Episode 29: Promotion - The 5 Key Marketing Elements | Mastering the Production Series, Part 9

0:00 Hey EdVenturous Educator. Welcome back to Marketing EdVenture with Jacqué. Today, we are talking about part nine in my series on mastering the production of a fashion show, part nine, reflects on promotion, and all the activity that surrounds that particular task, I'm going to define promotion, we're going to go over the events, the marketing collateral, the different channels used for promotion, in the promotional calendar. Let's go.

0:44 You're listening to Marketing EdVenture, the hub for business, fashion, marketing, and other CTE educators who integrate marketing into the learning experience. I'm your host, Jacqué Walker. Each week, I'll cover marketing, education concepts, strategies, tips, trends, frameworks, and other information to equip you to connect your classroom to digital natives while cultivating an engaged learning environment. So come on into the room, where your favorite beverage snacks, and even your cell phone are all welcome.

1:20 Now, as a part of any production or any company really, promotion is always key. Promotion is one of the seven functions of marketing. So everything needs to have a promotional team, whatever it is, that company is using to advertise that particular event or that item, that brand, or what have you.

1:56 So what is promotion? Promotion, as I said before, is one of the seven marketing functions. Now it has about eight elements to it. Sometimes you'll see more elements listed depending on the organization that is putting out a publication about promotion. So those eight that I'm going to talk about are advertising, publicity, public relations, special events, visual merchandising, sales, promotion, personal selling, and direct marketing.

2:37 I'm going to start off the conversation for promotion focused on the events. Now these would be the special event element within the promotional mix. There are generally two events that the promotions team would be focused on for the fashion show production, the very first one is going to be the model call. Now the model call is the very first thing after all of the planning has been done for the fashion show. That is what initiates the implementation of all the planning that's been going on by the production team.

3:24 So the model call is the event that's going to be where the models try or the potential models try out for the fashion show. At a minimum, you want to start marketing or promoting that model call about 30 days in advance. This gives the people who are trying out an opportunity to make plans to take time off from work if they're working students or to let their parents know, or just to give them enough time to hear that announcement to say, “Oh, I think I want to try out for the fashion show.” So at a minimum 30 days. All of the activities that are going to go on as far as the promotion of the model call will be your daily announcements that you have every morning in schools across America. At the school that I taught, instead of doing the announcements on the speaker, we had gone to a digital format. So our radio television and film magnet program actually recorded all of the announcements and we basically had a news station where we were watching the students do the announcements through YouTube. We would submit our announcements to them and then they read them off, just like on a new station. So it was like we submitted a press release, which we're going to talk about later, and they were making our announcements for us. So announcements, that's gonna probably be the number one way in which you're going to promote the model call. Also, most organizations have social media. So you could use your social media to promote the model call, as well as flyers, posters across the school campus so that when students are walking around and they see the poster or flyers on the wall, they are like, “Okay, well, let me check that out.” Now, the thing that you want to have on any type of material that you're using to promote the model call: what the model call is; when it's going to happen; where it's going to happen; and the how (how do I register and what do I need to wear). So those are the things that you want to include in your promotion for the model call. So that's the first event.

6:19 The second event is the actual fashion show. We know a lot of activity is going to go into the promotion of this event, because this is your fundraiser, it is your project, it is the senior showcase for my students, and it is the big thing that everyone has been working toward. So at a minimum, you want to start promoting the fashion show, at a minimum 45 days in advance. But of course, you can have a longer runway of promotion, so that you continuously get the word out there. So you can get your audience, your market to start purchasing the tickets for the fashion show. Now, you're gonna go the same route, as far as your promotion activities, you'll do your announcements, you'll do your social media posts, your posters, flyers. and word of mouth, of course, is like the number one promotion, right. You're gonna have the same information as far as the location, well, it's not the same as information for the model call. Let me take that back. So you're gonna have information that is similar, but it will have the name of the fashion show, the location of the fashion show, the time, the date, the cost of the tickets, and how you can purchase the tickets. So that is information that you want to include on everything that you use to promote the actual fashion show.

