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The Sarah Best Strategy Blog

Explore marketing tips and tricks to help you shine in the digital space.

Case Study: Chicago International Festival of Puppet Theater Social Media Campaign

3/2/2015

 
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A ten week paid and organic social media campaign drove ticket sales and raised brand awareness for a new 12-day theater festival. Social media posts reached 428,000 unique people on Facebook, drove 1.8 million impressions on Twitter, and generated 10,500 fan engagements. More than 14,000 people attended 83 events with 88% of shows selling out. 

Challenge

The Chicago International Festival of Puppet Theater approached Sarah Best Strategy about developing a social media presence for their inaugural festival, which presented the work of over 50 artists from Chicago, the U.S., and around the globe at over a dozen theaters and cultural institutions, January 14-25, 2015. 

The goals for the 10-week social media campaign were:
  • Raise brand awareness for new festival
  • Increase the number of fans and followers
  • Drive traffic to the website and influence ticket sales
  • Cultivate fan and follower engagement
  • Communicate buzz / community springing up around festival through on-the-ground coverage
  • Communicate last-minute changes in festival programming
  • Develop goodwill and results for partners and participating artists

Time for #chipuppetfest family fun at @artinstitutechi #EnsorPuppets

A video posted by Chicago Intl Puppet Festival (@chipuppetfest) on Jan 17, 2015 at 10:02am PST

Idea

Sarah Best Strategy hit the ground running in November with a campaign that combined a robust organic strategy, with influencer engagement, and paid social media advertising designed to maximize results with a limited spend. After the festival started, our strategy shifted to creating compelling on-the-ground social media coverage to communicate the buzz building around the festival, build brand awareness, and influence ticket sales. This included starting an Instagram channel. With a number of last-minute changes to the line up, social media was used to drive ticket sales to new additions to the festival roster, resulting in ticket sales shortly after new shows were verbally announced at performances, before emails could go out announcing the line-up changes.

Results

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Social media efforts helped build brand awareness and drive ticket sales. More than 14,000 people attended 83 festival events. 88% of festival shows sold out, including a number of additional shows that were added while the festival was in progress.

With only 727 Facebook fans at the beginning of the campaign, our Facebook posts reached 428,000+ unique people with 690.5k total impressions in part due to an efficient, strategic Facebook advertising spend. Impressions included 74.4k organic (unpaid) impressions, 164.8k viral impressions (from audience members sharing content), and 448.7k paid impressions. Our most popular post reached 29,300 people with 678 people sharing the post, leaving comments, or "liking" the post.

On Twitter, starting with only 33 fans at the beginning of the campaign, our posts garnered 1.8 million impressions due to daily interaction with key influencers who had a broad reach. Our top Twitter follower acquired during the campaign had over 500,000 followers. Other influencers and partners with 50,000 or more followers also tweeted regularly about the festival. 

Sarah Best Strategy grew the festival's Facebook audience by 167% and Twitter following by 673% in a ten week period. Across Facebook and Twitter, our Fans and Followers engaged with us 10,500 times during the campaign. This includes retweets, incoming messages, mentions, and Facebook stories created by fans.  

Social was also the #3 source of traffic to the festival's website, behind organic search and direct traffic. However, prior to distribution of the festival brochure, which influenced direct traffic to the website (where people directly type the festival URL into a browser bar), Social was the #1 source of traffic to the website, driving a lot of early traffic to the website.

We would love to talk to you about how social media strategy can help achieve your business or organization's goals. Contact us today and let us know a little bit about your upcoming project.


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