Butserfest 2016

East Hampshire District Council

SERVICES

MARKETING
BRAND IDENTITY & DESIGN
DIGITAL
PRINT
SOCIAL MEDIA

Butserfest is a rock music festival, founded by the East Hampshire District Council in 2007 with the aim of providing more local entertainment for the young people in East Hampshire. 2016 was a particularly special year for Butserfest, as the festival celebrated its 10th event.

Mzuri were asked to work with the EHDC project team for Butserfest in 2015 to provide a strategic marketing service from high level strategy through to the design of each piece of collateral, from way finding to social assets. We were delighted to be successful in winning the bid for the 2016 event as well and relished the opportunity to build on what we had established and developed in the previous year.

butserfest.co.uk

SERVICES

MARKETING
BRAND IDENTITY & DESIGN
DIGITAL
PRINT
SOCIAL MEDIA

Butserfest is the UKs biggest and most established drug and alcohol free festival, a distinction that is key to the premise of the event which is targeted at a youth audience (primarily those aged 14 to 20 years old). The festival aims to provide an authentic festival experience in a safe environment for young people to enjoy their first experiences of live music performances and festival events.

The strategic aim of our marketing activity was to ensure that parents felt comfortable allowing their children to attend while ensuring that the line-up, presentation and general experience were appealing and 'cool' enough for the kids themselves to want to be there.

Work started on the promotion of the 2016 10th anniversary event before the 2015 event had event taken place! We knew that the best way to generate interest within the target audience would be to talk to them while they were still on high from the buzz of the 2015 event. In order to achieve this we launched a £10 for 10 days ticket offer at the 2015 event to sell low price tickets for the 2016 10-year event. That offer promoted via banners and flyers at the 2015 event and afterwards in the Press, via social media, the festival website and email marketing to the festival database. We were delighted with the uptake which was unprecedented in terms of early ticket sales.

While we were brought into the 2015 Festival project late in the lead up to the event, we gleaned a detailed understanding of the target audience, the issues challenging the festival and the range of channels that we could potentially use to address those challenges for the subsequent years. This understanding put us in a great position to research and devise a full and effective marketing plan that could be rolled out over the course of the year for the promotion of the 2016 event.

Our first project, following the super early bird campaign of £10 for 10 days had concluded, was to refresh the festival brand for the anniversary year and to start the planning, design and development of a new and bespoke website for the Festival.

The previous site was based on an outdated template that was not flexible enough to allow us to develop the functionality that we needed to make the site the effective tool we needed.

The new site was designed with accessibility and mobile/responsive use in mind as we knew our audience (based on Google Analytics data) was likely to largely use it on a device rather than a desktop computer. The site heavily features the festival brand styling with the aim of building brand awareness within the target audiences and also uses professional photography from previous events of bands and the event itself to create the atmosphere that the event strives for.

The site structure was radically overhauled and developed to develop it into a resource and hub via which any query or interest in the event could be managed effectively. The use of video was featured heavily on the homepage including footage shot from last year's festival to demonstrate all that the festival embodies in line with Butserfest's safe, fun environment for young people to enjoy music. A key element of the structure was the creation of an effective journey through the site as well as the development of alluring CTAs (calls to action) that drove traffic to the ticket purchase pages.

The site was launched in January 2016 and it's unveiling launched the PR campaign for 2016.

In terms of the brand, we had worked on it in 2015 when we were brought into the project and had developed a new look for the festival logo and surrounding brand style. Given that brand awareness was a key objective we wanted to keep the new brand style for the 2016 event but added a new element to celebrate the 10th anniversary.

Following that kick start our marketing plan was rolled out in stages based around pre-event milestones such as line up announcements, introducing stage competitions, acoustic stage announcements, event activities and attractions etc.

Our work covered a range of disciplines including management and development of the website content, strategic email campaigns to targeted audience groups, a series of weekly blog posts across a range of topics, detailed and on-going social media research, planning and support for several platforms, graphic design for print and digital promotional collateral, advertising and PR as well as the sourcing of a wide range of saleable branded merchandise, staff livery, wayfinding and promotional signage.

A Press Partnership was negotiated with The Portsmouth Post (a publication central to our target area) that gave a range of print and digital coverage of the event in the months and weeks leading up to the Festival, culminating in an 8-page feature supplement that was published the weekend before the event and distributed with the paper. In addition to that partnership we developed a strategic PR plan for the promotion of the festival which resulted in the achievement of record breaking numbers of print, digital, radio and TV coverage for the event.

Project Manager for EHDC, Susan Kirkwood-Taylor said

"As a team Mzuri have loved working with EHDC on Butserfest 2015 and 2016. The strategic element of the long term project has allowed us to combine a number of skills and disciplines, bringing together team members as a project group to deliver a truly successful event with press coverage, social engagement and ticket sales that have far and away exceeded those achieved for any Butserfest Festival to date."

Visit the new website here.

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