8:00 The third thing I'm going to cover is marketing collateral. You may have been like what is collateral. Collateral is anything that you're using to promote the fashion show or your event or your brand. So the collateral are the items that you're going to use. So for “Mastering the Production”, I'm going to present to you five collateral marketing items that you could use. The first collateral item is the media kit. Now your media kit contains a lot of information about your program. Media kits can vary. Now your media kit can be simply a press release and a short bio about you, the company or whatever it is as being promoted. Or your media kit can be very elaborate, and it could have promotional items in there such as T-shirts, mugs, pens, as well as a bio, a press release, a lot of pictures, a gallery of photos, anything so your media kit can contain anything. The media kit, as it states in the name, first of all media, meaning pictures, information, anything that tells you about the event, the person, the brand, the company. Then the word kit means that you have multiple items that you're putting together for use for something. So your media kit then would be defined as all of the information and promotional tools that you're putting together in a packet to distribute to your target audience. All right. And so for us, that media kit was sent out to middle schools because we were always in promotion mode when it came to our program. So we would send it to the middle school counselors, the best person to get their students interested in our program, right. We would also send it out to potential sponsors for our show, or people who had already sponsored us or shown interest, or that we just wanted to let them know. Since our program was a dual credit program, I would send the media kit out to the college campus that our program was connected to so that the professor's there and the staff would know about our fashion show. So you can send your media kit out to the important and key people that you are connected to or that you want to capture the interest.

10:58 Now what goes into the media kits that we produced. So we weren't elaborate with all the different promotional tools, because we're a high school, and our fashion show is a fundraiser, which means that we're trying to spend as little money as possible. But we did create cute media kits. So the things that we had in our media kit would be: information about our school; our school history; information about our fashion program (introducing the program to them, most of counselors already knew about our programs, but it's just a good time to give more detailed information about your program); teacher biographies for marketing and fashion design (education, the number of years teaching, our accomplishments, and all of those things so the students and the parents would have confidence in who we are, as teachers); pictures of all the different activities that we do (especially previous fashion shows); a little bit of history about the various fashion shows; highlights of our program; the different things that we were known for; what students did after they graduated from high school if they went on into a fashion; and other successes with our program. The media kit also contained the press release, which I'm going to talk about next. It also contained a couple of passes to the fashion show. So that was for the counselor and a date or they could give those passes to students who were interested in our program. But we also had our program booklet that gave information about the fashion show. This is something that we will hand out at the fashion show. I will talk about that one in a little bit as well. We will also list our sponsors, if we had sponsors for our fashion show, so that the counselor could be very aware of what we were doing. This allowed them to see how promotion is a part of marketing. They could get a glimpse of what the students do. This media kit is one of the elements or one of the things, the projects that the students actually work on as a part of their program. So that is all that the media kit includes. Media kits can be as simple as you like them to be or as elaborate as you'd like them to be.

14:11 A press release would be one of the items in our media kit. You may be asking, what is a press release? And then again, you may already know, but let me go over. A press release is a document a statement that you send to all of the media outlets that you want to mention or promote whatever it is that you are doing. It could be for a fashion show, it could be for the release of a collection. It could be whatever newsworthy thing that you want those media outlets to let the public know about. So of course ours was a press release about our fashion show and what it can do. canes is the school name or organization name, the name of the show the purpose of the show, the date, the time, the cost of the show how people can go out and purchase tickets for the show, or even find out more information like a website, or a QR code, or social media platform listing, just whatever way that you want them to find you in get more information, a press release is not a long drawn out document, it's very concise, and to the point, it really should be written in the way that you want that media outlet to say it. So they can just take that press release and basically read directly from it. And that is your announcement, your message or advertisement out to the world. The people that we would provide a press release to would be our school newspaper, our school media team that does the announcements, and out to the radio station, the TV station. So those are places that we normally would send our press release to. And of course, we would include it in our media kit, so that those parties that we wanted to receive that extended information and personal invitation, we would include it in that kid as well. your press release, it's a very key element in your promotional mix. And I think that it's something that's often overlooked by high schools and programs, because people really tend to think that a press release is something that only a big organization would do. But no, it's a very professional formal document statement of your activity that helps the media promote your activity for you. You know, sometimes you might want to just call up and say, Hey, can you tell them about my fashion show, whatever, no, send them something professional, send them something formal, send them something, that's a statement that makes the work less for them. Because most of the time does that mean they get a lot of these things. So they're not going to want to take a phone call, they're not going to want to take an email they're going to want if you deliver it in a format that all they have to do is read it. And it states the key things that make them say, oh, I want to help this high school fashion program out by mentioning their fashion show. You've given them the statement and you've made their work easy for them. So that's what a press release does for you.

