On this episode of the ProfitEngines podcast, the PracticeBloom team walk through their efforts when marketing the NJ Festival of Ballooning. In a little over a month’s time, PracticeBloom was able to generate $95,000 in ticket sales through Facebook marketing. They also created a highly successful mobile app for the festival.
Matt: Today we’re be going to be doing a really interesting case study. This case study is the NJ Balloon Festival. Now, my band actually played this balloon festival. Here’s the real story. It’s a 50X on Facebook spend. Now $2000 was the real spend and Facebook that generated $95,000 in ticket revenue over the course of six weeks. Now that run was really a short window of time that we had in order to perform the actual marketing. And then there were 3,000 downloads of an app we created for the event that was allowing people to find their way around the festival. That web app was super important because people had push notifications when there are challenges, which you’ll hear in the case study that’s coming up. We had a full articulated digital strategy here which really won out, and then we ended up with a total of about $116,000 dollars of ticket sales. And that made the biggest difference in the world for people who had never actually used Facebook to really start to sell tickets for the festival. It had been used very lightly so you’re going to hear all about this very cool case. So enjoy the folks on my team. You’ll be listening to Chase, James, and Anthony and they’re going to talk about the festival. Enjoy your case study for 50 X on spend.
Chase: Trying out a new video case study format. I’ve got Anthony and from our team here and I’m going to invite them up. We’re going to talk about the balloon festival of New Jersey that recently happened. A client of ours we were brought in sort of late into the game with some high stakes goals that we were thrilled to work on and to hit. So, James let’s let me bring you up here on the screen. There he is James, King of the social media.
James: Hola.
Chase: Talk to me a little bit about the challenge that we faced. Balloon Festival is a big event. We got brought in I think six weeks before it started- approximately, yeah six weeks- the year before they had rain I think which sort of killed their turnout. So this was like a big high stakes year for them. Yes. And so we knew right away. I think the first thing that we all thought about was Facebook and why don’t you tell us a little bit about the strategy that we implemented.
James: Well, what we did basically start with pixeling their properties so we can optimize their website for conversions. They didn’t have, they weren’t very savvy on how they ran traffic through their site. A good way of putting it. It was a challenge just getting the pixel installed. We had to work with another company. I mean we started with six weeks and that took up a week. So really let’s say about five weeks we really had to push this effectively. Though, once that everything was pixeled up I created conversion ad campaigns on Facebook. We basically broke it out by the event they were having, the balloon lifts, and different performers. And they’re they’re known for their musical act. So there were a bunch of music acts and some events kind of did an ad campaign for each one, set up the pixel on there so we could track it for conversion. Those were the first four and a half weeks, and not only did we pixel their site but we also pixeled Ticketfly right? Which is the system they were using to actually purchase tickets.
Chase: That’s correct.
James: So they put they put in the check out pixel so we could track the amount of money that we were helping drive through their ticket system. And besides the individual conversion campaigns, the last two weeks we pumped basically- they were the $7500 budget in total. Took about right under $2000 and put it into like the last 10 days of retargeting, because that is traditionally when they do most of their ticket sales, especially because of weather. People will kinda hold tight and wait and see. No doubt right. So yeah. So you know that that was it. It was the first 80-85% of the campaign was just doing conversions which we got a ton, but they did their best action, their best success came with the retargeting those last 10 days.
James: So yeah, so this is basically what happened. Hold on one second let me get in here. So this was this is the retargeting campaign right here. These were all the different artists Pat Benatar, Plain White Tees.
