Listening to Your Audience with Analytics

This organization learns from its email and Facebook metrics

by The Marketing Team,  Constant Contact Customer Success Stories

Customer: Winter Park Harvest Festival
Number of Facebook Likes: 750
Website: http://winterparkharvestfestival.com

On November 19 and 20, the second annual Winter Park Harvest Festival will be taking place in Winter Park, Fla. This year, founder John Rife and his small staff of three volunteers hope to be more prepared for the event's popularity.

"Last year, we were expecting 1,000 people and we got 3,000 -- mostly because of our use of Constant Contact and social media," John says.

The festival has a lot going for it. For one, it's something of a rarity to celebrate a 'harvest season' in more temperate Florida, but the Winter Park Harvest Festival collects local food from miles around, so that attendees can sample farm goods from all over Central Florida.

Over the past year, John has worked hard to keep past and prospective festival-goers engaged. That means paying close attention to what they like to read and interact with.

To this end, Constant Contact's metrics reporting has proved to be handy. John has paid close attention to what links are most popular and includes content in his email newsletters that reflect his findings. "We have links at the top of the email that let people jump content that's relevant to them, rather than making them scroll," he says.

Demographics play heavily into how content is shared and used, both in email and on social media. "I noticed that when I put up stories on Facebook or in a newsletter about, say, what's wrong with the food system, nothing really happened. But if I posted positive news about a local school's garden, our traffic went up," he explains.

That's partly because John used Facebook's analytics tool to identify the Page's average fan.
"Our target demographic turned out to be females age 20 to 35, post-college women who are early in their careers," he says. "And so now we try to cater more to that audience." In total, 70% of the Facebook Page's visitors are female.

John admits that it can be draining to come up with original Facebook content all the time, so he and his team started spotlighting, in just a paragraph and a picture, vendors who would be at the festival. That made it easier to post quality content on the Page more frequently.

"By providing more frequent, bite-sized content, we keep the buzz alive longer and don't experience the drop-off in activity we did when just sending out an email newsletter every two weeks," he says. John and his team also discovered that their highest Page views and new fan Likes came when current fans Liked their wall posts, so they started looking for good stories and tips that their female audience would be likely to find engaging.

"That way, it shows up on our fans' news feeds, so their friends, even if they aren't friends of the Festival, get exposed to our content," John says. "We notice we get more new Likes and page views that way."
 
If this year is anything like last year, the second Winter Park Harvest Festival can expect to see similar, or even greater, successes. And reaching 3,000 people or more can be considered quite an impressive feat, considering that the entire marketing budget for the festival is just $4,000 a year.

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