By Art Menius, Sponsorship & Marketing Coordinator, MerleFest

Well-done marketing provides the energy for excellent customer service and the architecture for the entire successful event – building blocks for establishing an event as a brand. Marketing unites creative programming, sales, customer service, media and public relations, and advertising. Done correctly, marketing can even help events remain grounded and in touch with the communities they serve. Marketing involves hard work and creativity, number crunching and daydreaming. It requires looking at your event from the outside in, from the ticket buyers’ points of view. To paraphrase Peter Drucker: Marketing is the whole event, taken from the audience’s point of view. A complimentary concept is that marketing consists of each and every contact you have with the any segment of public or media serving them. Marketing takes the consumer-based view instead of the product development viewpoint.

Marketing demands enumeration and evaluation of every point of contact, direct or indirect, between the event and its actual and potential audiences – These are the only things that matter to the customer. New media join these contact points. Success requires pulling the entire event in the same direction and involves as much or more creativity as anything else we do. Clean restrooms, friendly yet efficient folks at the door, and even the smell of an outdoor event provide, in the big picture, just one of many marketing initiatives, right along side the talent line-up or effective advertising!

While lacking the big budget of a Fortune 500 company, music festivals possess advantages that derive from our smaller scale. Unlike brand managers in big corporations, we can still infuse our entire organization with a marketing based approach to doing everything well and consistently with the event’s image. We have the advantage that our hard-core audiences are loyal and value their relationships with events and presenters. And we can advertise in an efficient, targeted manner. Guerilla marketing approaches fit the field well also. Guerilla marketing is geared to small business. Guerilla Marketing tactics include investing time, energy, and creativity rather than big bucks in marketing. It uses the bottom line as its yardstick, not statistical mumbo jumbo. It demands fervent devotion to customer service and building long-term relationships rather than just trying to sell tickets.

What lessons can be learned from the MerleFest experience in marketing a successful, multi-genre event? How can MerleFest take its marketing methods to the next level? I want to examine these two overarching questions as an insider. I attended the initial Merle Watson Memorial Festival presented by Wilkes Community College on its campus in 1988. I began working for the festival as an emcee in 1989. Within two more years my duties had expanded to coordinating all emcees for a multistage event and conducting instrument contests. By 1998 MerleFest had become my day job with responsibilities including sponsorship, marketing, and contests.

Most of the credit for MerleFest’s strength in marketing goes to its initial coordinator, B Townes, Dean of Development for Wilkes Community College. Coming from outside of the acoustic music world, Townes was able to see the event with totally fresh eyes, while digesting what he learned from folks like Doc Watson and Ralph Rinzler.

1. Consciously develop the festival as a brand.

Festival presenters are brand managers. MerleFest has been conscious of this since the beginning. MerleFest’s strength as a brand provides the key to its long term success. MerleFest has and can continue to build its already strong brand further on the back of its strengths – community involvement, superior product, strong customer service, and positive media attention. The strong synergy derives from the potent combination of these factors with the cause and culture related aspects and compelling story of MerleFest and Wilkes Community College.

2. Carefully monitor and enhance the impressions the festival makes on participants.

Image forms the bedrock of brand management. A look at the Doc & Merle Watson Theatre (aka the Watson Stage) exemplifies this concern.

While at once expansive and imposing both inside and out, with its all wood, barn like appearance, the Watson Stage also projects warm, down home values. The MerleFest Mission Statement makes clear that we are self conscious about the image we project:

"MerleFest is committed to producing a high quality diversified American roots based musical experience for its guests, supporters, and performers. The festival is held in a setting that compliments the experience and fosters an interest in a variety of musical forms representative of the repertoire of Doc and Merle Watson. Through Outreach, MerleFest takes the experience to the young people of the area in an effort to further educate and cultivate an interest in the music.

"The Festival is committed to new ideas in music and associated cultural experiences, including arts and crafts representative of the heritage of western North Carolina. MerleFest supports the Eddy Merle Watson Memorial Garden for the Senses and provides funds for the Garden’s upkeep. The garden provides an interpretive, educational, artistic, and cultural experience for the visually impaired, as well as the sighted.

"The Festival serves as an economic catalyst for the surrounding community and has a significant impact each year. MerleFest remains committed to promoting the work and efforts of non-profit community organizations and the Mission of Wilkes Community College.

"Through its World Wide Web presence, the Festival provides an opportunity for a deeper appreciation of the event and as a vehicle for year round communication. Through its organization, MerleFest strives to present the best possible "Americana" music experience."

3. Keep the festival’s heart and soul always in mind as growth is managed

The positive image of a music festival like MerleFest depends on it projecting a connection with the values of our audiences. We have to be about the music no matter how successful our events become. As we produce and market an evolving, growing event, we have not and must never lose sight of or an empathetic connection with heart of the event. MerleFest must always be about celebrating the music of the Watson family and contributing to the health of Wilkes Community College and Wilkes County. For MerleFest budgeting, planning, and marketing effectively can never be enough; we have to do all that within the context of a cause related event that depends on the good will of our customers who must believe that they are doing a good thing by participating.

