This campaign initially came with its challenges: country music does not sell well in the UK, but we managed to bundle Dolly’s new album, Blue Smoke , in June (prior to her UK tour) with a Best Of album to make it more attractive to our market. Her core target audience is 55-70, so most of our marketing was traditional; but thanks to her Glastonbury performance, there was a huge opportunity to expand her digital footprint and increase her digital sales – especially as a younger audience would discover her.
We encouraged her to interact from her socials, with storytelling to convey a ‘behind the scenes’ experience for fans. There was a post showing her AAA badge, pictures of which shoes she should wear on stage (high heels versus wellingtons) etc., always keeping close to her fun and quirky personality. Her Glastonbury performance pulled in the biggest crowd and viewing figures in Glastonbury history.
As #DollyParton and #DollyGlasto trended numerous times, a big chunk of our paid activity went to Twitter, targeting specific keywords and conversations around the festival. This ran alongside search and a Facebook campaign.
Nick Grimshaw wanted her on his show, which couldn’t happen as she was flying too soon to Germany. We asked fans to request she appear on the show, using the hashtag #GetDollyOnGrimmy. This resulted in UK trending and numerous celebrities tweeting (Zane Lowe, Sam Bailey), and Dolly eventually appearing on the nationwide show.
Blue Smoke went on to be her biggest studio album ever in the UK, achieving her highest ever UK chart position at #2 and remaining for 12 consecutive weeks in the top 10.
Overall digital sales of 25,057 represented 13.6% percent of total sales, a huge figure for a heritage (mainly physical) artist.
We increased Dolly’s database by 3,000% during the campaign, gained 550k new fans since the campaign started and increased her Twitter following by 370k.
KEY LEARNINGS
Our Dolly campaign has been running since May and will run through to Christmas (which, for a heritage artist like her, is a very long and successful campaign, especially for a best of). As much as we did lots of strategic planning so as to integrate our digital activity into the wider marketing objectives, none of this would have worked without her talent and involvement. She went along with all of our ideas for social and is an amazing performer. We also learnt that Twitter works better when supporting a massive event like Glastonbury or an offline media activity like Nick Grimshaw’s show.
Project Budget
Target Age Groups
Demographics
