Summary

Both the Virgin Money London Marathon and the Stratford-upon-Avon Literary Festival are proving to be successful. However I feel as though improvement is needed in the marketing of these events.

The London Marathon is an internationally recognised event and is on a lot larger scale than the Literary Festival. The marathon relies on its popular name and the use of social media to promote itself, which yes is proving successful. With this information that using the internet is working I feel they should work more on the lead up to the event. In 2011 they did a promotional video, I think if they did this again it would have an even more positive impact, this would allow everyone to get excited and prepared even if they are not running in the races, it also may potentially interest those who had never considered taking part.

The Literary Festival on the other hand does definitely not have the same media coverage that the Marathon has but again I feel it needs to think about promoting the event beforehand. From images of the festival it seems that the event has a lot of families with young children attending (pictures of people dressed as the Gruffalo, a children’s television character.) So although we are entering a more electronic time, I don’t feel trying to market the event on social media is allowing the target audience to be attracted. I believe the festival could try and branch out with more advertising and try and attract other audiences such as more local schools and universities.

 Overall I feel the use of Social media platforms can definitely be successful, but both events should consider the advertising and marketing of the build-up of the event, after the events take place there is a boom of people talking about them but not so much before the events. I feel if they did this it would broaden the audience to the events but also create excitement for people as they have the anticipation of waiting for the event.