An Exceptional Brand in Need of a Local Push
While located in a relatively small town, the Redlands Symphony has a national reputation for their incredible performances. They continually bring in world-renowned composers and musicians. Plus, they have developed strong community programs and children outreach initiatives.
Since 2007, RWL Design has worked closely with the symphony to develop and maintain their brand presence. This includes creating and managing their posters, brochures, concert programs, additional collateral materials, website, and advertising.
The RWL Design team have helped us get the most out of our marketing budget. With their expertise, we've been able to broaden our target audience and increase our season subscriptions. Chris Myers, Redlands Symphony General Manager
The Challenge – How to Attract New Season Ticket Holders and Increase Brand Awareness?
While the symphony consistently maintained a growing group of loyal patrons, they wanted to attract new season ticket holders in different demographics. They needed a way to connect with potential concert goers in the Inland Empire, alert them to events, and encourage them to buy tickets online.
The Solution – An Affordable and Effective Marketing Campaign
Ultimately, the Redlands Symphony needed an affordable and effective marketing campaign that increased their overall ticket sales.
1. Google Grants
In 2014, we helped the symphony qualify for a Google Grant. This unique grant is available to nonprofits. It provides qualifying applicants a $10,000 monthly budget for Google advertising products such as Google Adwords, a pay-per-click marketing tool.
Google Grants provides qualifying nonprofits $10,000 monthly budget for Google advertising products.Click to Tweet
To use the budget effectively, we did an in-depth analysis of the symphony’s target audience. This included identifying their target audience’s age range, additional interests, and frequently used search terms.
This information allowed us craft ads and website landing pages specifically designed for the symphony’s target audience. Additionally, it let us display the ads to individuals who were predetermined as potential buyers. We did so by installing the ads on Google with highly specialized display settings. This means, the display of the ads were triggered by factors such as specific search terms and location of the search user.
These targeted ads worked to bring the Redlands Symphony in front to new people to:
- increase donor base
- increase volunteer base
- promote season subscriptions
- promote events specific to the organization such as fundraisers
- sell single event tickets
2. Help Google See Richer Information About Concerts
We helped Google to parse and display event-specific information from the Symphony by using an HTML syntax called “schema.” The schema, embedded on the website for each event, let Google show event data and other relevant information in organic search results. This increased the size of their search results, giving the Redlands Symphony more visual weight on Google and helping prospective customers navigate to concert information faster.
Recent updates to Google’s search platform have given organizations with schema-optimized websites a higher ranking. For example, with the right schema, Google will showcase an organization’s upcoming events within relevant search results. This added visibility increases website clicks and ultimately increases sales.
Web schema boosts organic search results by helping Google parse relevant info.Click to Tweet
3. Optimizing Google Analytics for Vendini
At RWL Design we firmly believe in tracking success and ROI. We worked with the symphony’s ticketing system, Vendini, and added additional tracking to their website to better see when someone actually purchased a ticket.
We also added appropriate tracking codes to the symphony’s ads, website, and links to Vendini’s ticket pages. This allowed the symphony to see which ads were getting clicked and driving visitors to their website. And, it let them see which of those clicks were getting visitors from their website to their Vendini ticket pages.
Maximize your marketing dollars by tracking your sales with analytics you can truly measure.Click to Tweet
The same methodology can be applied to measure the success of email blasts, print marketing, and other media placements.
The Result – 16% Total Increase in Season Subscriptions and Significant Growth in Single Ticket Sales
In one year, we helped the Redlands Symphony increase their website visits by nearly 300%. December 2014, the Redlands Symphony site had a steady 14,000 visitors. By December 2015, that number jumped to 41,000.
This increase in traffic helped introduce the symphony to new ticket buyers and lead to new purchases over the phone. 95% of their concerts exceeded projections for single ticket sales.
The ultimate win for the symphony was a significant increase in new subscriptions from their website. From August to December of 2014, few new subscriptions were purchased through the website. Between August and December of 2015 after our campaign, the symphony had a significant increase in online subscriptions attributed the efforts of RWL Design - not counting myriad new subscriptions sold over the phone!
Together these combination of strategies helped the Redlands Symphony reach a larger audience.
Your 3 Takeaways
Use Adwords to Target Your Specific Audience
Whether your campaign is funded by Google Grants or your own marketing budget, Adwords is a very effective tool for increasing brand awareness, gaining new leads, and driving sales. As a results-oriented marketing platform, it allows you to easily track your success. Additionally, you can easily perform A/B testing and your ad spend can easily be tailored to your threshold.
Proper Web Schema Increases Your Visibility
By optimizing your site with the proper web schema you can significantly increase your organic search presence.
Track Your Results to Know Your ROI
In order to accurately assess what’s working and what isn’t, it is essential you have the appropriate tracking codes in place. By following a user’s entry point and exit point, you can determine your marketing campaign’s ROI.
Let’s chat about how Adwords can help your business increase its sales.
