Skagit Valley Tulip Festival

Social Marketing Campaign: First Year 2010 (Case study still in progress.)

It was the desire of the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival management to start a social marketing campaign, however, it wasn’t discussed until just prior to the beginning of the year’s festivities. As a result the organizers thought it would be best to only conduct one piece of the various methods for the year 2010 and following the year’s event create a plan to incorporate all the various social marketing methods for the 2011 year events.
It was my intention to prove that using social marketing could improve the festival’s reach, attract new visitors which in turn creates additional revenue into the local communities and increase exposure to the sponsors affiliated with the event and increase their ROI as a sponsor.
The method that was implement was Facebook. The results that were obtained with the Facebook page has been nothing short of outstanding. According to recent data; less than 1% of Facebook fan pages have an excess of 1,000 fans. Within one week the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival page reached 1,000 fan status and within 38 days there was an excess of 3,000 fans. The page is experiencing a growth of nearly 1,000 fans a week. Presently, the year’s events have yet to begin; thus we anticipate the same steady growth through the month of April and a slowdown following the end of the year’s events. It will be really interesting to watch the fan interactions and page growth following the end of the “Tulip” season.
The methods put in place for this page were focused on creating a place for outreach and engagement. Questions, trivia games, requesting pictures, requesting feedback all played a large role in cultivating a highly energized level of engagement with the fans.

Observations:

• Sharing the enthusiasm: Several comments were posted to the page about the excitement that person had about attending the event, and that they had never attended before, even from those who live out of state.
• Exposure to businesses: Those businesses who were affiliated as a sponsor of the Tulip Festival were mentioned at one point during the feeds that were posted. Each of these types of feeds were intended to be an interesting tid bit about that business, the results were significant. Each of these posts had some level of fan interactions; in fact many had a response from at least one fan (if not more) thanking the page moderator for sharing the information about that business, because that person was looking for that type of business/ service and was excited to get in touch with that company.

The following screen shot was taken on April 10th reflecting the data of April 07, 2010. Please note that these results may not be typical.