Event Marketing enables you to play host to your prospects and make it easy for them to experience your location and home designs. Marketers are doing so many creative things to increase traffic at events; we thought we'd devote a blog post to 4 Event Marketing Categories that get beyond food. Don't get me wrong, food works! Gourmet food trucks, Americana BBQ's, food n wine demos and more, all welcome your Sales Center guests into a festive atmosphere. And, who doesn't love to eat! Everyone is doing it. So how do you differentiate your events? Here are some Event ideas that allow home buying prospects to make use of precious weekend time and visit your Sales Centers too. Informational/Learning Events: These are events that offer learning opportunities that sync with home buying. You give prospects valued in-person content that adds value to the home buying process and showcases your designs. Our Ideas: Get a local author to do a reading and book signing. Think home decor, food or gardening as a theme. Combine a cookbook author reading with a farmer's market or a cooking demo. Invite a local children's author and create a kid-friendly event. If your school district is a strong housing draw, invite a school Principal to come speak about the benefits for kids educated in the neighborhood school. In the California market, prospects are interested in water use/costs. In this market, providing content about low water home design or drought resistant landscaping would deliver information most home buying consumers are seeking currently. I noticed a builder on Instagram promoting a class about mortgage financing in a market where there are a lot of first-time buyers. Exercise Events: While we were traveling this summer, we met a group of journalists "sampling" our Lodge as part of a trip through several properties. I awoke one morning to find them enjoying an early morning Yoga class with a local Yoga Master. They were situated on mats under a shaded trellis, next to the kitchen's organic garden. The hotel was able to showcase their outdoor environment by pairing it with the class. The journalists looked serene, calm and happy afterward. They said they loved it! Everyone needs to move more, and most of us sit at computers more than we should. So why not promote your outdoor space by hosting exercise classes with local community experts. Our Ideas: Start and end a 5K run from your Sales Center. Finish with healthy snacks, water and offer maps of running/walking trails in the area. Host Yoga, Zumba, or any other fun fitness class that works outside. Begin and end a Fitbit walking challenge from your Sales Center. People love to get moving on weekends, and you can marry that desire with a visit to your Sales Center, by helping prospects make time for something they want/need to do anyway. Charity Events: Local charities benefit from the sponsorship of community businesses. Include prospects in your brand's charitable efforts and create an event around fund-raising or volunteering to help a non-profit near your new home community. Our Ideas: Tap local music talent to create a festive atmosphere and make it fun and easy for people to give or volunteer their time. You can partner with a food bank and pack boxes for homeless shelters. A local homeless organization near us is trying to collect 8400 pairs of shoes to get an image of what it looks like to take care of 8400 homeless people. They will use them for an art installation and fund-raising event and then distribute them to their shelter members. It's a simple way to help, and most of us can recycle a pair of shoes. People want to give, and they want to teach their kids to give. In providing these kinds of events, you demonstrate that a "sense of community" already permeates your new home neighborhood. It's a powerful draw for people who know they are buying more than a home when they decide to buy new. Mobile Events: These are events where you take your product to your customers. Hard to imagine with a home, but think Food Trucks and Pop-Up Retails Shops. Not everyone can get to a new home sales center when you have your event. Why not take a "Mobile Sales Center" to your prospects where they are already shopping, eating, and living. These cost more, but the mobility might just pay for itself if you are a larger builder. Our Ideas:  Ride the Food Truck wave and create a mobile Sales Center that delivers big screen virtual tours of your homes and interactive registration devices that make it fun and rewarding for prospects to share their contact information. Including music will give people a reason to hang around. Retailers are successfully using the food truck idea to market products.  We know you cannot put a home into a shopping cart, but builder marketers can capitalize on the trend in Pop-Up stores, and bring the Sales Center experience to consumers. How would you design a mobile "sales center"? This Adidas shoe box is a creative piece of mini-real estate designed to attract consumers to the brand outside of the standard retail setting. For any of these types of events, make use of local celebrities - authors, athletes, artists, musicians, chefs, etc. Local celebrities love to participate in their communities. If you are Marketer, you are probably a networker, and you already know someone who knows someone! And to help you attract a crowd, Click here to make use of a checklist for marketing your events. Thanks for joining the conversation. We hope this adds value to your week. Cheers! Leslie Bridges, Chief Blogger Marketing Blueprints is sponsored by Builder Promotions, a branding solution that delivers brand consistency throughout the home selling cycle.