Chichester Festival Theatre
1/Dec/2011
Chichester Festival Theatre is one of the UK’s flagship theatres. Opening to much anticipation and great acclaim in 1962, it was the first modern theatre in this country to have an open ‘thrust’ stage with the audience seated around it on three sides, allowing it a close involvement with the actors. The smaller and more intimate Minerva Theatre was then built in 1989.
Objective:
Chichester Festival Theatre wanted to develop a new website following a re-development of the online ticketing system. The aim was to develop a site that represented the high standards of care and services received from the face to face channels. Following the ticketing redevelopment, the Theatre needed to ensure that ticket sells offered a return of investment, whilst enhancing the customer online experience.
Our solution:
We created a modern, professional, contemporary and stylish website that welcomes and doesn't intimidate it's current and new users. We placed equally as much focus on returning visitors as we did on new visitors, by ensuring new automated content, images and video kept the site fresh and relevant. The latest figures show that this has been a great success.
Our solution created an emphasis on the theatre’s Summer and Winter Festival seasons, giving website visitors a multitude of booking pathways by examining different audience user journeys. We accomplished this without letting the design suffer. Intelligently and stylishly developed production listing pages, provide extra information via roll-overs - enhancing the user-friendly experience and allowing the Chichester Festival Theatre promote all its productions. By placing 'call to action' links to 'Book' we ensure the customer is never left lost and is able to make a quick purchase.
Social Media Strategy:
During the website build, we carried out focus groups with each department within the theatre to develop their social media strategy. We assessed their audience to determine who they were and how they translated into social media channels - from ticket buyers to their Youth Theatre programme. We also analysed their internal resources, not just within marketing, and how best use these effectively and intelligently.
Since implementing they have seen significant growth in their Facebook followers and YouTube video views, twice as many visits to their website from social media updates and are now devising a strategy for creating their Twitter account.
The Result:
The website is fully integrated with the new ticketing system, providing users with an easy booking process. Since launch on the 1st December 2011, the site has already seen site traffic increase of 43% and most importantly, visitors are 10% more likely to book online - a huge increase in Conversion Rate.
What we did:
- Design
- Content Management
- Mailing List Manager
- E-marketing
- Ticketing Integration
- Social Networking Integration and Strategy
