CASE STUDY: SOUTH WEST JAPAN FESTIVAL (2024)
The City of Bunbury is a proud Sister City of Setagaya in Japan. Each year to celebrate this relationship, Your Turn Events organises the South West Japan Festival, with help from Studio42. This is a 2 week festival, held across Bunbury (and now Busselton and Dunsborough as well!), including events, activities, the iconic Matsuri Day, and the popular Floating Lantern Festival.
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In 2023, we introduced a few events to the City of Busselton as well, who celebrate their own Sister City relationship with Sugito. Busselton became a much larger part of our program in 2024, with Origins Market and the Busselton Jetty hosting a range of workshops and our Busselton Jetty Sushi Train respectively. ​​​​
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What was different in 2024?
Renee from Your Turn Events and I introduced more events for 2024, and rearranged the program based on attendee feedback to make sure the Festival was as accessible and logistically as easy as possible to maximise attendee numbers from Perth and outside the South West.
This included combining the Floating Lantern Festival and Bunbury Matsuri Day into one weekend, to avoid people having to decide which of these major events to come down for. This would also encourage outer visitors to stay the night in Bunbury, maximising how much they could get from the festival, whilst also spending longer in the Bunbury CBD and bringing tourism dollars to local hotels, restaurants, and Airbnb's. We also changed location of the Bunbury Matsuri Day, as we had outgrown our existing space (Bunbury Regional Art Gallery), and the public raised their need for more grassed areas to sit. It made sense to us both to move the Matsuri Day to Queens Gardens in Bunbury - just over the road from the Bunbury Friendship Gardens, Labyrinth, and Floating lantern Festival location.
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This was my third year working as the Marketing and Design Manager (and co-organiser!) for the SWJF, and each year our processes are becoming more streamlined, our signage and way-finding methods and materials are growing, and our methods of data collection are also getting easier. Our reach is growing as we're refining our audiences, and the events that we introduced in 2023 had enough word of mouth marketing between friends and families of attendees, that they all sold out pretty quickly!
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We're already planning for 2025, with streamlined strategies for online form collection, templated sponsorship proposals, and new video material in the works.
Videography + Editing by Studio42
MARKETING IN 2024
Using our survey data from 2022 and 2023, we can see that the majority of festival attendees heard about the SWJF through Facebook and Instagram. Given this was our third year running ads on Meta, we already had data from '22 and '23 about which kinds of advertising 'experiments' worked better than others in terms of reach, user acquisition, event RSPVP's and click throughs.
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Without going into too much detail, our ad spend of $1500 was split between three campaigns over three months - starting off slow in June to build awareness, building up momentum in July, and pushing hard in August to showcase individual events and encourage online ticket sales.
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On top of this budget, we also allocated ad spend (boost) to individual events, depending on the agreements between venue hosts and facilitators.
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Studio42 (formerly Yellow Digital), once again was a sponsor for the festival, offering social media management, photography, videography and event setup for most of the Festival events.
Check out my highlight video above!
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Meta ad campaign setup, including ad copy, video creation and pixel maintenance
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Analysis of previous years campaigns
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EDM (newsletters) design, email address sync automation, copywriting and sending
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Website updates including copywriting, event uploads
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Event uploads to Facebook page, Bunbury, Busselton, Margaret River and Dunsborough event listing pages, Eventfinda and more
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3 months social media management, content creation and copywriting
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Survey creation, forms for applications made and connected to site.
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Koi brand design for 2024 theme
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Animated koi for reels and stories
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Facebook cover image
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Social Media content creation June - Sep
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Social Media Management (strategy, captions, content) June - Sep
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T-shirt design
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Postcard design
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Bookmark deisgn
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Poster design
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A5 20 page festival program - printed and digital verions
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Site map
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Teardrop/flag banners
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A-Frame signage
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Event photography and edits
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​Event videography and edits
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Event header graphics​
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Site maps
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Festival planning, co-organisation of events
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​Press and media releases for event
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Communications with event stakeholders
Find out about the South West Japan Festival's website here.
CLIENT
