While writing my last blog about event marketing, I realized that barn that I keep my horses at is infamous for event marketing to their marketing strategy.  Honey Tree Stables is located five minutes from Miami University in Oxford, OH.  This means, that a majority of its clients come from the University itself.  While this may seem beneficial to the business, it is extremely hard to capture and maintain services for these customers.

In order to gain customers, the owner, Sarah Oelerich, and several of her employees and clients, must ban together to come up with unique marketing strategies.  Many of these ideas market her business through event marketing.  For example, at the beginning of each school year, Sarah and Honey Tree Stables put on an open house.  Rather than just having the barn open for clients and potential clients to walk through the facility, Sarah has a welcome back party with a band and game festivities.  The band, the pool, and the games allows current and potential clients to interact with each other, for them to get to know Sarah and the other staff, and to have a great experience that will make them come back year after year.  After the party, Honey Tree Stables put up pictures and video footage of the event on its website and invited clients to come and view them online.

Sarah also puts on a number of clinics throughout the year, both with her clients and the Miami Equestrian team.  This allows the community and the internal community to get a taste of what Sarah does.  She markets this through email marketing with the Miami Equestrian Team and the clients, posters throughout Oxford, and creating an experience during the event that makes the customers feel like they are at home.

Without these events, many of Sarah’s customers would not get to experience the culture and fun at Honey Tree Stables.  Without these experiences, it would be hard for Sarah to maintain customers. Sarah and Honey Tree Stables do an amazing job at capturing their audiences through event marketing.  Companies that have a hard target marketing to capture or those that have experiences that they want to sell, should try using event marketing.  They should set up events that promote not only the services that they sell, but that capture the experience a customer has when using the services they offer.  Similar to Honey Tree Stables, companies should hone in on a certain area they would like their customers to experience and then build their event marketing around that.  They will see that event marketing does in fact capture customers and if done right, keeps them coming back for more.