Promogogo excels is in two places: easy to understand ticket sales analytics and building promotions that are easy to make but create huge impact.

Getting ticket sales in real-time is extremely useful strategically so decisions can be based on what is actually happening. Building promotions can either be done in reaction to something that happened and pushed out right away – but most of the time there's already a strategy in place by the time tickets go onsale.

These are high-level executive decisions, and some people who use PROMOGOGO just want to dive in themselves right away, which of course is absolutely fantastic. Others want to learn what using PROMOGOGO to execute a strategy in a meaningful way can look like. Many of our users have chosen this path, where together with some of our team we'll match their ideas to a materialised content strategy with all the relevant assets.

White Label Branding

because it's about –your– audience

Because PROMOGOGO operates white label branding for our premium clients, we actually take pride in not getting in between the audience and the act. We believe the connection between artist and their fans is very important, and PROMOGOGO faciliates these interactions, but we don't want to get in the way.

Much like good lighting, or design – we think it excels when it goes unnoticed, and that's exactly how we feel about our product. It should get the job done, and the love and attention should all achieve the most important goal: get more people to see more shows, build an audience, build a connection.

To see how it can work for you, we'll be demonstrating how PROMOGOGO has been used in two very different ways for projects on very different scales, but both utilised the campaign builder in creative ways.

Arcade Fire Uses Promogogo

Arcade Fire really wanted to make their audience feel seen, so they used a gogoPoster to host a fan-generated gallery of Instagram photos on arcadefire.com/reflektor.

We were able to find really good fan-generated photos from them by using the geo-location of each show and surface the photos from Instagram.

Arcade Fire had been building a fan gallery from their Reflektor tour, grouping together photos coming in under the hashtag #Reflektor. It is common knowledge at this point that photos from hashtags become diluted, because people are posting screenshots of their phones listening to the albums, or just using popular hashtags to draw attention to their unrelated content.

The location photos don’t really have that, these are the genuine fan-generated photos. When Arcade Fire launched their gallery in 2014 via Promogogo, the fan-generated gallery went from under 20k photos from over 7 months, to 80k+ in a week. People were digging through their photos on their phones posting photos on Instagram from a concert they went to months earlier. Seeing your photo featured by your idol like that, blows the fans’ minds.

This to us is the appropriate marketing for our times. It’s not pushy, it’s not pretending to be anything that it’s not. Not sure if you want to buy tickets? – see how much fun people had the last time. It’s honest, has integrity and fosters communities. Having your favourite band feature your Instagram photo in their campaign builds the kind of currency Taylor Swift famously referred to in her WSJ op-ed as the only one ‘kids these days’ want. Not to mention how much easier it is for bands/artists and their managers to build campaigns by utilising content created by the audience, for the audience.

The band went on to share a lot of this newly discovered content, with a shoutout to the fan, on their social media platforms and their audience went wild. Engagement went through the roof, people were posting in comments more of their own photos and the excitement was palpable on these photo threads.

Arcade Fire fully achieved their goal of wanting their audience to be seen, and PROMOGOGO made it really easy for them.

But not everyone has a massive fan-base like Arcade Fire does already. Compare and contrast a project we executed with a local charity, Talent Unlimited, which aims to give a platform to newly trained classical musicians.

They decided to launch a showcase festival in Central London's Asia House, with seven events over four days with almost thirty musicians. The problem there was that the festival was new so it didn't have any name recognition, the musicians were as well. The charity had the strongest brand out of the elements at play there, but hadn't fully transferred its influence to the social media sphere yet.

The goal was to sell out the Music Futures Festival at Asia House, and to build the brand of the charity itself and by extension its rota of musicians. Here is an outline of strategy we came up with together and then helped them execute. The result was that all seven performances completely sold out.

Local Charity Uses Promogogo

A lot of tickets to live music events get sold on name recognition, and that's great. People buy tickets to see 'this band' or their favourite artist, and that is what determines the strategy (make their name in bold on any promo material). What is easy to overlook, is how little the average person knows about music.

