On July 1, 2021 we joined the Bijou Theatre team as their year-round marketing department. Jump to twelve months later, we’ve increased their social following by 25%, their engagement is up 400%, and their staff and board finally have a sophisticated dashboard of analytics and data they can use to better understand their patrons and community.
On a daily basis, our team handles a swarm of tasks and responsibilities for the Bijou Theatre, including social media posts, email newsletter campaigns, press releases, graphic design, website management, and address online customer service inquiries. Our team simultaneously balances strategies to build their online followings, connect with their fans, raise awareness for the foundation’s preservation efforts, and inform the public on all of the happenings of the week - which can sometimes be a show every night! In addition to these tasks, we also coordinate all concert marketing and promotions for each individual show, from working with artist’s teams to building and executing campaigns, including coordinating media buys and radio promotions!
Grassroots marketing is also a key piece of the puzzle in concert promotion. We regularly coordinate street team efforts across the city in addition to social media and in-person giveaways with small business partners and work with influencers in the community. It takes a village to help us get the word out about the wide variety of shows and events the Bijou hosts.
"Rhett has her finger on the pulse of all the trends in the digital world and she regularly brings new creative ideas to the table. Rhett was invaluable to the Bijou in launching and promoting new programs and fundraising campaigns with great success.” – Courtney Bergmeier, Bijou Theatre Executive Director
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Website Optimization
In November 2021, our team collaborated with the Bijou Theatre staff to develop a more optimized experience for customers on their website. We worked with their developers to facilitate some much needed upgrades; enhancing the homepage slider functionality, event pages, footer menu, and added a search bar. When redesigning a handful of stand alone pages we prioritized functionality and branding elements. After noticing a trend in increased mobile users, we prioritized enhancing mobile functionality.
Results:
Measuring January 1, 2022 - May 31, 2022 over August 3, 2021 - December 31, 2021, we saw positive growth across all KPIs. This website enhancement has led to an increase in traffic, new users, and average session duration across all devices.
Increased total users 11.51%
Increased new users 9.60%
mobile sessions increased 39%
mobile bounce rate decreased 16.10%
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specialty cross-platform campaigns
Giving Tuesday Campaign
As a non-profit organization, Giving Tuesday is a great opportunity for the Bijou Theatre Foundation to take center stage and shine across all communication platforms for one special day of fundraising. For our 2021 campaign, we worked together to build a thoughtful and efficient campaign that raised over $4,000 in one day while spending just $50 dollars in ads, generating funding they were able to use to relight their iconic marquee.
We started by pinpointing the specific need with their staff - the beautiful marquee needed a facelift and the price tag was beyond their normal spending budget for upkeep. Our team optimized the simple message of “Help us raise four thousand dollars” to “This Giving Tuesday, we’re asking for your help to relight our beautiful Bijou marquee! There are 270 bulbs in our classic marquee. The total estimate for this project is $4,050, so we’re asking for just 270 people to buy a bulb for $15 today to help us reach our goal by midnight tonight!”
We introduced affordable donation price levels, a sense of urgency to meet the deadline, and a simple call to action. We kept campaign visuals and copy clean and concise, while still being able to provide the visual aid of what they’d physically be contributing to. This message was sent out the first morning via social media (with a little boost of $50 behind the message targeted at lookalike audiences of our donors) and we emailed our newsletter subscribers specifically about the cause. We met our goal in less than six hours, which exceeded all expectations.
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113th Birthday Celebration
It can be difficult to break your standard marketing practices and disrupt the cycle of show promotion for a venue with an event frequency as high as the Bijou Theatre. That’s why when the Bijou’s birthday was swiftly approaching during the very packed month of March, we knew we had to incorporate the milestone along with the show marketing messages or the date would be lost in the mix. To cut through the noise, our marketing team created a branded event series - 13 Shows to Celebrate 113 Years. Each show had a new look on social media, our fans had a fun message they could help us spread the word about, and our marketing campaigns got a refresh on interest and talking points. For about two weeks, this is all the venue really talked about, and hammering in the message really paid off. This campaign helped boost up to 15% of sales for some of the featured shows. Almost half of the events were sold out, and nearly all of them were very well attended. The best part for a very busy internal staff - this campaign required no extra work from our box office or venue staff.
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Digital Ad examples
Melvins 2022 Digital Ad Campaign
$600 spent
$2,616.50 revenue generated
4.4x return on ad spend
32,312 Total People Reached
648 People Available to Retarget
This show had a light ad budget, and our team knew we had to be very thoughtful with our targeting. With thoughtful analysis our team’s budget optimization helped increase profit by $146.50 by shifting budgets to higher performing audiences and ads.
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Hasan Minhaj 2022 Digital Ad Campaign
$800 spent
$5,125.50 revenue generated
6.4x return on ad spend
43,072 Total People Reached
1,285 People Available to Retarget
Our team helped increase profit by $1,280.50 by shifting budgets to higher performing target audiences and ads throughout the campaign. We also implemented Youtube Ads and aggressive email strategies to ensure a quick sell out.