(Source: For three weeks in September, the Brisbane Festival spreads across the city catering for all audiences with a mix of music, theatre, dance, circus, comedy, opera and more. The Festival has had the same website since 2009, and whilst re-skinned every year the back end was virtually unchanged. Brisbane Festival engaged a hometown digital agency “Bigfish” to help with its digital strategy.
The objectives were clear. The website needed to represent fun, excitement and diversity appropriately, a uniting of these brands (to help represent what Brisbane Festival stands for) and increase multiple ticket purchases. Brisbane Festival also required a new app for 2012 for iPhone and Android, as the current version did not provide experience or any reason to download.
Bigfish decided to take a different approach to a typical arts marketing strategy, by making Brisbane Festival feel like Big Day Out or Splendour in the Grass, where people buy tickets for the whole Festival experience rather than specific artists. Whilst many large acts sold tickets on their own, the festival was made of a multitude of lesser-known acts that also deserve their place in the limelight; this format would allow the whole experience to be added into the price. The digital agency decided to build the website with this concept in mind: a poster listing all acts that users can share and create conversation about on social media. The app included more engaging features like QR codes, itinerary builders and a check in facility to enhance customer experience.
To execute this plan, Bigfish positioned catchy key words over transparent images to help create excitement about each of the acts. The agency also embedded easily accessible mini-video segments within the website layout to showcase the performances, made the homepage customisable for better user experience and responsive in layout to adapt its layout for a computer, phone or tablet.
The app was broken down in five functions, which all integrate with social media platforms. These features included photo tools, the festival feed, dynamic maps; check in functions and direct links to the mobile site to buy tickets.
Results were astounding. The website has helped deliver higher than expected ticket sales for the 2012 season. Visits increased by nearly 50% to more than 583,000 visits, and unique visitors increased by 42%, each visit lasted close to three minutes, with page views increasing to 1.5 million. There were 11,000 downloads, a 40% increase on the previous year and Facebook likes increased 170% and Twitter followers by 64%. Ticket sales also increased swiftly, with a 75% increase in pre-sale tickets and 15% more tickets sold than the previous year. Overall, more than 90 individual performances sold out, with ticket sales exceeding $1.25 million and more than 30,000 itineraries have been created via the itinerary builder, with 2666 tickets purchased as part of the multi-tix offer.
This shows how digital media and marketing can be used to reach business objectives. In this case, the Brisbane Festival was aiming to increase sales and adoption of the new ticketing option.
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