Wavo’s Comprehensive Strategy for Festival Marketing
/wavo.me is a marketing technology agency focused on the music space. Wavo helps artists, publishers, and music companies collect and activate their customer data on a single platform. Our clients include 100 top music destinations, and advertisers such as UMG, Sony, WMG, Live Nation, AEG, CAA, WME and Apple Music.
Client and Campaign
The sixth annual VELD music festival - presented by INK entertainment - took place on August 5th and 6th at Toronto’s Downsview Park. The lineup included some of the world’s biggest EDM and hip-hop artists, boasting headliners like Future, Major Lazer, Tiesto, and Zedd. An estimated crowd of 40,000 music fans attended the festival over the course of its 2 day duration.
INK entertainment contacted Wavo with the goal of creating a multi-channel digital media plan designed to drive initial ticket sales and boost overall awareness for the festival.
Using our experience gathered from running thousands of successful campaigns in combination with our first, second, and third party data, we were able to create a media plan targeted to reach users most likely to convert to a ticket sale. Ultimately, we were able to reach thousands of Toronto festival goers, while driving a return on ad spend (ROAS) of approximately 1700%.
Developing the Campaign
In order to maximize return on investment, we selected the channels upon which we were most likely to interact with the largest quantity of VELD’s ideal customer base. Hosting targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram allowed us to reach an age appropriate audience in the correct geolocation. To reach the fans of the artists involved, we also ran placements on our native advertising network, Boost. Ticketing links for VELD were placed at the bottom of articles featuring the festival’s headliners, and sites were selected according to the genre of the those artists. As the campaign ran, data acquired on each platform was used to optimize targeting across all channels. We’ve included a more detailed breakdown of our targeting methods below.
Wavo Boost Network
our boost native unit as it's displayed on desktop and mobile
Native advertising is a form of paid media in which content appears as an extension of the publication’s material, mimicking the feel and experience provided by the host-site.
Wavo Boost is a native-advertising platform that’s specifically caters towards the music industry, allowing clients to promote their content on respected music & culture sites through native, below-the-fold and in-feed advertisements.
Wavo carefully curates its list of partner publishers in order to ensure that clients’ advertisements are shown to engaged music audiences. For the VELD campaign, Wavo placed festival flyer creatives within its ad unit across over 70 Electronic and Urban publishers, driving interested fans to the festival’s ticketing page.
By integrating conversion and retargeting pixels on the festival ticketing page, we were able to track which clickthroughs converted into ticket purchases while simultaneously building a pool of interested fans who had not clicked through to the final purchase page. We then targeted these users with additional ads across Facebook & Instagram.
Facebook & Instagram Advertising
On Facebook & Instagram, we leverage both built-in targeting capabilities as well as our own first party custom audiences to reach an entirely new proprietary audience of potential ticket buyers.
In order to best create and reach these audiences, we focus on testing, optimization, and adaptation. After running thousands of music marketing campaigns and tracking millions of data points relevant to the music space, we have developed a deep understanding of customer personas and the purchasing habits of ticket buyers for events of every size and genre.
For the VELD Festival campaign, we determined 7 initial audiences to target:
Festival Interests: Users who had shown interest in music festivals within a relevant geographic reach (based on their engagement with such pages or posts).
VELD Purchase Interest: Users who had previously exhibited interest in purchasing a VELD ticket, but had not yet converted (e.g. the “Add to Cart” individuals mentioned earlier).
Wavo's targeted audience of 13,000,000 shared only a 9% overlap with that of facebook's
Wavo 1st Party Audiences: Users identified through Wavo's proprietary music data gathered from a variety of unique sources. Often our clients miss out on large potential audiences because they are confined by the data available on a specific advertising channel. The above image shows an "Audience Overlap" comparison of one of our proprietary data segments "Electronic Music Fans" vs an audience created by targeting fans of a major Electronic/Pop artist on Facebook. In this case the two audiences- both boasting over 12 million users- had only a 9% overlap. Wavo’s custom audience performed better than the audience built by Facebook (which targeted fans of the headliners).
Festival Lineup Targeting: Users who had liked pages or posts associated with the VELD headliners and/or second tier acts.
Producer & Artist Remarketing: Users who have submitted songs or downloaded stems in Wavo remix competitions hosted by EDM or Hip Hop artists.
Wavo Article Remarketing: Users who have engaged with articles about VELD’s headliners on Wavo’s ad network in the last 180 days.
VELD Core Fan Marketing: Working with the VELD team to compile their email lists of past purchasers, contest entrants, & core fans, and matching them to user profiles on Facebook & Instagram.
We optimized these ad groups throughout the campaign, testing multiple creatives and lines of copy, and pausing any audiences that were less receptive in order to facilitate the highest amount of traffic on the VELD ticketing page. Additionally, budgets were adjusted over time to increase focus on high purchase intent, retargeting those groups later in the campaign. Ultimately, our campaign generated a ROAS of approximately 1700%, and a second campaign was set up shortly after in which the data and audiences collected in this first phase were leveraged to encourage further conversions.
The value of going through Wavo to organize your ticket marketing, lies in the unique data and targeting methods we utilize to maximize the cost-effectiveness of your campaign. We select channels according to their ability to efficiently reach your target audience, and optimize your plan as it runs so you’re able to serve ads to previously untapped segments of fans.
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