The Need:
In it’s fourth year the Colorado-native, nationally-acclaimed Snowball Music Festival faced several unique challenges coupled with it’s decision to pivot from a mountain-based, winter-destination festival to a spring-time, city event. Problems primarily stemmed from relocation based challenges and the rebrand that entailed; the Snowball brand was known as the first-ever winter mountain festival, so they faced a tremendous hurdle in repositioning the event in their audience's minds. Furthermore, Snowball needed to find new ways to reach and interact with these fans to spread enthusiasm around these exciting changes and ensure success of the festival for years to come. So they reached out to the team at Souls In Action, on which I played the role of Marketing Director, to help put together a campaign that would blend the best of digital, experiential and grassroots tactics.
The Remedy:
Given their unique and daunting challenges the Souls In Action team and myself knew we had to approach this festival like no event we’d covered previously. To maximize audience awareness and buy-in we developed a 3 step plan: 1. Increase festival awareness 2. Engage audience 3. Showcase festival happenings to ensure future success.
1. Increase Awareness
The first step was to get the word out there that Snowball was back, better than ever, and taking off in a new location. We combined the Souls In Action and Snowball street teams into a grassroots juggernaut nearly 200 strong. Using our seasoned team coordination muscle we leveraged this team to deliver 3 strategically timed waves of flyer and handbill coverage from California to Kansas City, with a particular emphasis on college campuses across the western US.
With all of our promotional strategies coupling the real-world with the digital was a huge part of our success. Snowball was no different. While spreading the word about the festival our team of content creators and curators previewed every artist on the line up to our audience of music industry thought leaders. By sniffing out the latest releases, interviews and videos from Snowball artists we were able to expand our reach far beyond the front range and target fans of artists around the world who had never heard of the festival previously.
2. Engage Audience
For an audience of taste-makers we knew that the bar for exciting content would be very high, so we put the collective SIA mind to work to develop content that would work across digital platforms and step easily into the real world. The first content type we created were playlists, curated by the SIA team, of artists that fans could get excited about seeing. These playlists included acts from the headliners to artists just starting off, and were presented them in a format that users could take with them and share with their friends via 8tracks.
Next, we sought to target artist fans specifically and incentivize ticket sales by demonstrating how excited artists were to come and play the festival. This led to the creation of our proprietary “Live Q&A” session, wherein artists sat down with SIA team members on a YouTube Live Stream (a brand-spanking new technology at the time) and answered questions from the media and fans as they came in via Twitter. (I had the privilege of hosting Paul Basic in this Live Q&A).
Finally, we knew that real-world interaction with fans would be the key to success in our promotion strategy, and even better, getting a group of Snowball fanatics to chase us around Denver would push our promo efforts over the top. Thus the Snowball Scavenger Hunt was came to life.
This interactive marketing effort was targeted at influencers in the front range music market, who we knew would work as excellent brand ambassadors for Snowball and encourage their network to come out for the festival. The hunt was the ultimate marriage of digital and real-world tactics, leading not only to a dozens of fans spreading the word around Denver, but also spreading it like wildfire through social media.
Now that we had an expansive audience targeted, reached and engaged it was time to seal the deal by showing them exactly why they needed to come and checkout the newly redefined Snowball. This took the form of my massively popular “10 Reasons Snowball Is Better Off In Denver” article, which gave readers concrete reasons to get more excited about this newly rebranded festival than ever before. This unique piece of content proved to be one of our most successful pieces of marketing sharing the front page of both the Souls In Action and Snowball websites for several weeks.
3. Showcase Festival Happenings
Finally, the prep work was done and we were ready to ensure that Snowball 2014 went off with a bang. We knew that driving day ticket sales would be crucial, and that we had some big shoes to fill in showing that Snowball was still a top-tier festival.
We began these efforts on digital media by: providing live coverage from each day of the festival; interacting with media outlets, fans, and artists via Twitter; and reminding the target audience about different happenings of the day. As always we sought to bring social media into the real world.
We also teamed up with FOMO Media, the developers of the official Snowball app, to provide timely and unique content to festival attendees. We delivered daily playlists right to attendees phones each morning to give them something to warm up with and bring with them on the ride to the festival. Just another example of us tying the digital with the real-world.
To wrap things up, we capped the weekend off with top-tier photographic event coverage. Here our team of photographers demonstrated clearly that the newly relocated Snowball is still a force to be reckoned with and that those who missed out this time around had better pay some serious attention the next time Snowball Music Festival comes to town.
The Results:
We set out with the objective of educating our target market about the changing location of the festival, engaging them with unique content and activities, and ultimately driving ticket sales. On all fronts we were successful.
“108% Increase in organic social reach.”
Over the course of our push we increased reach to qualified prospects by 108% via social media channels and delivered useful updates to 5000+ members of our festival mailing list. This increase in communications reach was targeted at not only past Snowball fans but also: fans of performers, fans of the Colorado music scene, and known festival-goers all over the country.
Furthermore our unique content outreach efforts created traffic spikes in web traffic to key pages that introduced the target audience into the ticket buying funnel, thereby driving advance and day-of ticket sales. In some cases increasing targeted traffic flow by as much as 86%.
“Boosted qualified traffic by 40%.”
But we didn’t just stop at reach, our audience engagement rates soared as well during the month before the show. By reaching markets based on interest in performers, known interest in music festivals and by utilizing unique technology we were able to boost qualified audience engagement by 40%.
However, reach and engagement alone are never enough to create a successful event. Our clear strategies of directing key traffic into the buying process, expanding to diverse audiences, and targeting buyers at critical moments proved to win the day. We were very proud to get to flex our muscles on such a decidedly Colorado festival. Best of all, by the end of all our efforts the festival grounds filled up, artists happily played to bustling and excited crowds, and we decisively demonstrated that mountains or city Snowball Music Festival is a force to be reckoned with.
