There are many ways to advertise a venue or an event. But you want your efforts to arrive in front of the right people.

A great advertising campaign has no benefit at all if it only reaches people that have no interest, no need or no want for your product. So when promoting your Pub Quiz or Trivia Night you want your advertising to get to the right people. To do that you need to know who you are going to target.

I suppose we could sit down and define the archetypal quiz buff, but quiz attendees stretch from right across the socio-economic and age spectrum. For instance you can expect patrons from legal age right through to people in their 70's or beyond. Unlike promoting a band, for example, where a certain genre of music will attract a certain type and age of follower, the quizzer is less definable. It is unlikely that you would promote a heavy metal band playing at your venue on your local country and western radio station, this probably isn't where heavy metal followers will be.

To complicate matters further many of your potential customers don't even know that they are quiz people. Until they have been to a well organized trivia night and caught the bug, they don't even know they would enjoy this type of night. The word quiz for many is associated with poor school performance and there is no way they want to go back there. So getting the right advertising in front of them will probably have little effect, even though they are your target market.

There are two problems. One your target is hard to see. And two, not that the target keeps moving, rather your target market doesn't even know they are the target. You maybe thinking right now, why bother.

Well there is a proven way to build your quiz night and it doesn't utilize broad based advertising. It is very cost effective and you use your current customer base. If you already have a print, radio or TV advertising budget, then by all means why not advertise your trivia night along with your other promotions. But using print, radio or TV solely for advertising your trivia night is probably wasted money unless there are really great prizes. (But that's another story.)

So here it is

Your target market is your current customer base. Your current customers represent a broad range of backgrounds just like the people at any quiz night. Many of them are going to be keen quiz attendees, they just may not know it yet.

To advertise you need to let them know what is happening. Simply putting new posters up around your venue and some table talkers can get the word out.

So you have established your target market and put up some advertising to attract the few (and I mean three) pub quiz buffs at your venue. So now you have to get the "will be quiz people but don't yet know it" patrons to come along.

And that takes more than a poster…