Marketing success for holiday pop-up series

From the creative minds of Bayer Brothers Sets and MOTUS Booth came the immersive holiday pop-up series SNOWDAY. Located at the Plaza at Preston Center, guests navigate their way through an imaginative winter wonderland of festive photo ops, enchanted rooms, interactive spaces, and more.

Anderson Collaborative began work with the SNOWDAY in the early conceptual stages. Inspiration for the project came from unique experiential locations such as Candytopia, Museum of Ice Cream, and Meow Wolf. The concept expanded from this inspiration into fruition with plans of a unique and immersive holiday photo and sensational experience unlike anything currently out there in the marketplace.

Immediate challenges included coming up with a strategy at both a marketing and conceptual level that would build brand awareness quickly and entice visitors to come to the event. Additional challenges included organizing strategic planning and media planning efforts effectively on a limited budget and getting the word out through press appearances/news articles and by word of mouth. Lastly and perhaps the largest challenge was taking a limited advertising budget and applying it in a way that would provide as much return possible.

Our team at Anderson Collaborative was successful in helping the SNOWDAY build awareness for the event in a massive way using as many marketing channels and advertising methods as possible.

Total Digital Impressions: 3,047,423

Facebook: 1,640,439 impressions

Instagram: 543,463 impressions

Google Ads: 456,148 impressions

Snapchat: 350,000 impressions

Email: 3,009 impressions

Snowdaydallas.com Search Views: 18,000 impressions

Twitter: 36,364 impressions

Unable to fully account for Digital Press, Influencer, and Social Mention Impressions.

Web Analytics:

49,652 web users

62,997 unique sessions

127,489 unique page views

Our team began work by assisting in the development of branding, marketing messaging, positioning, and design material for the event. Our consultation efforts were guided by our SOSTAC marketing/strategic planning approach and our team built out an extensive document outlining each detail of the SOSTAC plan.

SOSTAC Media Plan included 20+ pages compiled together for the SNOWDAY team focusing on each component of the SOSTAC model.

1) Situational Analysis:Where Are We Now?
-Analyze opportunities
-Benchmark competition
-Document current performance
-Audit current customers

2) Objectives:Where Do We Want To Be?
-Define vision
-Set weekly/monthly expectations
-Align goals
-Set SMART objectives
-Key performance indicators
-Define a reporting plan

3) Strategy:How Are We Getting There?
-Define consumer segments
-Establish target demographics
-Positioning statement
-Marketing Mix
-Define multi-channel experience
-Build engagement & content strategy

4) Tactics & Action:What Are We Doing To Get There?
-Build a digital roadmap
-Media schedule
-Set allocation of budget and marketing resources

5) Control:How Do We Monitor Our Progress To Our Goal?
-Engage with our customers
-Review aggregation plan
-Qualitative feedback (surveys, etc.)
-Review progress
-Have we met our goals?
-If we haven’t met goals, how do we pivot?

Large amounts of competitive analysis was done to get a better understanding of their customer demographics, website traffic, website structure, promotional strategy, digital marketing efforts, search engine optimization, and ticketing managment.

Careful financial analysis was conducted to ensure that we were meeting necessary key performance indicators to provide the ROI we were looking to achieve through marketing efforts.

Extensive market research was conducted to help us percisely segment our target demographic and to send out marketing messages to the right individuals.

The SNOWDAY team required a website launched well before the event was set up. This put the Anderson Collaborative team in a unique situation where we had to come up with a very creative website without much content to use. There was no photography of the space available and wouldn’t be until just a few days before the launch of the event. With an early access push in the marketing pipeline, our team had to think out of the box.

We built out a unique one-page website that featured on scroll animations creating a seamless user experience as one explored the site. We kept the design simple for the most part but made sure it was very much on brand and very interactive.

The website was well received and had over 127,000 page views over the course of the month.

Our partnership with the Showclix team was very beneficial. Their company provided a very reliable ticketing software and backend system that helped us throughout the entire event. The Showclix marketing team assisted us immensely with the development of the ticketing page where orders were processed.

The SNOWDAY website was built in a way to accumulate as much actionable and insight-rch data as possible. With the installation of Google Analtyics with cross-domain tracking between our own property and showclix ticketing software we were able to closely monitor every single dollar made and understand where it was coming from. This full-scale attribution model allowed us to allocate more dollars into marketing channels that were working well for us and to quickly ditch irrelevant ones. With this approach we saved an immense amount of money in advertising and marketing.

Additional trackers and tools were used to better understand who our customers were so we could continue to hone in on our target demographic.

The SNOWDAY team was provided with a full cross-channel marketing dashboard from our team that centralized all marketing/web analytics into a central spot. This was incredibly useful for rapid takeaways and quick financial reporting.

User Experience research was conducted by installing a user recording tool in the checkout steps. This allowed our research team to identify any issues with links, buttons, layout, etc. These recordings helped improve our user experience and lower bounce rates from 60% to 40% by the last month of the event.

A unique challenge was approaching search engine optimization with a name that included the keywords “snow day.” Search results for snow day dallas included a large variety of prominent and authoratiative weather websites and school listings. By using best web development practices and sitemap configuration we ensured that snowdaydallas.com was loaded by Google Search Console with no coverage or usability issues.

We employed an extensive link building strategy to ensure that we were not only featured on as many digital press websites as possible but also event listings and other influential websites. We were able to acquire 1,030 unique external links to our own website.