4. Consciously seek excellence in customer service.

Since the first Merle Watson Memorial Festival, MerleFest has been consciously customer service driven. Much like Disneyland, we attempt to deliver a hassle-free, safe fun for the whole experience where the details are handled so that the attendees don’t have to worry about them. This has at time resulted in controversial, but ultimately successful innovations such as reserved seating and big screens at the Watson Stage. We have been unafraid to pull back quickly from customer service blunders like attempting to make profit centers out of the program book and web site.

5. Involve the local community actively in the festival.

"Consistent with the mission of Wilkes Community College, one of the primary goals of MerleFest is to have a positive economic impact on Wilkes County and its citizens. Numerous civic organizations earned $533,143 in net profits on gross revenues of $856,277 through their participation in this year's festival. These profits represent a significant source of funding for the many important projects sponsored by the community organizations…. Over 50 civic and institutional entities participated in MerleFest 2001, with 2,200 volunteers contributing over 20,000 hours to help make the festival a success. These groups earned $857,978 in gross income through their participation in MerleFest 2001."

Some of these organizations engage in income producing activities, such as operating food concessions, while others perform services for the festival in return for fees. As a result, 1) dozens of organizations feel a stakeholder share in MerleFest, and 2) MerleFest can obtain hundreds of volunteers through these groups rather than having to recruit all as individuals.

"The Outreach Program provided 29 school shows, a developmental day school show and shows at three nursing homes. The school shows alone reached over 12,000 students. This program provides a unique cultural opportunity for the students of Wilkes County. The cost of the Outreach Program is absorbed by the festival and with the aid of a grant from Sprint."

6. Court the attention of mainstream media and decision influencers

Starting with the Wilkes Journal-Patriot, MerleFest has correctly emphasized outreach to media that serve the general public, rather than getting lost servicing mostly music specific media. In many ways, MerleFest has slowly built itself in the mainstream media from local, less than daily newspapers to major regional dailies to national publications like the Wall Street Journal and Southern Living.

Similarly, MerleFest has courted successfully politicians and other key decision makers and influencers, in the real world and in the music business. People of this sort not only help spread the word and can be called upon when needed, but their presence attracts media attention.

7. Use barter and media sponsorships for most advertising

Out of a $1,700,000 budget in 2001, MerleFest spent less than $6000 cash on advertising. Instead MerleFest leveraged sponsorship and ticket barter deals into more than $88,000 in ad placements and air time.

Radio is a saturation medium, demanding voluminous repeats to a specific audience of your message for effectiveness. Country radio, for example, has become the format most aligned with major label agendas, blindly pursuing the 18 to 44 female demographic. Your budget, geography, and your target demographics determine how much you can work radio. Serve the radio reaching the audience(s) you desire within the largest area you can afford. The cost, however, makes ad buys at the volume needed somewhat impractical, even for larger festivals. Fortunately, other methods exist besides straight buys:
Be liberal, very liberal, in offering tickets to relevant DJs, even outside your primary market area. You’re giving little to gain a lot of good will that can translate into plugs for your show. So is acquiring promos of CDs by acts on your lineup for the jocks to giveaway to listeners, again with a plug for your event.
Distribute press releases and PSA’s to as many radio stations, even of irrelevant or irreverent format, as you can. Even community calendar type announcements and plugs on distant stations help.
Radio ads for tickets trades are the best bargain in outdoor event advertising. Unless you’re a hard seat venue, tickets given to folks who aren’t going to come otherwise cost you nothing. Most of the ticket winners will fall into that class, because by the time the ticket giveaways air, our hardcore audience will have already bought weekend tickets. We primarily use one day tickets for giveaways. With commercial stations the transaction happens in a pretty straightforward manner. We can exchange, for example, 20 one days that cost $40 for $800 of air time. With non-comms it has to be a little looser, as in we’ll give you 20 tickets in exchange for giving away each pair separately with festival information. It works best to provide written information for this purpose to air personnel rather than expecting them to make up something off of a flyer or brochure. We end up doing such deals with 85 to 90 stations each year in the USA and Canada.

TV advertising is expensive; cable somewhat more affordable. Production costs, however, will be large even for a 15 or 30 second spot. Even with plenty of MerleFest footage available, the out of pocket post-production costs will be $1500 and up. TV spots must be intensely visual – delivering the message just as effectively with the sound off, professional in appearance, fascinating the tenth time a viewer sees it, believable and credible, focused on the event and its benefits, not creating confusing or overwhelming images, and serving to create a powerful desire by using the emotional power of video.
The most cost effective opportunity with TV and cable exists in bringing them on board as media sponsors. In return for signage and lots of tickets, some outlets have traded air time with MerleFest providing the spots to their specifications. Since tickets given to folks who aren’t going to come otherwise cost nothing, these arrangements are like printing money. They also can increase the likelihood of TV coverage. After two years, we have lost ABC 45 & UPN 48 as media sponsors due to changes in personnel. The new guy wanted us to grant them exclusives in news coverage.
It is critical that presenter do send festival information to local TV stations for their community bulletin boards. All stations provide the contact info at the end of each bulletin board broadcast.