17:59 Marketing collateral for your fashion show production is going to be your program/booklet, however you want to name it, but it is the actual item that you hand out to the audience when they come to the fashion show that this is usually a great souvenir item for your audience, because it's going to consist of all the information about everyone who's participated in the fashion show and what the theme is, and all of the key information. It has the school name, or the organization, the name of the fashion show, description of the theme of the fashion show, an outline of the order of the fashion show, like the list the names of the segments, it can list the entertainment that's going to be performed at the fashion show. It'll have all the pertinent information like the date, the time, the location, and then it'll have listings, it should have a listing of all the production team members. All of the fashion show designers are either the retailers that you sourced your clothing from the various places in which the clothing were sourced from for the fashion show. And then it should have all of the teams who have contributed to the development of the fashion show like for our school, we use our graphic designs, our TV, radio, and film department photography for culture construction. So we would list all of those magnet programs to give everyone recognition for the work that they contributed to the fashion show. We would also list sponsors, let me not leave cosmetology out because cosmetology was very key to our program. They did our makeup and our hair for the program. So cosmetology as well. Then another thing that you can do, just depending on how much time you want and effort you want to put into that, and it can be a part of your fundraising, is to sell ads for your program. Now, that's a big undertaking, because then you have to organize those ads into the booklet. And then of course, the printing of those. So just have to be mindful of those kinds of things. And that just would be an extra task that the promotions team would take on. And then of course, you want to just give your thanks at the end of your program. So this can be a simple foldable, depending on how much information you have in it. Or it can turn out to be a program booklet that is bound, and stapled together with multiple pages. It just really depends on what it is that your organization wants to do with regard to that promotional piece of material. And again, even though it's not promoting the show, because you don't pass this out until the date of it is still a piece of collateral, which can be used as a promotional tool for your program. So you put that in the hands of a counselor, you put that in the hands of potential students who come to visit your schools on tour. Or even the younger students who weren't in your program that you're trying to recruit to your program, maybe like the ninth graders. You show them that piece of material, and it is a really great promotional tool for your program for the future.

21:56 EdVenturous Educator, I have a program that will be available in the fall 2024. It will provide a scope of resources to help you create and implement a successful fashion show. It's something I've wanted to do for years, because the fashion show has so many moving parts. And of course, when you're managing students who were responsible for implementing the show, it really is a project management responsibility. Now, this program will contain video and audio modules, as well as a project management framework, proprietary documents for management in all areas of the responsibilities, signature, model call framework, an outline for creating your fashion show bible of media kid framework, real examples of my productions, and highlights of my student led fashion shows, and so much more. Now, stay tuned for the early bird invitation to access the program. I look forward to having you access there. And I also look forward to hearing about your fashion show productions and seeing them on Instagram. So be sure to connect with me at marketing EdVenture. So I can see all of the wonderful work that you're doing with your program.

23:28 The fourth marketing collateral is signage. Signage is key because signage is what gets the attention of your target market, the people that you want to come to your fashion show. Now there are just two basic times when you're going to have signage that you need to be concerned about. And it's before the fashion show, and the date of the fashion show. Prior to the fashion show, you're gonna have signage that's placed all around your campus, and sometimes maybe in the community in stores that are nearby your school so that you can promote your fashion show to an external audience. But most of the time when you're doing a fashion show for high school, you're promoting it to the schools and the faculty at the school. And then you're telling your parents and your friends and family and all of that about the fashion show. Those are the main people who are going to attend your fashion show. But again, like I said, We promoted to middle schoolers, so you may want to put signage at their campus at the middle school campuses, but most of your signage is going to be on your campus and that consist of flyers and posters and banners that have the information that we've been talking about all along. You could just have a QR code that says fashion show and they scan it and it pulls up information about the fashion shampoo. But what it's going to have on it is your school name, or organization name. And it's gonna have the name of the fashion show, it could have a little bit of hint of what the theme is for the fashion show, the location, the time, the date, the cost, how they can attain a ticket, or find out more information about the fashion show. So that's going to go on all of the signage, posters, media that you have posted around the campus in the community. Now, that's before the fashion show. And you want to get that out fairly early. You want to give a runway time of about 45 days, at least to promote your fashion show.

