The result
- Sold out a week before show day
- Delivered under budget
- Built a database of 7k+ subscribers
- Social following grown to 11k+
Case Study
Rolling Sets Festival First-year sell-outs
We were invited to help an epic team of festival promoters launch a brand-new festival called Rolling Sets in the country town of Coffs Harbour.
Starting completely from scratch, with no social media page followers or email database, our goal was a first-year sell-out!
Our roles
We were the plug-in digital marketing team handling performance marketing across Facebook, Instagram, Google and Youtube.
Our creative department delivered video animations and Live Footage Trailers.
South Social’s Chat Experience team built an RSVP Sign-up on Facebook Messenger and 2 social growth competitions.
The brief
Create and execute a performance marketing strategy to a set budget with the objectives of selling out the festival before show day.
Execute growth strategies for socials and first party data whilst placing Rolling Sets as an annual must-see event.
The challenges
- Starting from a zero point of data.
- Keeping creative fresh in regional areas with smaller audience sizes.
- No past sell-outs to help drive urgency to buy early.
- Not a single social media follower.
How we did it
The campaign strategy was made up of multiple micro phases which are summarised into 4 main phases:
1: Launch
To make the most noise for the launch we ran a pre-sale registration competition using South Social’s Facebook Messenger chat experience. This allowed people a chance to sign up for exclusive access to a 24-hour pre-sale, and win a VIP experience for sharing with their friends. The uptake was amazing with a huge list built for the presale and 40% of those came from people sharing with their friends.
2: Tickets On Sale
The festival launched a 24-hour exclusive pre-sale for those who registered which was a huge success with 43% of sign ups converting in the first 8 hours. This set up an amazing week 1 of sales, with tickets selling at above-average daily rates for the first 3 weeks.
3: The Grind
We call the period of a sales campaign when you get to the lowest daily rate of sales ‘the grind’. To keep the narrative fresh for punters during this time, we ran three unique competitions aimed at festival awareness plus subscriber and social following growth.
4: Run Home
During the run-home phase, we used the remaining budget to enhance the natural ticket ramp that is generated by the proximity to show day. With evolving messaging, we kept the punters that hadn’t bought a ticket yet aware of the impending sell-out by counting down as we reached the milestones of 500, 200, 100 and 50 tickets remaining. This urgency funnel accelerated the journey to that glorious sold-out banner and ultimately helped the Rolling Sets team achieve the goal of a first-year sell out a week before show day!
Takeaways & Learnings
We work on 50+ festival events a year minimum and get to experience the inner workings of many festival promotion teams.
One factor that can play a huge role in the success of digital campaigns is the willingness of the decision-makers to try new things and accept that paid digital is a fast-moving evolving machine.
The Kingdom Sounds crew were 100% willing to try anything we suggested and were completely open to pivoting direction on short notice when the data dictated.
We’re now up to our 7th project with the team, with many more to come!
Services engaged
- Performance marketing
- Strategy & consultation
- Copywriting
- Video animation
- Data analysis
- RSVP experience on Facebook Messenger
