NorthxNorth Festival is an event that offers a wide variety of food, music, film, and speaking activities all oriented around one central theme: The North. The event planners invited local and international speakers from the Arctic Community to speak on the challenges and opportunities they face in topics such as art, design, architecture, energy, sustainability, and health.
The Marketing Challenge
The NorthxNorth event planners hired us to take care of their social media marketing just two and a half months prior to the big day. Our challenge was to capture all of the diverse people who would be interested in such a broad range of events in a short amount of time while maintaining a consistent image across all advertising efforts. The event was only in its second year, and it was seeking a lot of new attendees, so we knew that we needed an attention-grabbing campaign.
A second goal was to educate potential attendees about NorthxNorth, because the perception was that it was only a food, music, and film festival. The client wanted us to attract attendees for the speaking events offered, because significant figures from across the country were involved.
How We Got Results
We went to work immediately, categorizing the activities offered into the primary/most important topics and events, creating an actionable editorial calendar with planned content for every week leading up to the festival. In order to change perceptions, we created three post series:
#TalkoftheNorth
Focusing on the subjects of the speaking events.
North by North is
Defining what the event is about, that it’s more than a film festival.
#SpeakerHighlight
Putting a spotlight on some of the speakers involved.
On all posts, we included a call-to-action encouraging registrations, explaining the somewhat complex registration options of individual event passes, day passes, and full passes. Every post carried the Arctic theme with strong graphics and copy. We boosted the posts that performed the best to maximize potential reach while building a strong sense of brand awareness.
We also created multiple short promo videos comprised of quick shots from activities offered at the NorthxNorth festival as well as breathtaking northern scenery, animals, and people. We used simple but powerful nouns and verbs in overlays to demonstrate what NorthxNorth is about, and what attendees could gain by coming. We chose uplifting music and set important images and words over key parts of the music to engage people with the story it tells. These were published and boosted at three intervals—as a teaser leading up to the campaign, in the middle, and as the festival got closer.
The event planners adored our content, and the campaign gained a lot of traction on social media in a short amount of time. Overall, we achieved 141,033 impressions, a reach of 41,839, and 5,710 clicks on a budget of $927.49. The average click-through-rate (CTR) was 1.72% and the cost-per-click (CPC) was $0.38, which is an impressive 77.9% less than the national average of $1.72. Our team was lauded for not only achieving 100% of the client’s goal, but also for doubling their attendees from last year and bringing in a lot of new faces to the crowd, particularly at speaking events.
“The social media campaign we ran for NorthxNorth Festival doubled their attendees from the year prior, bringing in new faces, particularly for the events the client wanted advertised. We were able to capture the spirit of the north in a compelling way using graphics, copy, and video.”
Sarah Testen, Social Media Marketing DirectorBeacon Media + Marketing
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