James: here you’ll see all the different performers, Pat Benatar was one of the performers, Plain White T’s. They, you know they target like balloon enthusiasts. They have a running a marathon. So like I said it was broken down into artist and events and you can see here impressions, reach, links, but most importantly was the convergence. You know what each campaign brought in. Pat Benatar, she was a big act, George Thoroughgood. So those are all of the individual conversions. But here is the retargeting campaign. As you can see we spent right on the 2,000 dollars that drove over 95,000 of their total one hundred and six thousand dollars in sales from Facebook. So I mean it was everything. So we took two thousand dollars, and they had a seventy-five hundred dollar budget in total. We spent fifty-five hundred of it on these individual campaigns. The cost per click was a little bit higher on these, the conversions a little bit higher, but it is what it is. That’s what we did the first four and a half weeks, the last 10 days or two weeks out from the event. We took $2000 of that $7500 and put it into the retargeting campaign. So basically once we got the pixel installed we were building up an audience of people that have visited the site and the past 10 to 14 days, we launched a campaign targeted directly at that audience. Took, like I said, under $2000 of their total $7500 budget and drove over ninety-five thousand dollars of their ticket sales from Facebook just on that retargeting campaign.
Chase: Yeah, it really, it really worked out well. Like you said it was something that you know, it was like kind of spur of the moment go away and set it up to get it going. Move on and it worked. Because you know we’re awesome.
Chase: Alright I’m going to bring up Anthony because I want him to talk about the sort of the second phase of the project that we that we implemented which was to create a mobile app. So we really wanted to optimize the experience of the festival as well. Once people had their ticket, enable the client to communicate better with the people once they were there direct people around the grounds to see the shows and the things that they wanted them to see. So let me get Anthony up here. All right. Anthony should pop up in a second. Nice, how’s it going? Anthony,
Anthony: Pretty good and you?
Chase: Good, good. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the app that we created? What did it do? Like what were the capabilities of the app and other results?
Anthony: Yeah absolutely. So I mean I guess to start, to go back to the challenges that we kind of face is really like the hesitation from them to even get a mobile app. It’s like the value proposition of having one. And the big functionality in the app is one, to let you know to buy tickets right from the app, festival info, you know concerts and stuff like that. Had a parking finder too so when you park at the festival you can drop that down.
Chase: Yeah that was really cool drop a pin so can walk back to your car so you don’t get lost, right?
Anthony: Yeah, but then as you alluded to the last festival they had some issues with weather and that kind of you know it’s a hot air balloon festival so the winds are taken into account for you know some of the events and you know attractions. So we were able to have them send push notifications to everybody to download the app to give them updates on when things were going to be scheduled to happen. You know anything like that and they use that through the app which is great. And in the end we got 3,000 downloads across iOS and Android. The average time spent within the app was around 2 minutes which is pretty good for an app that you know has functionality. Big success to be honest.
Chase: Yeah and I think one important point is that most people that download an app don’t delete it and so they’re going to have the app for next year so they can be marketing to those people all year long through push notification which is arguably the greatest way you could advertise to somebody. It’s almost impossible to avoid a push notification that pops up on your phone. So we’re already, we already have a leg up for next year’s event as compared to this year’s event. Can you do a quick screenshot and show us what they look like.
Anthony: Yes.
Chase: While he’s loading that up. Just a pitch to anyone out there watching who might be having a festival that they’re looking for some help on. We’re going to do another festival. Rock, Ribs, and Ridges next year. So this festival event marketing is sort of a niche that we are branching out into and we’re definitely looking for a couple more music festivals something like that to take what we’ve learned here. The success that we had and apply to new festivals that are going on in the future.
Anthony: OK, so this is the app within. We will certainly see some screen grabs. I’m not able to get an emulator of how the app functions within there.
Chase: But you can see it was on right here. They advertised it for both.
Anthony: Yeah iStore, Google Play, Apple both app stores which is huge, and the big thing was when somebody got tickets in the receipt that emailed to them. There was a link to download the app as well to kind of keep everything connected.
Chase: That’s right. Yeah, cross promotion so once you drop into sales we are also driving up downloads. And, how many people ended up downloading app? So in total, we had 3,000.
Chase: Awesome. All right, well thanks for joining me, James. Thanks for joining me, Anthony. And again if you need help with any sort of event marketing give us a shout over at PracticerBloom. As you can see we have fantastic success with this and we got brought in pretty late into the game. So, if we had more of a heads up we could have produced even more success and we look forward to doing just that next year. So thanks for joining me guys. We’ll see you on the next video case study.