Woking Food and Drink Festival

The Challenge

Following the launch of #WeAreWoking Free Public Wi-Fi, Woking Borough Council wanted to significantly increase awareness and usage of the service by visitors to the town center, whilst gaining a better understanding of the audience demographic & behavioral profiles.

This data will then be used to enrich the Councils’ current contact database, providing a further reach within the local community and a firm understanding of its key demographics.

Furthermore, this deeper insight will also help to improve interaction and engagement with local residents and assist with community cohesion throughout the borough.

The Solution

In an effort to maximize the results of the campaign and raise overall awareness of the Woking Food & Drink Festival; in partnership with Ardmore, the content was delivered via social media platforms such as X, Instagram & Facebook, using the hashtag #WeAreWoking to create a buzz around the festival and draw attendance.

In addition to the social media campaign, Woking Borough Council also launched a competition offering the chance to win £500 worth of Woking Shopping vouchers to anyone using the guest WiFi for the first time.

Changes were also made to the guest WiFi experience specifically for the event, with the splash page for Woking Borough Council’s guest WiFi network customized prior to the event to promote the competition, thus encouraging users to log in.

Guests accessing the free WiFi were able to securely authenticate using either a social media account or through inputting data into a bespoke registration form, allowing Woking Borough Council to collect key demographic information about the visitors.

Once logged into the WiFi, an email was sent in real-time to encourage guests to find out more about the event and drive interaction with the food and drink stalls.

The Results

Over the course of the 3 days, the event saw thousands of attendees at the festival, many enjoying free WiFi whilst doing so.

Through the efforts of Woking Borough Council, the campaign turned out to be a huge success, with the allure of free WiFi and a £500 prize being a key driver for greatly increasing WiFi conversion newsletter subscription rates.

The event saw a 36% increase in active WiFi users in comparison to last year and a further 12% increase in newsletter sign-ups, highlighting the importance of incentivization as a key driver for boosting WiFi logins and harnessing clean data. As a result of this, Woking Borough Council has greatly increased its contactable community for future events.

The increase in guest WiFi logins has also helped Woking Borough Council to grasp a better understanding of their audience profiles. Purple reports show that 50% of all visitors during the 3-day event were aged 18-34. Within this age bracket, over half of these were female.

This data has assisted in delivering insights around the festival’s core audience and presented the opportunity to deliver targeted follow-up communications based on information collected during login. It also provides a tool with which to measure the impact of future events and marketing campaigns aimed at driving interaction with other, less frequently engaged audiences.