8. Use partnerships to enhance the marketability of the event

MerleFest has long built upon the imprimatur provided by its marketing partnerships. While some in the folk community take offense to corporate sponsorship, these partnerships with firms like Sprint, Microsoft, Burger King, and Pepsi carry a good deal of weight with the mainstream media, politicians, decision makers, and family audiences. They suggest that the festival is neither hillbilly nor hippie, no matter how many hippies and hillbillies attend and perform, that the festival is outward looking and perceives itself as part of mainstream North American life.

9. Always learning about and from our audience

The survey data gathered from participants includes spending for food, lodging and merchandise. Even more valuable information comes from the MerleFest web site’s chat page and letters and emails to the festival. We have continually tried to make opportunities for growth out of audience complaints and requests. MerleFest has found there ideas that have improved the event and thus contributing to its growth as well as suggestions that have been turned revenue streams via sponsorship or fee for service, while enhancing our customers’ experience.

10. Using mainstream names as a hook

From Emmylou Harris’ performance at the second festival in 1989, MerleFest learned the value in media relations of including names with mainstream recognition in the lineup. Most often this involves presenting popular artists possessing an association with roots music, such as Emmylou, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Patty Loveless, Hal Ketchum, or Mary Chapin Carpenter. Occasionally, however, we have presented pop acts in acoustic settings, such as we did with Hootie & the Blowfish. Frankly, these sorts of bookings make it easier for mainstream publications to cover the event and serve to attract journalists to attend the event rather than just writing a preview.

11. Offer activities for the whole family; don’t be just a music festival.

Since the early days, when the Burger King Little Pickers and Heritage Crafts areas were created, MerleFest has positioned itself as a safe, friendly entertainment event for the entire family. Currently, beyond music, dance, storytelling, and family entertainment, MerleFest offers food, kids activities ranging from a petting zoo to artificial rock climbing to a teen dance, picking sessions, nature walks, and shopping for arts and crafts, musical instruments, recordings, and accessories, and gift items appealing to our demographics. When it all gets to be too much, "The R&R (Rest and Relaxation) area provided a quiet retreat for the entire family. The R&R tent offers a baby changing station, a nursing area, cots for children, tables and chairs as well as board games for adults."

12. Employ new media

MerleFest’s primary new media effort remains its Web site. The web site occupies an unusual position for it is both a marketing tool and a feature to be marketed. While improvements remain a constant need, the design of the MerleFest site generally conforms to high professional standards while reflecting a positive brand image. At MerleFest, we have refused to clutter our site with advertising; ad revenue is not a goal of our site. Our site exists to disseminate information, save staff time while providing superior customer service 7/24, sell tickets, serve the media and audience, and build the MerleFest brand.

The site provides a vast amount of information about MerleFest and its artists, delivering positive experiences for both current and potential customers. Those positive experiences depend on a strong product as well as an excellent site. To date, the success of MerleFest drives folks to www.merlefest.org more so than the web site bringing folks to MerleFest. Our site, while extremely well done and successful with many internal characteristics of superior sites, could be better marketed in almost every respect externally. The site thrives because of good content and design, the powerful product it represents, and the aggressive marketing of MerleFest. We have done a good job of making our URL appear prominently on everything – all ads, radio spots, press releases, business cards, email signatures, brochures, and letterhead – EVERYWHERE. The URL needs to function almost as an integral part of our name. We endeavor to make the URL the first contact anyone thinks of for MerleFest. We attempt subtly to suggest that if one can use either the telephone or the web, to pick the later. Letterhead and email signatures need to include the URL, along with snail mail addresses, phone and fax.

Ultimately, a web site must offer fresh and compelling content that demands repeated visits. Ideally, the web site should provide everything a visitor would want to know about your arts council and its events. The site must offer reasons to visit, reasons to stay, and reasons to come back. The web site should provide not just information or services otherwise available in traditional media, but information and services either available no place else or much more conveniently accessed on the Internet.

At MerleFest we have implemented these principles to develop a nexus of features that draw folks to and back to www.merlefest.org. For a six week period ending December 3, 2000, 61.25% of our visitors were returning, 9.34% new, and 29.41% of unknown status. Thus roughly 86% of those whose status could be determined were repeat visitors to www.merlefest.org. These features include.

