Fred & Augustus

While livestreaming has opened up potential new global audiences for artists as well as presenting a format in which to continue to engage mega-fans, challenges still exist with the value perception of paid livestream content, predominantly due to the lesser opportunities for fan engagement that it represents. With this in mind, a key factor for the growth of livestreams in 2020 was addressing the ‘fan experience’ and creating exclusive ‘moment in time’ branded opportunities for fans. 

Overall the goal of the campaign was to sell a considerable number of tickets and merchandise bundles for what would be one of the artists only performances of the year (outside of impromptu livestream performances behind their fan club wall). The secondary goal was to create content that would ensure fans were not just excited by the upcoming performance but were delighted by their overall experience (across all touch points), thus providing a valuable word of mouth (and repeat) audience for future livestream performances.

Challenges

How you promote a livestream differs greatly from how you would promote an event or a tour. It potentially has more overlap between how you would build traditional ticketing momentum and creating digital hype for a single release. This in itself presents a challenge: when selling tickets for a new revenue stream which has constantly changing and newly emerging best practices how do you plan effectively? Furthermore, as this was a seasonally themed event consideration needed to be given to the artists brand and the degree to which they felt comfortable leaning in to the theme. Lastly, with fans having developed ‘video lethargy’ during a very trying year and livestreaming often viewed as a repeat of a live performance artists have been challenged to rethink how they create ‘outstanding fan experiences’ in livestream formats.

Solution

With the above information in hand, our team brainstormed and implemented a marketing strategy for the promotion of the livestream. This strategy addressed concepts for engaging fans, content creation, email marketing, social media marketing, paid media, support artist and affiliate marketing with a strong focus on the implementation of pre-sale, event launch, day-to-day, last call and post event tactics. 

In doing so we were able to create a Livestream Playbook of best practices and a valuable template for marketing livestreams going forward. These included ideas for exclusive ticket and merch bundles, how to approach the artists content pillars during a promotional period, optimizing email automations and campaigns, the social calendar and building key audiences and asset guidelines for targeting via paid media. 

The result of implementing these key tactics? A clear spike in engagement rates on social and email, paid media ad copy, creative and targeting drove incredibly low CPC’s, and overall livestream sales exceeded the ticket sales goal by more than 16.8%.

COVID has forced the music industry to become far more innovative and creative than we’ve ever been. It’s allowed us to demonstrate both resilience and flexibility as we discover viable new forms of revenue. When in-person touring and large-scale events return, they’ll return to a different landscape. One that will finally include livestreaming as a viable form of experiential-fan-building for artists.