Obviously on the side of the superstars, they're the draw; but a lot of people still like seeing a kick-ass rock-band, an up-and-coming talent that sits within their favourite genre – or say, an exceptionally talented classically trained musician perform Liszt or Schubert or Tchaikovsky. The name of the person on stage actually matters a lot less to them, than attending a lovely evening with their partner to see world-class performers.

This angle became the core of our strategy. Don't focus on the names, but on painting a picture of what the event is. The trick is giving the general gist quick but allowing those who want to find out more information to dig deeper.

The Strategy

The organisers of the festival knew that they had world-class talent performing some of the most beautiful pieces in the world. But someone hearing "Classical Music Festival" might not realise the level of the talent at play there. People don't buy tickets to something that they don't know exists or know what is about – they need context.

And the best way to provide this context is by making sure any piece of information, anyone might want to find out, is there. The task is to make sure all relevant event information is available for anyone to find.

The structure we came up with was a to create the main page that had an overview of the festival in full. All seven events, over the four days, were listed with a description. Should a person be intrigued in any one of them, there would be its own page for each of the events. And finally, each artist had their own page.

The musician and event pages had the musicians' programmes, and an embedded YouTube video of the musician performing. It makes a huge difference for the audience to not have to imagine some unknown musician in the abstract, but be able to see what the programme is, and see their style for themselves – before buying tickets.

The Execution

So each of the pages described was set up as a gogoPoster on the PROMOGOGO platform. We're not going to lie, this process is frontloaded in gathering all the links and photos, writing the descriptions, and putting it all in the right place.

It was worth it though, because once the posters were done – that was pretty much it. The assets had been created which encompassed all information any potential member of the audience could ever need. These assets could be passed around with only minor updates required as the programme evolved.

The strategy was then, literally, to share one poster a day on Facebook. gogoPosters are made to be perfect for Social Media. They've got a beautiful preview you can manipulate yourself for both Facebook and Twitter, and they are extremely mobile friendly (most people open links on Facebook on their phones).

The Numbers

The charity had 611 likes on Facebook when the festival campaign started in June. The poster link was shared on Twitter, Facebook and via email, but the emphasis was on Facebook. The most promoted link was the main poster, that had the overview of the festival and link to all the other posters because of course, that's the main thing to promote. That link was clicked on 7,520 times during the campaign.

The 7 event posters were clicked on 300-700 times each, and each musician poster received between 170-1000 clicks. For a charity with an audience size of 611 people on Facebook, the campaign was engaged with over 18 thousand times.

Over the 3 months during the campaign, their Facebook page went up by hundreds of percent in all key metrics. Their reach went from a peak of 104 people to a peak of over 3000 organic reach. They went from having no shares on their posts to peaking at 45 shares for a single post. From 6 reactions to a peak of 142. Their combined likes over the 3 months were 1.6 thousand. By the end of the campaign period, their Facebook page is currently at 888 likes. That's a growth of 45% in just over 3 months.

That audience that got built is theirs and theirs alone, and for any future events that they have – and they have a lot, every single event reaches more people that have specifically expressed interest in their work.

The Result

It's important when launching a campaign to not lose sight of what the endgame is.

The endgame is not getting more likes on Facebook or trying to get as many link clicks on the posters as possible. These can be promising indicators but should not really be the goal in and of itself. For Talent Unlimited, the endgame, of course, is performing at full capacity.

The link clicks mean that the campaign is reaching people, and an increase in Facebook likes indicates that it's resonating with at least a number of the people reached. However what matters, is if people show up. Some people were reached via other means, such as on meetup or via email which added to the momentum and would increase the numbers of people engaged and reached total.

The bottom line is 300 people showed up, and the festival took place at full capacity.

Over To You

What Would Your gogoPoster Say?

While these projects happened some time ago, they provide the perfect contrast in showing the versatility of the gogoPoster medium. From literally a small unknown classical musician to one of the biggest touring rock bands in the world – the Promogogo Poster gives you the space to tell the story you want your audience to hear.