a. Artists Schedules and Roster
Until one arrives at the festival, the MerleFest web site provides the only source of a complete festival schedule. One quarter of our visitors during that same six-week period apparently sought artist and schedule information.
b. Pictures ad Video
Surprisingly, pages offering photographs of MerleFest and the Watson Family combined with our Promotional Video page provided the second most popular type of feature (excluding home page and site guide and index) during that time, albeit a distant one almost 7% of page views.
c. Accommodations Information
Although almost a half year away from the event, November visitors sought information on motels and campgrounds, accounting for 4% of page views.
d. Contest Information
MerleFest includes three instrumental and one songwriting contests. During the six-week period about 3.9% of page views were of contest information.
e. Chat
The MerleFest Talk Page provided the fifth most popular feature during that time, at less than 3% of page views. Nonetheless, throughout the year the chat room stands near the top of page view and provides that festival with a constant stream of feedback about both the event and the web site. Chat also works well because it is self-updating and a guarantee of new, unsolicited content. The opportunity to interact with visitors is a key advantage of the web.
f. The MerleFest Gift Shop
The web site permits almost year-round sales of MerleFest logo items. Even during November when the on-line store is closed, nearly 1.9% of page views attempted to shop there.
g. Links
Although one would surmise that improving roadmaps to the web would make links less valuable, lots of folks still use them. We have always attempted to make the MerleFest site a wide-ranging and thorough source of artist, organization, and business site links. During November, 1.8% of our site views concerned links.
h. On-Line Ticket Sales
On Line Ticket Sales involves some of our most sophisticated technology and brings the festival into the ecommerce world. The number of page visits to this area, however, remains remarkably low. Although we sold some 1600 of our highest priced, reserved seats sold on line during the survey period, only 509 unique visitors accounted for these purchases with but 1.5% of the views.
i. Mailing List Registration
Capturing visitor information may not prove popular with viewers relative to other features, but it serves one of the key functions of any web site. At MerleFest we capture both snail mail and email addresses with our mailing list form, although we have so far only employed the former for promotion. During November 2000 the mailing list form accounted for about 0.9% of views at www.merlefest.org.

13. Remain aware of the differing audiences that make up our participants

For MerleFest, several potential target audiences – some depending on the lineup more or less than others -- appear:
1a) MerleFest fans. These folks are already loyal to our web site and served by our direct mail, but can be cultivated even further with direct email.
1b) hard core bluegrass, folk, Americana, roots, blues, and singer-songwriter fans – these folks are the core audience for music festivals. The most likely to purchase weekend camping tickets. The campground picking quality is often a key factor, as are the general reputation of the event and whether their friends go there each year. Whether particular artists are on the lineup is often not a key deciding factor. The most likely to grouse about prices, this is in truth the least price sensitive group. They are the most willing to endure rain and mud, limited food vendors, primitive sanitation facilities, picking next door until dawn, out of the way locations, and other inconveniences, if the picking off stage and on is good. These good folks are also the ones with the most preconceptions of how a festival ought to be and thus least likely to put up with rude treatment, off site parking and camping, overly officious security, being left off the mailing list, and poor campground picking arrangements. They are best reached by direct mail and genre specific print and web media. It often proves hard to get them to add a new festival to their rota, but once you get them coming, they’ll be loyal patrons.
1c) pickers and instrument traders – Campground picking and old instruments provide their focus, with instrument workshops sometimes appealing to them. We reach them with instrument and picking oriented publications, but we need to do a better job of promoting contests to them.
2) soft core bluegrass, roots, folk, Americana, blues, and singer-songwriter fans – These folks usually consume a lot of one day tickets. They form the bulk of the Americana radio audience and are often reached effectively via radio, especially public radio, as well direct mail, mainstream media, and webzines. Lots of these people don’t decide whether to attend until they see the weather Saturday morning. Price and line-up sensitivity seem higher than among the hard core. The soft-core folks often identify as fans of specific acts more than bluegrass music in general. They are less likely to travel long distances to events, but on the other hand, they are less likely to be aware of competing events.
3) family events audience – These are folks looking for fun, safe, and wholesome events for the entire family. Reaching them requires a kids-friendly event, often with specific children’s activities and ticket discounts with free under age x, names recognizable in the mainstream such as Ricky, Alison, or Doc, and, in most cases, a fairly convenient location. They expect fairly high level amenities such in sanitation and food choice, but are more accepting of off site parking and tight security than bluegrass fans. They need to be reached through mainstream media such as public radio, TV, and newspapers. These are to whom one reaches out with feature articles and listings on TV bulletin boards and print media event listings. We, as a not for profit, can take advantage of PSA’s here.
4) vacationers – This is a critical subset of the family audience. Their needs prove similar, but these people will travel, camp, and buy weekend tickets because they seek festivals, music events or otherwise, as cornerstones for family vacations. They can be reached through the travel media, particularly newspaper travel writers, state and local convention and visitor bureaus and the like, and event listings. This is where cultural tourism comes into our mix and why we have partnered with the Blue Ridge Music Trail. After September 11, 2001, the focus here shifts to more localized travelers than before.
5) RV campers – these are folks looking for safe and fun events with RV camping. They expect a high level of RV amenities such as hook-ups and dump stations and tight security. They can be reached through mainstream media, direct mail, and RV specific media.
6) local general audience – Simply folks looking for entertainment in the immediate vicinity of the venue, usually responding to big names. Family-friendly, well-organized day parking, friendly gate personnel, strong amenities all prove pluses for attraction and retention. Reach them through newspapers and entertainment weeklies, radio, TV and cable. Since you ought not to allocate a big chunk of budget in this direction, every thing free or traded out is critical here.

Allocating Marketing Resources: Everyone feels they operate restrained by inadequate resources for marketing and advertising. In the 1880s, Philadelphia department store giant John Wanamaker said that he knew half his ad budget was wasted, but he didn’t know which half. Two points remain true: If people don’t want a product, they’re not going to buy it despite price and advertising. If you have a good product, spend the money, and advertise well, the results will prove enormous. Thus models for their allocation have appeared. Guerilla marketers tend to employ the 60/30/10 model.
1) 10% to the general public or universe.
2) 30% to those who fit your audience profile but are not part of your core market
3) 60% to your core market.