25:49 The other time that you're going to be concerned about signage is the day of the fashion show. So you're going to want to have outdoor signage that direct people to where the location of the fashion show is, you want to have a sign that states the name of your fashion show that can look like a variety of things, when we're talking about outdoor signs, if you have one of those little ad stands that you can stand in front of the door or out on the curb that has the information about your fashion show, that would be great. It could be that you put a banner outside that has the information or just the fashion show's name. But there are a variety of things, like I said, you can use for outdoor signage, the other type of signage that you'll have on the day of the fashion show will be inside the ticket table will have information or a sign there that is representative of your fashion show, it could just be a graphic that you all created for the fashion show that has the fashion shows name on it, there could be a variety of things that you have in the for your area for promoting the show and just bringing the show to life. It may not have all of the information like the date, time and where and all that kind of stuff, because it's the date of the fashion show and the person is already there. So it is more of things that represent what the theme is the name of the show, and things of that nature. Now inside the auditorium or the facility, you'll want to continue with signage, which really probably will move more into the decorations area, but you want to have more signage that still promotes the fashion show name, or the theme, or various things that help with the promotional aspect of the fashion show. So again, your signage will be outside in the foyer area where the ticket sales are. And inside the facility.

28:06 Now you may want to collaborate with if you have a graphic design course or a graphic design teacher or organization on your campus. They will be great to collaborate with. They were our key magnet program that we collaborated with for promotions. If you don't have graphic design on your campus, maybe your district has a graphic design department that you can use. Definitely look into that. Because I know that our district has a graphic design program or graphic design department that we could use for graphics, but because we have one on our campus already, we never had to use that external resource. But those are available in a lot of districts. Now if you don't have access to graphic design, then you can check with the art teacher, especially like the advanced art teacher, maybe they have a program that they work with, where they could actually create your your design, whether it's your logo or you know, help you with the design for your banner or your posters or things of that nature. You could check with an art teacher, or you may have a computer class as an advanced computer class where they work on those types of graphic things on the computer. Now, you might be saying like what are they helping you with? Because I thought this was the process team thing to do was to make this so what my students did as the promotion team, they would create examples of what they wanted. Now, my girls weren't graphic designers. So they didn't have the skills that aren't necessarily the tools, the apps and things that the graphics design magnet program had. So we would just generally create something at that time in PowerPoint, and then eventually it got to a point when Canva came out. And we started using Canva. So we either created a PowerPoint, Microsoft Publisher, or eventually in Canva. And then we would show it to the graphic design class. And we were like, “This is what we're looking for.” And then they would come back with this wonderful, fantastic image and graphics that we were like,”Whoa, we would have never been able to do that”. So it's very good to collaborate with other organizations that actually have the software, the applications and the skills to be able to bring your idea to life.

