Shortly after returning from Crankworx Rotorua the world shut down. COVID-19 closed borders, tourism, just about everything around us. It felt like our Whistler-based Crankworx team made it back into Canada from New Zealand on one of the last operating flights.
The Marketing Opportunity
When our festival slated for June was postponed, plans shifted quickly. Crankworx now had an open opportunity to entertain and engage fans. Translation: we now had an impending large gap in our website and social media metrics and it was approaching quickly.
Typically, a new campaign would call for fresh content. However, amid the pandemic, budgets were tight and heavy restrictions on travel/riding created a challenging environment for athletes to tell fresh stories.
The widespread reach of COVID-19 in March kept us on our toes. Crankworx Innsbruck’s June dates didn’t stand a chance.
The Goals
Fill a need period across Crankworx communication and marketing channels
Drive an increase in website visitation for Crankworx.com
The Solution
Crankworx Watch Parties: re-airing a collection of milestone broadcast events from our archives with a social element. These broadcasts debuted on a weekly schedule on the Crankworx YouTube and Facebook brand pages and were cross-posted through PinkBike’s Facebook page. To layer in an extra level of engagement we enlisted featured athletes to join in the live comments for a bit of banter and behind the scenes insight.
Partnering with our PR Manager, Julia Montague, we repurposed our festival promotional channels to get the word out about each of our Watch Parties. This included:
PinkBike Post and promotional splash
Basic social media asset kits for athletes, festival location partners, media and sponsors
Crankworx.com Blog Post
Newsletter
Photo archive social posts with behind the scenes teaser content leading up to each broadcast on all social channels
Crankworx.com to simulcast broadcasts
Note: Uniquely, no paid advertising across social or search channels
This campaign was almost entirely reliant on the features Facebook and YouTube offered for engagement.
Marketing Hurdles and Learnings
Pivoting our campaign around a Facebook feature (Watch Parties) posed several challenges. The functionality wasn’t quite the right fit for this campaign but we couldn’t have anticipated it before launch. Many of Facebook’s features can’t be tested prior to alerting our entire fan base. We had to debut broadcasts and work through issues on the fly. For the future, YouTube might be a better platform as it doesn’t impose as many requirements on the viewer and is more of a natural choice for fan conversation.
Athletes struggled to join our Watch Parties on Facebook with their Public Figure accounts. Future campaigns need to focus on making it really straight forward for our highlighted athletes to join in the conversation. Their participation enhanced the broadcasts ten-fold.
Debuting the Watch Party in multiple places caused confusion and splintered viewership.
Music rights required some of our earlier broadcasts to be trimmed down to comply with Facebook and YouTube’s standards. We created a dummy Fan Page on FB to test the uploads and Watch Party features as these seem to be constantly evolving.
Results
To benchmark these Watch Parties against one of our traditional festivals would be a mistake. Imagine, tallying up the avalanche of fresh content, video views in the millions, high-end production plus the gravitational pull of global distribution partners. Our Watch Parties wouldn’t be able to touch the metrics we have come to expect. Apples to oranges.
But, looking through the lens of filling a period that wouldn’t otherwise feature fresh content and metrics move into the green. Based on average growth and impressions in our off-seasons of 2019 and 2018 Crankworx experienced a 3% growth in its social fanbase. Engagement skyrocketed to 70% above standard outside-of-festival activity along with Impressions coming in at 60% higher than average.
Crankworx marketing objective met and fans are stoked. Everyone wins.
Why it worked
The pandemic was the perfect storm for promotion. Viewers and media outlets alike were hungry for content.
Nostalgia gets the best of us. Not only did our fans tune in to the Crankworx Watch Parties, but suppliers, athletes, and the majority of the Crankworx family watched from home to reminisce over the cool moments in our company’s history. It pulls at the heart strings.
Time was on our side. Unlike the chaos of preparing for a festival with many moving pieces, we could focus squarely on this project. Getting fans, locations and endemic news outlets to work in harmony to promote each Watch Party.
Pooling current resources allowed us to grow and engage our fanbase without a large financial commitment. This allowed us to be experimental and flexible with how the campaign evolved.
What we Discovered
We Don’t Need a Pandemic to Keep The Party Going.
Crankworx Watch Parties could be an elegant on-going solution for off-season engagement. Pulling from the archives and adding a social element like athlete commentary make this a great campaign option for any company with loads of archival footage and active influencers.
Yesterday, shortly after starting my workday, I was informed that my role had been eliminated at Rocky Mountain. While this decision wasn’t entirely surprising given the broader trends in the bike industry over recent years—it’s still tough. I loved working with my team and the wonderful people that worked across the company.