14. Be open with information about the festival and use this information to market the event

"Using guidelines recommended by the College of Business at Appalachian State University, the total regional economic impact of MerleFest 2001 is estimated at $12,758,631. The direct economic impact on Wilkes County alone from the festival is estimated at $6.8 million. This figure includes money spent by tourists attending the festival, ticket sales, festival local expenditures and donations to service organizations." – MerleFest 2001 Economic Impact Report

Since the early 1990s, MerleFest has pursued a policy of proactive openness with information about the festival. The Economic Impact Report has enumerated attendance, revenue, net income, volunteer involvement, and the economic effects of the event. The latter, especially, has been used to enlist the support of the local community and its key decision makers. Since the first Merle Watson Memorial Festival in 1988, Wilkes County has lost two NASCAR Winston Cup races and thousands of textile and furniture manufacturing jobs. Thus MerleFest has been able to position itself as a major community asset and component of the local economy. That has overcome misperceptions largely based in the proximity of MerleFest to the site of the Union Grove festival, a traditional fiddle contest overrun by hordes of hippies and bikers three decades ago.

15. Create great looking print marketing materials

Direct mail has long been the most important medium of all for advertising musical events. It will remain so for at least the short run, while postal and printing costs conspire with an expanding web to plot its potential demise. Eventually, requested email with web links will replace direct mail due to the cost and temporal efficiencies. Mailings, however, allow you to communicate directly to each person in a way that print, WWW, or broadcast/cable cast media do not. Musical events remain a retail business, and direct mail is still the retail advertising medium.

Direct mail marketing pieces have to fight through a tremendous volume of clutter either at Visitors’ Centers or in the mail stream. For this reason, by the mid-1990s, MerleFest had made a commitment to great looking, four-color brochures despite the expense in producing them.

Also, stay on a consistent mailing schedule year to year. It’s OK and often advantageous to mail earlier than the prior year, but avoid mailing later. People will think the event isn’t happening or experiencing financial or administrative problems.

16. Use distinctive logo merchandise.

You can’t beat advertising for which the consumer pays to display, but all merchandise must meet the high quality and image standards of the event. The merchandise should be desirable without the event association. The merchandise should be distinctive, easily recognizable as a MerleFest item. MerleFest uses its web site to market merchandise virtually year round.

17. Assiduously avoid preconceptions

Preconceptions internally stunt the development of the event, while external preconceptions limit its growth. Especially since the third festival in 1990, MerleFest has made great efforts to avoid get pigeonholed. Although some call it a bluegrass festival to this day, we have fought that narrow idea with diverse lineups and diverse participant experiences, along with logistical, layout, and customer service approaches radically different from bluegrass, or most folk, festivals. Since the early days, we have eschewed "you can’t do that at a festival" thinking.

18. Never engage in price-based marketing

Price based marketing demeans the event and the artists appearing. The best quality at a comparable price sells a lot better than "your cheapest festival option." A healthy ticket price suggests that the event is worthwhile and valuable. We are presenting the best musicians in the world and the ticket prices should reflect this. Observe the way that opera deflects the small numbers it attracts by stressing the exceptional desirability of the audience. In the long run, price-based approaches handcuff the event so that growth, even survival, become impossible. MerleFest has never been afraid to be expensive, realizing that compared to other entertainment options, we remain a genuine bargain for the whole family.

19. Gather marketing data from the audience every year

Marketing, especially media relations and sponsorship sales, become highly problematic without valid data. Whether for internal planning or external sales, we have to know with whom we are dealing. MerleFest, therefore, annually engages in interviews with several hundred participants to gather demographic and experiential data, while also crunching geographic data from ticket sales reports.

Before September 11, 2001, cultural tourism had become a much-ballyhooed method for united the traditional arts and tourism promotion. A 1998 Partners in Tourism/Travel Industry Association of America study reported that 18 million of 92.7 million Americans who took trips of fifty miles or more included musical events on their itineraries and that one-third of these people extended their journeys by at least one night in order to participate in cultural events. Subsequent studies published in 1999, 2000, and 2001 indicated that 31 million adults had attended a festival when traveling more than 100 miles and a third of these had attended a music or arts festival within the past year.

In addition to attending MerleFest 2001, tourists also visited other area attractions. Twenty percent visited the Boone/Blowing Rock area, 11% visited Grandfather Mountain, 6% visited Lenoir, another 6% went to Statesville or Winston-Salem, and 15% traveled to other areas. While 76% of MerleFest participants travel more than 50 miles to the festival, more than 70% come from North Carolina, its four contiguous states, Maryland, and West Virginia.

Post 9/11, cultural tourism and travel related attendance remain just as important. War and economic uncertainly will exert a tremendous effect, but one which can be turned to our advantage. We shall no doubt lose a good number of folks who travel from more than 500 miles to MerleFest. On the other hand, we shall gain folks who generally have engaged in far flung family adventures, but who will examine options closer to home this year. This makes marketing to the mainstream, family audiences even more vital than ever before.

A. Further Refine the Categories That We Are Marketing

For each marketing rubric, we must develop category-specific marketing plans and initiatives. We need to ensure that these efforts create synergies that advance the marketing of the whole. These all need to feed into the written overall marketing plan.

