How Do You

help to shift a prestigious festival online and drive literature lovers to sign up?

The global pandemic required a mass shift to digital and Cheltenham Literature Festival looked to HDY to help overhaul their event online. We took charge with promotional activity in the run-up to their second virtual festival.

With a unique line-up of the world’s greatest writers, thinkers, performers and dynamic voices. The festival featured over 120 hybrid events across 10 days. From Cheltenham’s Town Hall and the Everyman Theatre, 100 broadcasts went out, live. In front of a socially-distanced audience

To raise the profile of the festival and to drive literature lovers to register ahead of the event. HDY came up with a thorough paid social campaign strategy, which resulted in an overall reach of 650k users and over 16k clicks.

 We segmented the audience by their interests and behaviours to target them with relevant events. We then created sub-groups for family events, classical fiction, science fiction, history and stage & screen. 

With the audience in mind, we then designed bespoke assets for each group and ran target social media advertising to expand digital reach and to increase traffic to their website and YouTube channel. 

During the whole campaign, our digital team optimised ads and copy daily to make sure we hit and exceeded objectives. Resulting in a goal completion rate of 12.97%