Alison Byard
The Festivals & Entertainments Division of Cheltenham Borough Council is the team behind an impressive portfolio of international arts festivals as well as a comprehensive year-round programme of events and entertainments. With over a thousand individual events each year, it was unsurprising that marketing activity had been confined to short-term tactics, eventually leading to the newly-created position of Sales & Marketing Manager to give a strategic focus to the overall programme.
There were and are many areas which needed to be addressed in order to make our marketing more effective, but one of the first was the perceived polarisation of the year-round programme, from that of the festivals. Clearly these are two very distinct areas of programming with very different target audiences, but it was felt that some lessons could be learned from particular areas such as print which would extend the appeal of the year-round programme.
Operating Gloucestershire’s largest concert hall and one of the country’s finest chamber music venues, the range of events included within the programme is vast, from rock concerts to record fairs and comedy to dance classes. The format of the existing print, a DL 2-colour generic events diary, was seen to be a little tired and therefore unlikely to stand out from its competitors. Some customers also found the fold-out format difficult to read and the fact that it was produced on a monthly basis resulted in the press team being unable to maximise long-lead editorial opportunities as well as making for an extremely labour-intensive distribution strategy.
Designers were invited to pitch for the work with a view to developing an umbrella brand which could both encompass the many diverse elements of the programme on a quarterly basis and the reduction in set-up costs would make it possible to produce a full-colour brochure for the first time. Local company The Edge won the pitch with their concept Cheltenham Live which presented the programme in an informal magazine style, categorising events by both genre and date order to maximise cross-fertilisation across the programme.
The first issue of Cheltenham Live was launched in the New Year in a PR and direct marketing campaign. Five ‘golden tickets’ were hidden within brochures distributed throughout the area and members of the public invited to find them through editorial and promotional support throughout the local media. The promotion proved immensely popular - the five tickets were found within ten days of the launch and attracted follow-up coverage, while over the course of the next few weeks, the mailing list grew by 13%, having remained largely static in the preceding period. More importantly, actual sales grew by 20% over the equivalent period the year before, yet production and mailing costs were significantly reduced.
Making such changes required collaborative working on a number of different levels not only resulting in increased sales, but offering increased scope for future development, such as the flexibility of being able to target particular sectors of the mailing list even more tightly in order to promote key strands within the programme. Look out for the next issue, or if you want to join the mailing list, contact Hayley Eade on 01242 775852 or email hayleye@cheltenham.gov.uk!
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