforts were also deployed to spread the word to viewers within a specific radius of Denver, through a Ticket Sale Campaign, Brand Awareness Efforts, Promoted Posts and an Event Response Campaign. We utilized video, carousel and image Ads on Facebook and Instagram and tapped into some cheesy good puns!

The McLernon & Co. team wanted to make sure our content stood out above the “cyber” crowd. We storyboarded, shot and edited a video to showcase all of the different vendors that would be in attendance, and their take on grilled cheese.

Careful consideration was also put into the aesthetics of the images used for the promotion of Denver Grilled Cheese Festival. McLernon & Co. The team planned, staged and shot many of the images used from the pre-promotion of the event, all the way down to the actual night’s event postings. These were shot and edited in house and our team was pleased with the way the images depicted the tastiness of Denver Grilled Cheese Fest!

The Results:
Over the course of the four month long pre-promotion of the event, leading up to the Denver Grilled Cheese Festival on Wednesday, November 14th, McLernon & Co. produced some incredible results, including over 390k Facebook & Instagram impressions, over 400 new likes on Facebook and over 200 new Instagram Followers. Our Facebook Event reached almost 700k people and had over 8.6k clicks to the DGCF ticket page, resulting in over 730 attendees to the event and over $30k in revenue.

Our team was on-site during the SOLD-OUT event to ensure it was a huge hit and the McLernon & Co. Team credits solid planning strategies and strong execution to the success of the Denver Grilled Cheese mFest and would love to partner with you on your next big event!

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