MerleFest
MerleFest web site
Contests at MerleFest
MerleFest sponsorships and advertising
MerleFest logo merchandise

B. We need to spend some team effort reexamining and refining our image.

MerleFest has established a good culture for cultivating an image and making it flow through everything you do – not just advertising and marketing, but the entire festival. That image involves almost every aspect of the event – programming, how parking and camping are handled, volunteer recruitment, how the entrance gate looks and operates, and the way security is handled. We have developed a highly positive image -- the personality of our event, our brand., trusted for quality so greatly that price isn’t that important.
Yet, as with strategic planning, we must keep up to speed and in sync with the image and brand development. This means it is high time for a team image exercise.

C. Use Direct Email to Promote MerleFest

Planet Bluegrass and others have jumped on the direct email vehicle for event promotion already. MerleFest lags behind in leveraging this vital and astonishingly inexpensive tool.

Building a list of folks interested in receiving email from MerleFest may be second only to our web site in ensuring success in online marketing. We need to implement an email newsletter to market both MerleFest and its web site. Whether written to one person or sent to the email opt-in list, each email sent is going to a potential customer and should be treated with the care of a personal contact.
Direct email provides the great advantages of low cost and immediacy.
Direct email has three broad types: press releases to the media, e-newsletters to our audience, and brief notices to our audience with basic facts and our URL.
Include a link to our web site.
Auto responders do not reflect well on your customer service image unless they are personalized and responsive to customer action, such as automated receipts for on line transactions. MerleFest uses these for on-line ticket sales.
Get quickly to the point.
On average, 5% of email addresses go invalid monthly, according to CNET.
Use Opt-In Email. Spamming breeds ill will and doesn’t make sales. It isn’t spam if people have requested to be on your list and freely provided their addresses. Include email addresses on all our real world and virtual mailing list signup or address capture sheets. Collect this information in a database so that you can easily generate the distribution list for your mass email announcement. One and two click email list join buttons can be added to sites with ease. If needed, the form can use check boxes to permit one to choose whether to receive electronic newsletters. Once we’ve gathered their addresses, we need to contact them regularly.
Don’t Annoy People
Don’t spam.
Don’t post unsolicited announcements to news groups or chat rooms. We should be ready, however, to answer whenever someone posts a question about MerleFest.
The first line of any announcement should state that the recipients had provided their email addresses for this purpose and that anyone requesting removal will be removed immediately.
Do not include any attachments with direct email pieces. Slowing folks’ download time and cluttering their hard drives is not the way to develop good will.
Protect the privacy of your list by not permitting the addresses to be seen by the recipients.
One can easily use popular email clients to manage small email distribution lists. Databases or even spreadsheets can manage handle a few thousand addresses. Portals such as Yahoo! permit the creation of distribution lists. Specialized software, including some shareware, exists for larger scale direct email. You can download, for example, a 30 day demo of one type from http://www.messagemedia.com/techsupt/mailkingeval.shtml. A list server is a similar software option. Application Service Providers (ASP’s) offer maintenance for even more complex address databases. Basic services from ASP’s such as ListBot can start as low as around $100 per annum.
Ezines exist to drive folks to web sites. To accomplish that, they must include genuinely useful content. Something called Forrester Research claims a stunning 18% response rate for email newsletters. Banner ad click-through rates of 0.65% look rather weak by comparison.
Keep the readers’ attention with both real substance and attention grabbing headlines
Stay focused on the ezine’s purposes and target audiences
Keep things short and on theme
Stay on a regular "publication" schedule
Consistently maintain both the reality and the appearance that you are giving something of value freely to your subscribers.

D. Enhance External Marketing of the MerleFest Website

We must continue to enhance the website, as has been our tradition, to maintain our site’s position as the best gateway to the MerleFest world. We must constantly examine the goals, audience, and competition for the site and advance the site accordingly. The MerleFest web site currently does not function as well as it could as a contact directory for the event. Ideally, the web site should offer the ultimate staff directory presented in such a manner that the visitor can effortlessly determine the correct staff person to contact for their particular issue. Mostly importantly, however, we must greatly increase the external marketing of the web site.

External methods frankly refers to the way one markets a web site and to how the web site connects with and forms a component of the overall marketing effort. Basically, one can either attract more visitors or get visitors to spend more time at one’s site in order to increase traffic.

