Giving life to a brand new blues festival in Central Oregon – in less than 7 months.
Sisters Rhythm & Brews Festival
Sisters, OR
A pair of electricians in the Bend, OR area have a lot of experience doing electrical work for festivals throughout the US. After some time, they had the bright idea that they could pull off a festival in its entirety. As you can imagine, they needed everything. And fast.
The first annual Sisters Rhythm & Brews Festival occurred August 3-4, 2018. Their lineup boasted 12 artists, from household names like Walter Trout and Los Lobos to the up-and-coming like Nikki Hill and Down North. Attendees kept cool with beverages from Oregon based breweries and distilleries.
Many, many challenges arise with the creation of a new business or organization: time, budget, resources, know-how, to name a few. But the one thing every product or service has in common is the need for brand awareness.
If you market it, they will come… if your product or service is strong.
Optimize
New Website: Our team members have a lot of experience in website building before Intellitonic. It’s not within our typical service listing as we like to maintain focus on driving traffic to existing sites. That said, The Festival trusted us enough to hand us the keys and let us do our thing.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Keyword research is a GREAT way to understand what your audience is looking for. We used keywords to flesh out metadata to speak to people looking for blues concerts in The US. Backlink building was another huge component to our SEO strategy which gave the website more exposure to website visitors and gave Google more context clues about site content.
Drivitize
Google Ads (FKA AdWords): Utilizing the same keywords and more from our SEO strategy, we built out three major campaigns: one targeting searches for blues festivals, a second for beer festival seekers, and a third targeting searches for the artists themselves.
Facebook Paid Advertising: Similar to our Google Ads efforts, we created different audiences interested in festivals, beers, and blues music.
Preparitize
Event Photography: Okay, so we might be the first (and last) company to “preparitize” something, but work with us for a minute. We have a few photographers on staff who have some major skill (tip of the hat to Clint Keller for the majority of team photos on our site). Another member of our team photographed the festival to not only get some great shots for next year, but understand the festival and it’s attendees – to truly understand the festival’s personality. We plan to “rinse and repeat” our process to improve next year’s targeting.
It’s safe to say the first annual Sisters Rhythm & Brews Festival is off to a strong start. Their search engine optimized website, targeted ads, and compelling lineup of blues artists and beer selection resulted in more sold tickets than the organizers expected for their first year. Best of all, the feedback from the artists, volunteers, attendees, and even the little town of Sisters was overall very positive.
We can’t wait to work with this team again to try new audiences and tactics for the 2019 festival. Cheers to the blues!
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