Recently, C3 Presents, asked me to put together some thoughts and ideas on their digital marketing strategy for the Austin City Limits Festival. I was happy to oblige, and figured it might be interesting/useful to someone else as well. So here you go:
C3 has done an excellent job year after year with the Austin City Limits Music Festival, generating sold out crowds since 2004. Their challenge is to continue this success and build upon it by finding new festival goers and keeping current fans engaged year round.
In an effort to find the best way for ACL to meet this challenge, let’s first take a look at a marketing case study on the 2009 Vans Warped Tour, and see if we can gain any insight.
For the 2009 Vans Warped Tour I began our digital campaign nearly a month earlier than previous years, well before the tour or artist lineups had been announced. The goal was to reach die-hard Warped Tour fans, build connections with them on multiple channels, and then employ them as promoters of the tour.
Building Fan Connections
I achieved this goal by building a custom “pre-tour” splash page, that featured multimedia content to tease the lineup, a Facebook Connect comment wall where fans could chat, and most importantly an e-mail sign-up field for fans to get registered for Warped Tour news and updates. We promised fans they would be the first to hear about the tour details and ticket news. This page helped build connections via email and Facebook. Facebook comments, the custom-made share button powered by addthis.com and the audio playlist built on imeem made the page easy to spread, and encouraged fans to tell their friends. Simply, we connected with the hard-core fans, and enlisted them to help us spread the word.
Enlisting Fan Participation
In order to reign in the fans a bit and give them a single mission, I partnered with Fan2Band to build a Digital Street Team. This team of over 2,000 members used banners, widgets, the imeem playlist, and specially made Warped Tour videos to spread the word, always driving traffic back to the “pre-tour” page. The team generated over 5 million impressions on these tools, and nearly half of the traffic to the page.
Fan Engagement
Keeping fans engaged from the launch of the splash page to the ticket pre-sale was imperative. One of the ways I did this was to initiate a first of it’s kind twitter promotion where fans were given the opportunity to “tweet” their favorite song from any Warped Tour band, past or present. By partnering with twt.fm to power the contest, fans were able to create their own custom “station” to tweet their songs. The clincher for this initiative was the contest piece. Fans who tweeted were automatically entered to win tickets to the entire Warped Tour. VWT fans responded in mass and tweeted over 11,000 songs, driving our #warped09 hashtag to the top trending topic several times. In addition, this contest drove over 30k visitors to our sites. Finally, this promotion helped build the newly created Warped Tour twitter profile.
Results
These efforts were all extremely successful, generating over 40k new connections via email, 38k connections on twitter, and 21k new fans on Facebook. A total of 99k new fan connections.
This work, combined with intimate artist interaction, partnerships with Alternative Press, a limited edition 3D ticket, a small amount of digital advertising, and a carefully executed e-mail marketing strategy led to an extremely successful ticket pre-sale. The 2009 pre-sale sold 49% more tickets than the previous year.
Applying what we’ve learned to C3 & ACL
The most important takeaway from the above case-study is the marketing potential available when you maximize time between events, and use announcements to their utmost. Done correctly, this time should be about building fan connections, participating in conversations, engaging the fans, and enhancing the brand. Marketing, and/or sales type messages should be kept to a minimum during this time.
During the “off-season” social networking profiles should remain active, communicating directly with fans, building a “voice” for the festival, and sharing music news and media on specific artists. By engaging fans and encouraging conversations, fan connections on these profiles will continue to grow organically.
Fans are looking for much more than a conversation with the festival as we learned with the twt.fm example above.
— Encourage fans to share their festival videos, and photos and give them an incentive. Then allow fans with specific skills to take this content and do something amazing with it.
These connected fans should always be the first to hear news and information. By training the fan-base that this is true, you are again encouraging connections, rewarding your core audience, and with the proper tools allowing them to spread the news for you.
— Tease artist lineup announcements on the ACL site, and through PR efforts. Promise the news to mailing-list members first, and provide an easy way to join.
This is the time when ACL should be rewarding fans and customers for being a member of the ACL fan-group.
— Host regular video web-casts with current and former ACL artists, allowing core ACL fans the opportunity to chat with artists, and listen to them talk about their ACL experience.
— Release audio or video sets from the previous years ACL on a regular basis throughout the off-season, giving fans something to look foward to, and ACL another connection point. Build a completely new e-mail list of fans who want to recieve updates on the releases, and gain even more insight into your fan-base.
Everything the festival does all year round should be easy to spread, for any fan. Many of the festival’s die-hard fans are willing to share even more.
— Gather these fans and give them a common objective. Provide them with digital tools to spread your message; ticket sales, announcements, new music. Track their work and reward them.
The point of all this of course is to have a bigger core group of fans, and a larger audience to announce each years festival to while building deeper trust and a closer relationship with fans so that they don’t think twice about buying their ACL ticket. Even if they don’t know who is playing.
Hopefully this post has given you some insight into my marketing philosophy. I don’t believe much in big ad campaigns, or throwing a ton of money at a problem. I believe building connections, making the most of them, producing amazing content and tools, and encouraging sharing are the keys to marketing well on the web.
