Creating festivals is an excellent way to add value to your venue and drive additional visitation. But creating a successful festival that generates buzz and drives ticket sales takes careful planning.
Planning an Anime-Themed Festival Event
It’s no secret that millennials are crazy about anime. And while this niche segment is a small percentage of the population, they’re very loyal and willing to spend money on experiences related to their interests. That’s why it’s smart for any facility operator to create events centered around this trend, rather than pandering to traditional millennials with overpriced cocktails, gated golf courses and other gimmicky trappings. In this blog post, we will show you how you can successfully plan your next anime-themed event by following these two steps:
Create a Basic Event Narrative
If you already have a good idea of who will be attending your event, you need to create a basic narrative that ties your event to these guests. This narrative should be similar to the “hero’s journey” concept from the world of fiction.
You want to create a journey for your guests that’s fun and engaging, but also provides a meaningful takeaway. You should be able to explain the purpose of your event in one sentence.
An example of an event narrative for a typical anime-themed event might be: “Anime fans are invited to unleash their inner child as they compete in an exciting tournament to find out who is the ultimate otaku.”
Build Out Your Guest List and Import Audiences
Now that you have a narrative and know a bit more about your target audience, you can start to import audiences into your event. An audience is a group of individuals who have a shared interest. For example, you can import a group of people who like anime and also have an interest in table tennis. Or, if you know people that watch anime, you can try inviting them to your festival event. Finding additional audiences to add to your event can help you promote the event to groups that you may not have reached otherwise. And they can help you attract new patrons.