Lights, Camera, Action: Digital Campaign Brings Awareness to Inaugural Film Festival on the Gulf Coast

No question, within the last several years social media marketing has rapidly become a huge player within digital marketing campaigns. GodwinGroup recently had the opportunity to build a unique digital campaign for Sun and Sand: The Mississippi Film and Music Festival. The five-day mega-event hosted on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in mid-November brought together film and music enthusiasts across the nation in addition to highlighting Mississippi as an emerging filmmaking destination.

The main goal of this campaign was to create awareness of the festival, driving traffic to the Sun and Sand website and impact ticket sales. The target audience was determined to be between 25 and 55 years old. This age group is extremely digitally savvy; therefore a social and digital marketing component was extremely important to the campaign.

The two-month-long campaign launched with the creation of social media profiles across networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. Display ads, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, mobile ads, and Facebook advertising campaigns were also launched simultaneously. At every touch point in the social media world, users were provided an option to buy tickets. The Sun and Sand Facebook page had specially created apps that let users purchase tickets directly from Facebook.

Display/PPC/Mobile/Facebook ads also led users to a landing page on the Sun and Sand website where they could buy tickets via ticketing partner TicketBiscuit.

Since this was the inaugural year of the festival, excitement among users was high and the pressure on the event organizers to aim for record attendance. Mass Relevance — a social media integration platform — was brought in to curate all digital conversations happening around the brand Sun and Sand. The software allowed us to discover and aggregate real-time content, filter and moderate, visualize and integrate into displays, and report on engagement metrics. These metrics were things we already tracked, such as time on site, conversion, traffic, and customer loyalty.

Mass Expressions: Helps drive social opinion sharing.	Mass Streams: Helps curate all social conversation.
Mass Answers: Helps connect directly to your audience with post and reply streams. Godwin organized a special Q&A session with Jim Belushi. Users who submitted questions were eligible for a drawing for two ticket upgrades.	Mass Polls Ask your audience and display real-time results of social voting. We gave away two director’s chairs in a contest under Polls.

 

Before the campaign launched, the Sun and Sand website attracted 6,000+ visitors on average per month. Once the campaign started, within two months total visitor count reached 71,770. Of that total, 78.41% were new visits.  The festival also started with zero fans on each of their social media platforms. Developing a fan base mainly depends on the content and, subsequently, engagement levels of users. Our timely and interesting updates quickly increased the Facebook fan base to well over 3,800 fans by the conclusion of the campaign. Engagement level was at an all-time high, averaging around 50% engagement by the time the campaign concluded. Facebook also contributed to over 3,700 referrals to the festival website.Paid search advertisement averaged around 300,000 impressions within the two-month time frame, and 42% of the people who viewed the ad clicked on it for more information. Display ads garnered over 21-million impressions and had a click through rate of 31%.