Preparing for August Bank Holiday Weekend

As most of you will be aware, August Bank Holiday Weekend (officially the Summer Bank Holiday) represents a massive opportunity for the events industry every year. You may think it’s a bit weird to be talking about August Bank Holiday at the end of June, but hold on, there’s method to the madness.

The thing is, because there is so much competition for this weekend for both the big events and the small, those organisations that start marketing their events early have more of a chance of maximizing their event’s potential.

So what do the stats say?

Year after year, the stats are very clear. People start looking for August Bank Holiday content in the middle of July, well over a month in advance of the holiday itself. That means if you want to benefit from people starting to think about what they’re going to do over the August Bank Holiday Weekend you need to make sure you’re starting to promote your events by this period.

Interest in the August Bank Holiday Weekend continues to build from there steadily over the next couple of weeks, however at the start of August we tend to see a rush in people starting to think about what they’ll be doing that weekend. This second peak happens around Wednesday or Thursday of the first week of August and represents the time in which you really want to be getting your marketing and PR out there doing its thing!

After this peak subsides a little there is a continued although steadier growth in interest in August Bank Holiday Weekend, then the Saturday of the weekend before we really see the figures start to pick up with people from all over the country on Skiddle planning what to do  that following weekend.

This rapid growth continues throughout the course of the week with the traffic peaking on the Sunday of the August Bank Holiday Weekend itself.

May Bank Holiday was a massive success for events using Skiddle this year, with many of them reporting high percentage growth rates. This is echoed in Google Trends information which saw the search traffic for May Bank Holiday supercede that of what is normally seen for August Bank Holiday, as such we are hopeful this year’s August Bank Holiday traffic will grow in a similar proportion.

How to grow attendance at August Bank Holiday Weekend Events

The information above should serve as a rough guide as to what the search trends are. Hopefully, this will provide you with an insight into when you should be promoting your event, for example when it’s best to send out eflyers, press releases and carry out advertising – also it may give you some indication of when early bird and additional releases of tickets should hit the market.

If you’ve got something you need pushing, be sure to speak to our account management team and to our editorial team to determine how we can best help you promote your August Bank Holiday Weekend event.

Ultimately you can’t beat getting your events listed with tickets on sale as soon as possible, the longer they’re there the more opportunities you’ll have for people to see them, get excited about them and buy tickets.

Benefiting from the August Bank Holiday Weekend related traffic Skiddle attracts is really easy. All you have to do is get your events listed through Skiddle’s Promotion Centre and as long as your event takes place over the right weekend (23rd – 26th August 2013) it will appear in Skiddle’s national August Bank Holiday Weekend Guide as well as in the local guides (for example August Bank Holiday Weekend in Manchester).