CHALLENGE
A beloved regional festival called Wurstfest was returning to celebrate its 60th anniversary after a hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a site fire. The local destination management organization wanted to assist this volunteer-driven event to higher success by managing an influencer campaign in nearby drive markets.
APPROACH
We envisioned partnering with regional, niche influencers who could create pre-event excitement then create a stronger call to action in the weeks leading up to the event. The Wurstfest volunteer leadership team agreed with the vision and offered to create a preview event for the group, including a tour of the grounds, food sampling and an old-fashioned sausage-making demonstration.
SOLUTION
We engaged with 10 influencers in travel, hospitality, food and barbecue creating custom itineraries for each to visit two months prior to the festival, then worked with them afterward to carefully pace out their content in the weeks leading up to the November festival. This included a social media based content with one of the influencers with a trip for 4 to the festival as the grand prize.
RESULTS
- Our content creation partners had so much fun they created twice as much content as they were required and each piece of content had double the number of engagements we expected.
- The social media contest with one of San Antonio’s most influential foodies garnered an all time record of 6000 entries
- Influencer content influenced clicks through to the ticket sales page in the critical sales window timeframe.
- The influencers’ content, which was isolated from other festival content using a dedicated measurement hashtag, got more than 1 million impressions.