The five "killer apps" for promoting web sites on a budget are:
Search Engines
Links
Email marketing
Word of mouth
Worthwhile, evolving content and a strong product

Keep Getting Indexed
We need to keep registering with major search devices as often as each permits so that www.MerleFest.org will appear at the top of listings. During the late fall of 2000, our software tracked visits from around 120 search engine users per week to www.merlefest.org. Yahoo provided 26.3%, MSN 18.4%, and Google 17.2%. These are so-called Deep Search Engines, among which less than ten services dominate. The top eight account for 100% of search engine visits to MerleFest’s site and 99% of all searches. At far too many search vehicles, however, the official MerleFest site ranks behind unofficial ones, especially Jim Morton’s photo site.
Much more targeted than these popular Deep Search Engines are the Standard Search Engines. These depend on submissions to them rather than engaging in their own searches of the Web. At www.directoryguide.com one can find a catalog of more than 400 of these.
Regular listing alone is not enough. One must list effectively – employing a variety of industry tricks to ensure hits on your keywords and ranking at or near the top of search reports. These include:
a. A good descriptive title up to 15 words long can be placed between the <TITLE> and </TITLE> tags in HTML code. You can use this to best describe your site and add keywords.
b. META tags are used to generate hidden keywords and page descriptions. META tags can run up to 250 characters. Software, some of it freeware, exists to check and write META tags, which provide one of the few ways to influence the listing of your site.
c. Careful choice of keywords. This falls back on a basic principle – looking at things from the customer perspective. What words would a consumer enter to find my site? A large list of keywords will result in the most searches uncovering your site, while a more limited, focused set of keywords will place your site closer to the top of search results. Plurals, i.e. concerts, not concert, music festivals, not festival, produces more results in searches.
d. These matters should be addressed before submitting your listings to search engines.
Some advise submitting the URL of each page on the site in an effort to maximize listings and ensure that the search engine spiders visit your entire site.
Software, including freeware, exists to monitor your listings on search engines.
Linking
Links not only may bring traffic, but also provide a service for visitors. We provide an important service with links to the web sites for all the artists appearing on your event. We should ask for reciprocal links from each. We should also cross-link as widely as possible with media web sites covering the entertainment and travel fields. We should not, however, accept links indiscriminately. Links reflect our image and must be on topic, relevant to MerleFest or Americana music. The webmaster should provide a real service by serving as a link editor, reviewing where they lead. Links, moreover, require constant maintenance. The webmaster must regularly check them and repair or delete broken links.
Some of the deep search engines offer free services that provide a list of all sites linked to yours.
MerleFest should continue to avoid a hybrid of links and banner advertising known as the link exchange banner. This involves joining a service that delivers a changing set of banner ads to our homepage. Our exchange ads get placed similarly, based on the volume of traffic through your homepage, meaning that if you’re getting light traffic this will help you very little. The exchange banners, moreover, become the first thing visitors see at our site, beckoning them elsewhere, including destinations which may not reflect well on our site. The exchange service exists by selling advertising on the banners it administers, including those on our site.
Direct Email
Whether to audience or media members, all our direct email pieces need to direct folks to our site. A fundamental purpose, in fact, of some ezines is to drive web site traffic.

Other Methods
1. Media Relations
Similarly, our press releases and direct mail pieces should stress that the web site provides the best and most current source of information about our activities.
2. Media Partnerships
We should continue to form partnerships with strong web sites in our field or community to cross promote.
3. Advertising via New Media
Advertising on the web began in 1994. $2 billion was spent on web advertising in 1998, yet 90% of the visitors did not click on an ad. In return, this form offers powerful audience targeting. "Internet Marketing Issues" publisher Terry Williams argues with some passion that advertising in the right ezines with sufficient repetitiveness can draw significant click through rates. He makes a strong case that response far exceeds web site ads. Decisions concerning web advertising need to be based on the same fundamentals as more conventional media. Can the potential extra traffic generate sufficient additional ticket sales to justify the cost? Currently MerleFest does not feel that purchasing banner ad space is an effective expenditure. We do, however, engage in some media sponsorship and trade out deals for banners with ezines and web sites.
4. Usenet Announcement
comp.infosystems.www.announce is a Usenet discussion group for posting announcements of new and substantially revised web publications, sites, resources, conferences, and software.
5. ezine reviews
Some on line newsletters review web sites. One can, for example, nominate a web site for consideration by "Netsurfer Digest" by sending a brief email to pressroom@netsurf.com.

E. Develop Partnerships With Tourism Agencies

One of the least expensive both often overlooked promotional vehicles are your state and local public and private agencies devoted to business and tourism promotion such as Convention & Visitor Bureaus, Chambers of Commerce, and State Tourism Offices. These are your most effective means for reaching the soft core audiences, the general public, and those who want to plan vacations around festivals. Their activities can reinforce everything we’re doing in marketing with little cost. To wit:
Distribute direct mail pieces to various public locations including state visitor centers out on the interstates
Include MerleFest in state, city, and county level listings that go out widely to the media, especially the key travel media
Offer opportunities for cooperative advertising
Include your event on their web sites with a link to your site
Regularly field inquiries from the public along the lines of "what is there fun to do in Wilkes County on the last weekend in April?"
Lend credibility and marketing hooks to the event through recognition programs, such as "One of the 20 outstanding tourism events in the state or region for the month of June."

For this reason, we have engaged in a cultural tourism partnership with the North Carolina Arts Council for MerleFest 2002.

F. Upgrade the use of Email in Media Relations and Increase Distribution of Full Media Kits

Direct email offers a superior method for distributing press releases, providing vast savings in cost, labor, and time. After considerable work in this area since MerleFest 2002, the media email list for MerleFest contains more than 500 addresses, but much remains to be done to achieve a goal of getting our press release service entirely electronic by 2004. Some outlets, such as the Wall Street Journal, prefer not to accept press releases this way for fear of scams. Similarly, MerleFest has begun becoming far more aggressive in distributing full media kits, but this also needs dramatic expansion.

