Veld Finds the Forefront with ToneDen

When Veld hits Downsview Park, Toronto’s EDM scene lights up. The two-day music festival turns one August weekend into a bash of epic proportions with dozens of artists dazzling the 60–70,000 fans that will attend.

Tickets in the tens of thousands? NBD for Ramsey Aburaneh. A Senior Social Media Manager at Veld’s parent company Ink Entertainment (and fun fact: former houseguest on Big Brother Canada), Aburaneh has spent his career in the advertising industry. Now, at lifestyle management megastar Ink, he’s marketing everything from French restaurants to … well, festivals like Veld.

It’s Aburaneh’s partnership with ToneDen that helps him sell out Veld. “With the venues growing and so many shows, it was becoming more and more time-consuming to reallocate different amounts of budgets to different ads and ad sets,” he admits. “That was definitely the problem, and lo and behold ToneDen was the answer for us.”

“Facebook … on a Personal Level”

To market a festival the size of Veld, Aburaneh needed a game plan equal in magnitude. He brought the challenge to his team at ToneDen. They’re really a “strategic partner,” he says, “always at the forefront of what’s next, especially in the festival realm.”

And festival-wise, he discovered, nothing makes marketing easier than a multi-pronged approach, like one of ToneDen’s playbooks. Playbooks let you trounce multiple marketing objectives in a single campaign — the ideal strategy for events that can be overwhelmingly massive.

For Veld, ToneDen’s Event On-Sale Playbook provided an A+ solution. With this playbook, a new event is announced and fans get notified via Facebook Messenger when that event goes on sale.

It may seem counterintuitive, but automating messaging like this can lead to a more individualized experience for fans. That’s what Aburaneh was after — “different ways to connect on a more personal level.”

Using Facebook Messenger accomplishes just that. It expedites your response time and invites fans to initiate a dialogue in a familiar interface. (Because, seriously: who wants to fill out an email form on your website?)

“The Next Evolution of Communication”

Aburaneh spent a mere CA$745.80 on the Veld playbook. In the first phase of the campaign alone he crushed it. The campaign found more than 100,000 fans and led to over 64,000 engagements across multiple on-sale posts, costing him less than a cent per engagement.

But that was only the beginning. Fans who engaged with that post automatically received a follow-up from Veld through Messenger. This message let users subscribe to further Messenger-based communication. The campaign nabbed 33 new Messenger subscribers — a 65% opt-in rate.

All together, the targeted ad campaign combined with the personalized follow up messages led to over 100+ purchases. Bringing in more than CA$46,000, Aburaneh saw a whopping 62x return on ad spend.

This playbook insured that one of Aburaneh’s key aim s — to develop more naturalistic relationships with Veld fans — was met and exceeded. Messaging, as Aburaneh sees it, is “the next phase in advertising. Where before it was more traditional billboards, then it was more personalized messaging online, then it was email, the next evolution is going to be Messenger, messages in general — whether it’s advertising in WhatsApp or advertising in normal text messages or Facebook Messenger.”

Beyond messaging, though, the playbook helped Aburaneh and Veld with that always good-challenge-to-have: scalability. As Veld and INK continue to grow, tools like ToneDen’s playbooks are increasingly necessary.

For “anyone looking to get more done for less, get more out of less effort, to get bigger bang for buck,” Aburaneh says, partnering with a company like ToneDen is the answer.

And partnering is, truly, what he values about his relationship with ToneDen. Partnerships are about more than subscribing to a service: they’re built on relationships that serve as a conduit for ideas and innovation. That’s exciting to Aburaneh.

“By having a partner like ToneDen aligned with us — what we’re doing when we’re advertising is at the forefront of where the industry’s going.”

Ready to hit the forefront? It’s quick to get started with ToneDen right now.