The NEBRASKAland Days music festival had been shut down in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, attendance was lower because of COVID-related restrictions and fears. NEBRASKAland Days desperately needed to boost ticket sales in 2022 to make up for lost revenue.

We needed to drive more ticket sales with a bit of a minimized budget at a higher ROI than ever before.

Our strategy was Consumption, Consumption, Consumption — without initially asking for anything in return. We leveraged video footage of the artists performing live in 2022, in both short and long-form formats, on social channels. Video content ran on Facebook, Facebook Stories, Instagram, Instagram Reels, YouTube, and YouTube Shorts.

The initial goal was to get consumers to watch at least 60 seconds of a video before retargeting them. Once they had watched 60 seconds, we retargeted short-form content without any direct call to attention.

We were able to get the average user to consume almost 180 seconds worth of video before a call to action of booking tickets was mentioned. By the time a CTA was introduced, the market was warm — or red hot really— and qualified for purchase. With all of this consumption, NEBRASKAland Day’s organic traffic also started to take off.

NEBRASKAland Days increased its revenue by 48.5% compared to 2021, and ROAS on the ads increased by 54%. Their total ROAS for 2022 ended up putting in at $1 to make $17.05.

To put this into perspective, the best historical ROI NEBRASKAland Days ever had with online marketing was back in 2018 at $11 to $1. That’s right, in 2022 we did $17 to $1.

How did we do this?

It only cost three pennies to get a potential consumer to watch the initial 60 seconds of video. For a total consumption of 180 seconds, it only cost nine pennies. In other words, it cost $.09 to warm up a potential buyer.

After spending three minutes consuming content, by the time the CTA appeared, it only cost $.51.

Organic traffic increased by 16% and the number of impressions increased by 30.8%. The number of clicks went up 99% and the CPC dropped by 39%.