Queensland Garden Show

Hosted on the Sunshine Coast since 1984, the Queensland Garden Show 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 50,000 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, Jerry Coleby-Williams and Phil Dudman.

  • Media liaison
  • Digital support
  • Content creation

WHY THEY CALLED US

In 2007 the Queensland Garden Show 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 a number 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 or sharing life before his signature beard, 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 cute little 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 around 40,000 people attending every year — a 100% increase from the 20,000 attendees when we began working with the Queensland Garden Show team in 2007.

In 2024 alone, we secured 348 local, state, and national media clippings with an audience reach of 8.7 million. Highlights included ABC Queensland Southern Drive broadcasting live from the event, Seven Sunrise featuring the inaugural Rooster Crowing Competition, national lifestyle coverage in Women’s Day and Better Homes & Gardens and hundreds of media articles and broadcasts targeting the drive market.

Our organic social posting during the three-day event achieved 7,100 views and 1,500 visits on Instagram, and 94,600 views and 12,500 visits on Facebook — with 29,866 unique users viewing our top-performing post.

Together, these results reflect the lasting impact of a consistent, strategic approach to earned media and audience engagement.

Qld Garden Show

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