Selling out four festival dates across England.

Smoked and Uncut is a series of four festivals that run between June and December each year at Lime Wood Hotel and THE PIG Hotels.

Smoked and Uncut is a series of four festivals that run between June and December each year, at Lime Wood Hotel and THE PIG Hotels.

They are run in association with Chase Distillery and Action Against Hunger.

Our main challenge was to sell out tickets to the Smoked and Uncut festivals. The larger part of this challenge was to do this on a relatively small budget, with a view to replicating the campaigns to promote additional festivals in future years.

Working as an extension of their team

We meet with the team weekly and during these meetings, we planned out a multi-channel advertising strategy and plan to help meet their business objectives. Once we had this in place, we worked with their team to execute these campaigns in the run up to the festivals.

We also placed a dedicated digital PR manager, onsite at each festival, working on all of their social media channels. We created a large amount of publicity using customer’s social shares, and our own content relating to the bands and general buzz around the festivals. The knock on effect helped us grow our reach through social media channels and build brand awareness through digital PR.

Our strategy and delivering the campaigns

Firstly, we decided to make use of the valuable customer data held by Homegrown Hotels.

We started by segmenting this data for use in three key digital marketing channels; paid search and display marketing, paid social media on Facebook and Twitter and finally email marketing.

Our next step was to create awareness of the festivals at the top end of the purchase funnel using all three channels.

Once we had created this awareness, we were able to build audiences for both paid search and social for remarketing purposes. We were also able to build 'lookalike' audiences through Facebook to target potential customers, related to past customers of the four hotels, and their festivals.

We generated a total of £62,000 worth of ticket revenue for the four festivals that ran during the year.

This figure excludes revenue from food and drink bought at the festivals.

We managed to achieve this on a budget of £6,000, covering media spend and our consultancy fee, split over the year.

In addition to these figures we sold out all the bedrooms and tables in the restaurants at each hotel location, on the day of each festival in question.

These were nearly all festival goers who had purchased a ticket to the festival, as well as a room or restaurant reservation.