clients

Introduction

For the past 10 years, First Night Alexandria has been producing a family-friendly, “walkable” New Year’s Eve event—a festival of performances including music, dance, magic shows, face painting, and more held at different venues throughout the Old Town district of Alexandria.

The event has seen sporadic growth during the past decade and its annual success is highly weather-dependent with potential attendees waiting to see the weather forecast for New Year’s Eve before purchasing tickets. Since the majority of ticket sales occur during the 2 days before the event, extreme cold or precipitation can prove disastrous to entire event’s ticket sales. This creates a challenge for First Night to sell tickets earlier in the season and insulate their budget from inclement weather. Another challenge has been how to continue to provide ticket sales online, through the night of the event, given some of First Night’s logistics with “badge” or ticket pick-up and the dozens of pick-up locations. First Night continually looks for ways to face these two major challenges.

New Target proposed an aggressive web marketing and social media campaign, together with offering online ticket sales on mobile devices as well as through the night of the event, as strategies to face these challenges.

The Goal

The immediate goal of the web marketing campaign was to increase overall ticket sales as well as earlier ticket sales. Our long terms goals were to increase exposure to First Night as a New Year’s Eve option for people in the Washington, DC metro area, improve First Night’s organic position in the search engines, build a following of “fans” to help promote the event in subsequent years, and encourage local residents to “Buy Alexandria.” To address the second challenge, New Target allowed online and mobile ticket sales all the way up to and during the event.

Tactics

To accomplish these goals, we focused our efforts on generating traffic to the FNA website, presenting First Night to audiences multiple times from different online sources, and using social media to leverage the community aspect of their audiences.

To support easy, on-the-spot ticket sales, we developed QR codes and a mobile app to allow impulse buys by linking to the site with a simple point and scan. We developed the app for both iPhone and Android smart phones.

Next, we optimized the FNA site for search engines and created a series of banner ads to “follow” First Night site visitors when they left the site without making a purchase, keeping First Night top of mind for those prospective buyers. Using Google AdWords, we ran a hyper-localized campaign of high volume keywords used by people looking for New Year’s Eve entertainment.

For the core tactic of this campaign, we turned our sights to Facebook. We began by reviewing and improving the First Night Facebook page, including embedding ticket sales within the page, feeding Twitter and News updates into the page, and interacting with many in the local community. Then we created and launched two local Facebook ad campaigns. The first campaign improved awareness within the nearby community and the second targeted the family and friends of the “fans” brought in by the first campaign. Our efforts from there focused on starting conversations and interacting with the First Night audience.

Finally, we launched a First Night Alexandria channel on YouTube, using video to help promote the highly visual and experiential nature of the First Night event.

Results

The results are in! We are pleased – but not surprised – to see the difference our efforts have made. Highlights include:

• Best year ever for ticket sales (2011 ticket sales of $96,924; average = $70,822)
• Increase of 35% in tickets purchased online, with 45% of all tickets purchased online
• 138% increase in ticket sales by December 19th
• Mobile purchases accounted for 5% of tickets purchased, up from 0% in 2010
• Facebook ‘likes’ up by 1,046; in 2010 First Night had only 138 likes
• Organic traffic up by 44% from 2010, accounting for more than 40% of all web traffic during the campaign
• First-page organic search results in Google and other leading search engines for many top key phrases
• Facebook ads were viewed by 42,164 individuals and total daily impressions were more than 7 million

Did we sell more tickets? YES!

Did we sell more tickets online? YES!
Supported by First Night allowing ticket sales up to the night of the event, combined with easier access to tickets via the website, mobile app and Facebook, online ticket sales made perhaps the most notable leap forward of all statistics.

Did we sell earlier in the season? YES!
With help from a Living Social deal, the marketing and promotion of First Night sparked a 138% increase from 2010 in sales by December 19th, when prices go up to $20.

Did we sell tickets online right up to the end? YES!

Conclusion

The concentrated efforts of New Target’s web marketing and social media campaigns together with a clear weather forecast and extended online ticket sales all came together to make 2011 a banner year for First Night Alexandria!

The data and statistics available from Google and Facebook give us a head start on our marketing efforts for First Night Alexandria 2012. With a strong grasp on our target market and the most effective methods for reaching them, a large base of fans on Facebook, and online ticket sales enabled through the website, mobile app, and Facebook page, we hope to break records again in 2012 and beyond.

Challenge

When CQ Press wanted a website for their product First Street, which consolidates and draws a relationship between Congressional, government and lobbying information, New Target was excited to lead the strategy, user experience, and design efforts. CQ Press requested that we give users an unprecedented understanding and visualization of the relationships shaping policy. 

Solution

New Target’s solution included developing strategy, defining the user interactions and data visualization, so that the users can not only see how the points are connected in the network but also why. Various techniques like, strategic planning, information architecture, prototyping, user testing were used to develop and refine a highly complex system which was very interactive and extremely user friendly.

Benefits

New Target helped CQ Press build a political intelligence platform to research relationships and build coalitions. We spearheaded the effort in creating the vision, defining the user interaction, designing and developing the interactive features for a very successful product that is currently used by Fortune 500 companies and media houses. New Target reviewed all provided data to assess the true needs of CQ Press and their clients and deliver a creative, concise web communication of their product.

The site is password protected, but the landing page may be viewed at www.firststreet.cqpress.com.

