Driving 65,000 people to Manchesters biggest free festival

Driving Massive Footfall

Festival Manchester was an ambitious event with large-scale production, expecting to recieve tens of thousands of attendees – this instantly set the challenge for Wonderful to reach huge volumes of families across the North West with news of the event.

Wonderful were engaged to deliver a winning, connected strategy across 6 months leading up to the festival itself, that would generate family footfall on the festival weekend.

There were additional focuses on the local Youth audience as one of the core outreach objectives the organisations wanted to achieve, which would require a more focused, creative approach to the advertising. Part of the challenge was also to balance the Christian message of hope with their desire to bring the wider, non-faith-based community together.

Reach was absolutely key to generating exposure and buzz for the festival.

Campaign Strategy for Maximising Reach and Engagement

Wonderful created and implemented a diverse campaign strategy that focused on generating huge reach, driving awareness, engaging users, collecting followers, generating newsletter sign ups and sending traffic to the website utilising Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify and Google ads; alongside an above-the-line campaign including OOH across Buses, Taxis, Billboards and Digital Displays as well as Radio Ads.

Reach was absolutely key to generating exposure and buzz for the festival, so creating a consistent and memorable identity and reaching both the Christian and secular audiences across multiple touchpoints was key.

Targeted digital marketing strategy

Wonderful were primarily tasked with supporting on the broader, non-faith-based audience in Manchester and beyond. We created a number of audiences and personas based on interests, previous interactions and behaviours, targeting those most likely to attend the three day event.

Specific alterations were planned across the lifetime of the digital marketing campaign based on key dates, with updates to messaging and creative to reflect proximity of the event. To generate the dedicated Youth audience on the Friday of the event, we also ran a dedicated TikTok campaign targeting the Youth Audience which included a UGC-based competition mechanism to win a shopping spree at a local high-end sneaker store.

With the event being free and unticketed, measuring a defined conversion and the likelihood of attendance was challenging. To support this, we created mechanisms to drive retained page/profile followers on social channels and generated email newsletter subscribers with the aim of being able to nurture them to attend through a series of emails.

Successful campaign results and impressive festival attendance

With impressions totalling over 16 million across all channels, there is absolutely no doubt that the exposure expectations were met, and exceeded within the budget and time allocated.

Low CPCs, above-average CTRs and fantastic levels of engagement with the ads were further evidence that the campaigns were hitting the mark.

Generating a festival attendance of over 65,000 people across the weekend was an awesome achievement, and collating a retained database of over 8,000 people the organisations can now contact via email and social media has created a springboard for future Festival Manchester events in the coming years.