Every March, Emerald Coast Writers – a local nonprofit centered on helping authors along the Gulf Coast thrive – hosts the Books by the Bay Literary Festival in Pensacola, Florida. As the Director of Communications for the nonprofit, I was asked to take on marketing duties for the festival.
The first step in this process is getting all of our information updated between 2025 and 2026. While the rest of the board for Books by the Bay focuses on everything else necessary to get the festival up and running, I was laying the groundwork for our digital marketing campaign starting with our website.
The previous website design utilized a hamburger menu with over 10 pages presented in a list format. Additionally, the header of the site was dedicated to just the festival logo rather than providing information about the festival. Lastly, the images for the site were improperly stored, causing them to sometimes not show when the website was loaded.
I decided to give the website an update, switching out the hamburger menu for a series of buttons with drop downs when necessary. Then, I put the festival logo in the header and used the valuable front page space to highlight the purpose of the festival with a button linked to the information for the upcoming Books By the Bay in March of 2027. I then sorted the images properly to avoid the loading issue and added sections below the header summarizing the other parts of the website including the “About Us” and Sponsorship” pages.
I then turned my focus to the copywriting of the site. The biggest flaw I saw in the old site design was the loss of information between festival years. Once the 2025 festival was over, the site would be wiped to make room for 2026 instead of storing that information showing the history of Books By the Bay over time. To remedy this, I restructured the “About Us” page to discuss the festival as a whole rather than just the upcoming year’s festival. Then, I made several subpages for previous festival years complete with schedules, presenters, exhibitors, and more. I also combined several smaller pages to create a general FAQ page for easier navigation.
The only page to not experience major change was the “Sponsorship” page. The information listed here stayed much the same, with the only change being the removal of the “Encyclopedia” package as one of the tier options and turning it into a separate inquiry form. Not only does this make more sense, since the Encyclopedia package is customized per inquiry, but it also makes more sense to make the custom package visually separate from the more structured sponsorship options.
This is only the first step towards creating a full marketing strategy for the Books By the Bay Festival in 2027. As of this week, we began accepting applications for authors, exhibitors, and food vendors. Additionally, our social media strategy has begun sharing online to encourage both attendance to the festival and applications for vendor slots.
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