Additional search engine optimization efforts combined with a robust social media creation and business listing approach allowed for us to build SNOWDAY a massive organic presence where the first entire 3 pages of google search results belonged to SNOWDAY related topics alone.

To create a truly omni-channel approach to marketing SNOWDAY our team felt that Snapchat was especially necessary to reach a younger target demographic. The platform played a huge part for remarketing and brand awareness efforts. We utilized paid advertising on the platform to reach previous web visitors with a targeted video promo that drove traffic to the website in a very cost-effective way.

Our team also utilized branded Snapchat geo-filters to help spread awareness of the event. Geo-filters were placed in Deep Ellum, the Plaza at Preston Center, and most successfully at the Southern Methodist University tailgate during homecoming week. For just $134 we were able to generate nearly 66,000 impressions at the location and had over 33.8% of viewers use the filter in a photo that was sent to their network of friends. This ended up having an overall Cost Per Thousand of just $2.06 for just the visibility it reached within the geo-fence. The individual views on published stories and snaps sent to friends is not something that Snapchat will release.

Early on we knew that press would be incredibly important for the success of SNOWDAY. The entire time executed a well-thought-out PR acquisition strategy that helped get the word through hundreds of influencers, major news outlets, and social media profiles. Some of these press wins included:

“Immersive Pop-Up SNOWDAY Brings a Winter Wonderland to Dallas” – D Magazine

“Dallas Gets its Own Snowy Winter Wonderland” – PaperCity

“Stock up on photo content at this pop-up holiday experience” – Thrillist

“You’ve heard of a haunted house — but what about a holiday house?” – Jay Wallis, WFAA Ch 8

“Imaginative wonderland of festive photo ops” – Culturemap

“16 Reasons to Get Out of the House Thursday–Monday” – DFWChild

“The top places to see Christmas lights and other holiday displays in Dallas-Fort Worth” – Dallas Morning News

“Many Instagrammable moments for young and old alike” – NBC 5

With these press pieces published through print, digital, and television we were able to cast a massive organic net throughout the DFW metroplex.

The Anderson Collaborative team helped maximize the reach and engagement of these PR wins by amplifying them through various social media advertisements. These were massively successful and we were able to drive $36,933 in ticket sales off referral traffic alone.

A huge part of our digital strategy was focused on building a cross-channel marketing funnel to advertise to our customers at each stage of the buying process. We set up the following advertising funnel for the SNOWDAY team with our focus primarily being on paid search and social:

We would bring users in with PR win posts to entice them to learn more about the event from a reputable 3rd party. These initial ads often ended up resulting in purchases almost immediately. If the user did not complete a purchase after engaging with one of these ads, we then drove them to the website to complete a purchase. If the user still did not complete a purchase after engaging with multiple ads driving to the website, we would entice them with a unique promotional code.

This approach helped us generate an average return on ad spend of 6.94 for our conversion focused campaigns. We tested over 34 variants of images and copy for these campaigns and some of these variants had returns as high as 46 times.

With our PR amplficiation strategy we built a huge amount of engagement and following on Facebook and Instagram early on. These served very well as promoted posts in the discovery phase of the customer journey. PR amplification has always worked well for us on social media because a “neutral 3rd party” is doing the selling for you versus self-promotion.

Paid search advertising is incredibly effective for intent-marketing, meaning that users go to search engines looking for solutions and therefore you can accomplish great results by serving the right ad to someone looking for that solution. We were able to generate incredibly high interaction rates at an extremely cost effective rate.

We advertised on a variety of keywords that were related to holiday events in the DFW metroplex in order to encourage customer discovery. We would subsequently remarket to web visitors with dynamic display campaigns targeting users on various websites. We utilized dynamic creative to generate responsive banners that fit over 25 different sizes.

Encouraging Virality With “Snow Day News Cast:”

The SNOWDAY team built out a weather report video and blasted it out to DFW metroplex on social and Youtube. With incoming incliment weather in the area at the time of the post, many users shared the post without realizing it was actually an advertisement. Paired with facebook promotion, we were able to reach 86,330 unique individuals, receive 11,898 engagements, and accumulate over 98,000 views.

Email Marketing Initiatives:

Our team organized email marketing campaigns for the SNOWDAY team to share promotional codes and to spread the word out to a large email list of individuals. These campaigns were very successful resulting in thousands of visitors to the website, many positive reviews from past customers, and over $6,000 in revenue generated directly from email visits.

Youtube Advertising Efforts:

Tightly targeting past website visitors and our target demographic in the Park Cities area of Dallas we launched Youtube campaigns to increase views on our video content and to generate increased brand awareness of SNOWDAY. These advertisements resulted in 90,711 additional impressions.

Print & Out Of Home Advertising Efforts:

Outside of digital advertising, we worked with the SNOWDAY team to oversee the development of print material and out of home displays to further improve awareness of the event in the DFW metroplex. The SNOWDAY team had a digital billboard on the Dallas North Tollway that reached an estimated 300,000+ individuals over the course of a month.

Print materials were passed out in the local area with unique promotional codes. One of these print campaigns was especially successful at the Snider Plaza Tree Lighting ceremony where the SNOWDAY team had a booth set up in the location.

Social Media Impact:

Paid and organic social media efforts on Facebook resulted in 1,640,439 impressions, 77,605 engagements, and 150,000+ video views. On Instagram we received over 543,463 unique impressions.