Challenge

BSI needed an application development company able to create custom dynamic applications with intuitive graphics and effects to visualize complex data sets to inform its high profile customers on terrorist threats throughout the world.

Solution

BSI turned to New Target as a trusted source to design and develop a system to gather and integrate public sector and private industry supply chain data to inform its customers on supply chain security risks as well as travel security risks.

To visualize this data and provide a user friendly graphic interface with effects integrated throughout New Target conceptualized and designed the creative maps, charts, and graphs as well as the layout of reports, pages, and other data online. The creative process started with creating a product logo that incorporated elements of the BSI parent logo and was cohesive with other BSI products.

For the layout creative process we utilized competitive research within the private intelligence and government contracting industry. This research and creative process was focused on creating intuitive graphics and an appealing layout that makes people want to use the system.

Benefits

The results have already been positive. Customers have access to valuable information via a graphically friendly interface and are able to perform their jobs more efficiently and effectively. Shortly after launching the application online the BSI program manager said, “Wonderful! And thank you, truly. You and the entire New Target team have done an absolutely outstanding job with [our application].”

The site is not available publicly.

Challenge

The National Committee on Quality Assurance (NCQA) had plans to develop its Multicultural Health Care: A Quality Improvement Guide brochure and DVD in a more cost effective format to enable more frequent updates to its content as well as broaden user access to this valuable material. The cost associated with printing the Guide and physically distributing it was prohibitive.

Solution

New Target was engaged to create the strategy, design and develop an online presence, and provide marketing ideas for increasing its reach across a more diverse audience. The website needed to follow the overall graphic look and feel as well as content organization of the printed brochure, and supporting materials on the DVD. The website needed to be searchable, sortable, and cross-referenced to offer as much utility to the site visitor as possible. With a nationally recognized strategic funding partner involved there were very specific hosting and security requirements that were instituted on the website.

Benefits

The results were extremely positive. The website launched on time, on budget and within the requirements set forth and agreed upon by all parties. Beyond meeting all the operational requirements the website is enabling NCQA and its funding partner to meet their strategic goals of “improving culturally and linguistically appropriate services and reducing disparities in health care.”

The site may be viewed at www.clashealth.org.

Challenge

After four years of successful annual redesign partnerships for its two trade show websites, CTIA invited New Target to redesign its main association website, www.ctia.org . The challenge was to capture the amazing possibilities made possible by mobile broadband technology.  Broadband is the most exciting and boundary-pushing aspect of wireless today, and CTIA wanted its main public site to exhibit similar energy and functionality. Additionally, CTIA wanted to address usability changes expressed by users of the site.

Solution

Understanding the site visitors and how they were consuming information related to the mobile broad band industry was the best way to create a compelling design. This understanding could only be reached through a variety of research methodologies including upfront analysis of site traffic data to determine where users were navigating, how much time they were spending on the site, and determining the most popular links and why. We also analyzed data provided by various search engines to determine how users were finding the site and if they were finding relevant content on the site.

Our extensive research meant we were able to create a rich, dynamic new design for CTIA that decreased homepage clutter, focused the visitor on important content (including various multimedia features), and incorporated the new “family elements” to create a model to use going forward. In the back end of the site, New Target integrated with several third party web content providers as well as CTIA's proprietary CMS.

Benefits

Now CTIA's site demonstrates what the organization is all about – how wireless broadband technology is changing lives and making positive impacts throughout society. Users easily find vital and fresh content, and CTIA’s brand is solidified and clear. None of this could have been possible without the research and analysis portion of the project which was the most critical part for this particular website project.

The site may be viewed at www.ctia.org.

Challenge

The Association of American Railroads (AAR) came to New Target with an interesting challenge.  AAR had initially wanted to just revise its homepage as a simple recognition of President Obama's inauguration.  Then, with barely two months to go before Inauguration Day, the project expanded dramatically into a full site redesign, complete with new information architecture plus a variety of content changes.  Also, the site's search functionality was deemed sorely lacking, and an improvement was requested as part of the expanded effort.

Solution

Fortunately, AAR's existing site was already in Sitecore, so this made for an easier transition to the new site structure.  Once the client locked down the new information architecture, New Target created a parallel development site in Sitecore and set up the new site structure accordingly.  Content that was still deemed useful was brought into the new site, and it was augmented with new or revised content that the client added using Sitecore's CMS tools.

The new site supports AAR in many ways:

• By using Sitecore to house the site and it's contents, AAR staff can manage content and actual site structure modifications with ease
• New Target took advantage of a Sitecore feature that allows site administrators to manage how the site will appear in print and in RSS feeds. This makes printed versions of the site independent of onscreen versions, and adjusting one does not impact the other. This removes the need for the creation of print style sheets to cover all of the content pages. The result is a uniform and attractive printed version of any content page, one that reflects well on AAR.
• By implementing the Coveo search module, AAR's site offers visitors world class search capability, which in turn lets members get the most value out of the content deployed on AAR's site
• The new site integrates AAR's member database in a seamless fashion. Members can access Members Only content, review their publication subscriptions online, and purchase publications from AAR and other sister organizations.

The online store functions tie into AAR's backend databases to provide access to member pricing and to store historical purchase and subscription data.

Benefits

By working with New Target, AAR was able to get a wholly new site set up and implemented, complete with a fresh new design and superb search capabilities, all within an accelerated timeframe. New Target’s sophisticated competence with Sitecore paved the way to success for this project.