Queensland Garden Expo

Hosted on the Sunshine Coast since 1984, the Queensland Garden Expo is Queensland’s premier and award-winning gardening event. The three-day event sees 40,000+ visitors from across Australia and New Zealand explore the over 350 exhibitors – including more than 50 nurseries with 60,000 plants for sale each day. The event also boasts Australia’s largest gardening speaker program with over 120 free lectures and demonstrations from Australia’s gardening gurus including the likes of Costa Georgiadis, Sophie Thomson, Paul West and Jerry Coleby-Williams.

  • Media liaison
  • Digital support
  • Content creation

WHY THEY CALLED US

In 2007 the Queensland Garden Expo enlisted us to help gain media exposure across print, radio, TV and online channels, and we’ve been part of the team ever since.

Costa returns to Expo

CHALLENGES

  • While gardening may be growing in popularity, the subject does not attract much attention in the mainstream media so it’s our job to find fresh and clever stories to captivate a mainstream media audience.
  • The not-for-profit organisation has limited budgets so we need to think smart, while also ensuring we keep things fresh every year.

OBJECTIVES

  • Make the event a household name
  • Engage with existing fans
  • Attract new visitors from across Australia and New Zealand
  • Sell out the 360 exhibitor booths
  • Showcase the high profile speaker program
  • Provide social media support
  • Attract sponsors
“Since we partnered with Fresh PR & Marketing in 2007, Maya and the team have played an integral part in achieving exceptional media coverage in national and intrastate outlets as well as great local coverage. Our event has doubled in size over this time and we believe the media exposure — and more recently the social media support from Fresh — has played a significant role in this growth. The Fresh team is extremely easy to work with, has great ideas and we look forward to working with them into the future.”- MARION BEAZLEY, EVENT MANAGER, QUEENSLAND GARDEN EXPO

WHAT WE DID

Our action-packed, comprehensive annual PR campaign includes eight media releases showcasing the most interesting, innovative and sometimes unexpected stories from this stellar gardening event.

Whether we’ve got ABC Gardening’s Costa Georgiadis dressed as a garden gnome, River Cottage Australia’s Paul West cooking up a storm, or Sophie Thomson sharing how gardening helps mental wellbeing… we use our storytelling to bring these gardening gurus to the fore. These tasty morsels are then distributed far and wide (sometimes attached to a garden gnome) via targeted, current media lists, personal journo contacts and an engaging social media campaign.

RESULTS

We sowed all the seeds to build strong media relationships which no doubt contributed to the record number of visitors in 2019 with in excess of 40,000 people attending (100% growth from 2007). In 2019 alone, we achieved over 300 local, state and national media clippings with a print circulation reach of 2.9 million, and we celebrated the ABC Queensland Country Hour broadcasting live from the event for the first time, firmly shining a spotlight on the gardening industry.

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