30:40 The fifth and final marketing collateral that I'm going to talk about is our actual fashion show ticket. This item, we generally would create it again, just like we did with our flyers or any image that we came up with for the fashion show. We would create it in something like PowerPoint, or publisher. Sometimes we use Adobe, and then again, Canva, but you want to outline the image that you want to have for your ticket. A lot of times this started with a sketch. So don't overlook the sketch. And then our students would go into the software tools and create their mockup of the ticket. And then again, we would take it over to graphic design and have them to make it perfect. But what you want to have on your ticket and this is the actual ticket to the fashion show is your image that you're using as a promotion for your fashion show your theme colors. Think about that as another thing that you want to include in the look of your ticket. And we always did a perforated line so that we can have a place to tear the ticket stub off. And when we used our printing and imaging magnet program, they actually were able to imprint or whatever you want to call it, the actual perforation, so it will be easy to tear just like a regular ticket. And that was pretty exciting and it made our tickets look very professional with the ticket, it was pretty straightforward. With the information that we had on it, I know this is gonna sound very repetitive, because it's the same information that goes on everything that has to do with promoting the fashion show is the school name or the school organization, the theme, the name of the show, the location, the date, the time, and the price of the ticket would be on there as well. Now on the ticket, we would additionally have the admission type, like we would put VIP or general. And then we would also have ticket numbers, which was key for tracking the ticket. Because of what I did, I would give my students who were in production and design a couple of tickets for the fashion show to give to their parents or family, friends or whoever. And the models also got a couple of tickets for the fashion show. And then we also gave them a stack of tickets like here, you sell these tickets, you know, so we can get as many people to the fashion show as possible. So with any type of ticket sales, you have to have a tracker. So we did stamp the numbers on there as well. And then again, like I said, we had his ticket stub and all that stuff, you really just want to have information, some of the repetitive information that's on the actual ticket, you'll have it on the ticket stub, like the name of the show, the date, the time, and the admission type in the ticket number. Now we also collaborated with graphic design, to get our ticket made and printing and imaging would actually print out that ticket for us. If you don't have access to those types of programs on your campus, definitely get with the art teacher or the computer teacher for the creation of the image of the ticket. And then if you can take it to your printing office at your school or within your classroom, you can print it off and then the students can cut the tickets. And that's another task within itself. I'm thankful that we had a premier printing and imaging organization on our campus because they printed and cut the tickets for us at an or you can take it somewhere and you have it professionally done. And so that concludes all of the marketing collateral that I suggest that you have for your fashion show. These are the things that we used, I didn't do anything where we had paid advertising. Of course, that could be a way that you go, I just didn't have it as a part of hours because I wanted to keep the cost at minimum. And there's so many ways that you can promote the fashion show without spending money on advertising.

35:30 Next, I'm going to talk about the various channels of distribution for promotion. And when I say distribution is the various channels in which you get the word out about the fashion show, these channels are just I mean, you just think about it as highways. So these are the highways in which the information is going to go out about the fashion show. And for me, I have six different ways that we used media to promote our fashion show. Of course, that's not the max of any type of way, because there's a multitude of ways you can promote. But for us, we use social media accounts, our school campus, of course, mail, so sometimes we did have to mail those packets to the counselors are either they were hand delivered. Email is another way, I didn't use that too frequently, if I couldn't get to someone, or I didn't have the information to mail out the media kid. I, just on a few occasions, emailed the packet of information, made sure it was formatted properly, and it was in a presentable manner as well. So you can use email, email campaigns are very big these days, it could be something that you could incorporate into your promotions. Also, the students word of mouth, are the students with the tickets, walking around the campus selling the tickets, that is a channel of distribution of information. And then the main way is our school's media, through the announcements, because this is an everyday broadcast to all students in faculty to hear about the fashion show. And those were my six channels of distribution of information, promotions for the fashion show.

37:33 The last thing that I'm going to talk about is the promotional calendar. This was very key for the promotions team to have in place, because it helps them track their promotions, as well as to know when to promote something, they listed out their key activities. And those activities would be the announcements, the press release, the mailing of the items, the emails, the social media posts, social media engagement, the media kit, so they will put all of those items on the promotional calendar for when the task would start. And when the task would end. And if you can just imagine most times they printed off a calendar, and they would just write that information in on the dates needed. And then if there's a frequency, say, like a social media post, you may want to make a social media post once or twice a week. whatever frequency you determine, and you would put on your calendar, the day that you're going to make that post. So if it was on the fifth, you would write social media posts, and then if it was a week from that day, on the 12th, you would write social media posts. And you would just fill in all of their information on the calendar so they can keep up with the tasks that they need to do and on the date they need to do it. So again, with your promotional calendar, you want to list all of your key activities. And then you want to list those activities on the dates in which they should happen. And you want to put a start and a stop time to those activities.

39:21 And that wraps up all the information that I have for you about promotion, and the activities and responsibilities that are within that task. Come back next week when I wrap up this “Mastering the Production” series with logistics. I do thank you for listening to Marketing EdVenture, and I hope you have a wonderfully blessed day.

39:52 Thanks for listening to Marketing EdVenture. Remember to subscribe, rate review and share this episode with some When you think benefit from the information shared here today, if you have any questions or want to connect with me, find me on Instagram at Marketing EdVenture. All links and resources discussed in this episode can be found in the show notes at Marketing EdVenture.com.