G. Create an Electronic Media Kit

We stand pretty far behind the curve in lacking an electronic media kit for MerleFest whether on videotape, CD, or DVD. This is the best possible medium for pulling together MerleFest information that currently exists in video, audio, photo, and text formats. Plus, this is likely the only means we can afford to distribute this information as widely as need be. Getting this information in electronic form, moreover, allows most or all of its to go on the web and the creation of a small version that can be distributed by email.

H. Manage the long-term transition of Direct Marketing from Direct Mail to electronic means

As postal and paper costs increase and direct and web-based electronic marketing become commonplace, a natural shift will occur over the next decade away from direct snail mail. The lovely brochures we have created will become significant mostly for rack displays, such as at visitors centers, media relations, and sponsor recruitment. Direct mail will migrate transitionally to the use of both paper postcards and direct email driving folks to web site and, in the case of the former, directing the ‘netless how to get a traditional brochure. The trick comes in anticipating the correct timing for these transitions.

Until we move entirely to electronic direct marketing, however, MerleFest needs to do a far better job managing its snail mail database as a resource. We have performed less than optimally in three areas: 1) keeping the data fresh and up to date; 2) expanding the list; and 3) using the list as a resource to enhance sponsorships and obtain income or more addresses.

I. Enhance marketing of MerleFest logo merchandise

Aggressively employ direct mail and email pieces to sell our merchandise year round. Note how we get a Planet Bluegrass mailer along with your Holiday catalogs. The point of sale at the festival needs to receive far greater visibility and differentiation from the MerleFest Mall. We can also enhance use merchandise to reward staff, volunteers, media, and sponsors.

J. Become even more aware of long term marketing and festival cycles.

Marketing changes over the life cycle of the event. At first, all consumers are new ticket buyers. With maturity, comes a balancing act between retention of current ticket buyers and reaching new ones. Despite high retention, however, aging festivals must resume actively marketing to new consumers. For example, 90% retention is very good. Yet, an event with 15000 ticket buyers retaining at 90% loses 1500 customers a year. Roughly half the existing audience turns over in five years at 90%! In most cases, earning a new ticket buyer, on the other hand, costs more than retaining a current one. If you feel your event has matured to the point where it is reaching its target audiences, shift your marketing resource mix more toward maximizing retention and per participant revenue from trolling for new ticket buyers, until the time comes to reinvigorate the event.

K. Improve on site services for the media

We need to space in one of the classroom buildings to create a real media center offering computer, phone, and fax access, as well as a quiet place for interviews.

Advertising Age, the Bible of the advertising business, offers an online version at www.adage.com

American Demographics Online: www.marketingtools.com is a strong source of free marketing information.

"The Art of Business Web Site Promotion" site at www.deadlock.com/promote/ provides, in order to draw traffic, a number of thorough articles on various aspects of marketing web sites.

CNET Builder.com, http://home.cnet.com/webbuilding/0-3880.html?tag=sb offers several articles pertinent to email newsletters and marketing web sites.

The Directory Guide, www.directoryguide.com, lists about 400 themed search engines and directories.

Guerilla Marketing: www.gmarketing.com Up to date and content rich, this is your best source for free, on line information about advertising and marketing with limited resources

Marketing For Dummies by Alexander Hiam (Foster City, CA: IDG Books, 1997. $19.99).

Mastering Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson of www.gmarketing.com Chapter 5 of this 251 page tome focuses on online marketing. (Houghton-Mifflin, 1999).

Marketing in the Music Industry by Charles W. Hall and Frederick J. Taylor (Boston, MA: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2000). The basic college text, heavily slanted toward recording retailing.

NetMartketing www.netb2b.com, an AdAge subsidiary webzine, provides a strong source for web marketing information.

Project 2000 http://www2000.ogsm.vanderbilt.edu/ archives an impressive collection of academic studies about web marketing and advertising

Promotion World, www.promotionworld.com, provides the single most extensive collection of free information about marketing a web site.

Public Participation in the Arts: is a series of periodical surveys of Americans participation in and attitudes toward all forms of the arts. The survey has been conducted by the NEA and the Bureau of the Census each five years beginning in 1982. Reports resulting from these studies can be found at http://arts.endow.gov/research/notes.html.

Scientific Advertising by Claude C. Hopkins -- Dated, sexist and atavistic in tone, and frequently inapplicable to acoustic music, this remains a classic, which can be read on line for free at www.2h.com/Scientific_Advertising

Simmons Market Research provides the gold standard for such consumer research. IBMA has allocated $10,000 in the FY 2002 budget to obtain the bluegrass related data from Simmons for use by IBMA members.

Special Events: Best Practices in Modern Event Management by Joe Jeff Goldblatt (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, The basic college text on festival production, including marketing.

Standard Rate & Data Service: http://www. srds.com offers, for around $400 per year access to detailed data about radio stations, TV, and print advertising outlets.

Web Monkey, www.hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey, contains articles about all web site issues including promotion and design.

Web Promote Weekly is a monthly (search me) ezine concerning web marketing issues, archived at www.webpromote.com.

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