Previous years had seen scarce social media use, so Coventry City Council wanted to use social media more proactively and effectively. This case study forms part of our social media strategy resource.
Objectives – what did you want to achieve?
Ultimately, we wanted to use social media more proactively to promote the 2016 Godiva Festival. Previous years had seen scarce social media use, so we wanted to use social media more proactively and effectively, incorporating a feeling of fun and an informal tone to build up excitement for the festival.
Alongside this were our overall marketing goals to continue promoting the festival’s tag as the biggest free family music festival in the UK, ensuring Coventry and Warwickshire audiences were aware of the event and growing the regional audience for the festival, particularly people within a 30-mile radius of Coventry.
Audiences – who did you target and why?
The Festival by its nature attracts a wide range of audience with an average age of 34. There’s an even split of attendees by age groups. However for this particular campaign we wanted to target social-media users to create more festival supporters on Facebook and Twitter
Strategy – how did you make this happen?
We identified a clear communications lead for our social media activity and proactively engaged with social media users. We also worked more closely with the bands and artists involved in the festival to encourage a more coordinated response, including working with bands to set agreed release times for press releases or social media announcements about
Tactics – what channels, tools, platforms and content did you use?
We used Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Our content included pictures, hashtags, emojis and polls, branded pictures (using band photos), band posters and teaser images to encourage interest in headliner announcements. We also used questions to directly engage with people and made sure we responded quickly when people asked us things.
The tone we used for this project was drastically different to previous years. It had always been very formal but this year we made it more personal and playful.
Our Facebook event was created almost as soon as the festival was confirmed, and it was monitored regularly, with any announcements and posts being made into the group too. We agreed upon the #GodivaFestival hashtag instead of #Godiva2016, as we noticed people were using it more than #godiva2015 last year.
We also encouraged bands to tweet our band posters, which we were then able to retweet.
Did it work? What were the outcomes?
In relation to social media activity, this year’s festival reached 5.4m people compared to 2.5m in 2015, a massive increase of 116 per cent. We also increased Facebook event supporters from 5,000 to 2014 to 13,000 in 2016, a huge 160 per cent increase and 25,000 clicks on social media pages, up 56 per cent from last year. Interestingly, the event scored a record attendance with 148,000 visits over the weekend!
What did you learn?
Pictures, particularly the band posters, worked really well. We also learnt the importance of having a dedicated festival social media contact who could maintain a conversational style of comms to build rapport, trust and interactivity. Would you do anything differently? There was the potential to make more use of video, particularly Facebook live videos, as well as memes and gifs to grab people’s attention.
Want to know more?
Contact Carl Bainbridge, marketing and design manager at Coventry City Council via email or by calling 024 7683 2466