The client

Idilic Festival is a music and outdoor-experiences festival born in 2023 in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, on the heart of the Costa Brava. Its first edition bet on a top-tier line-up, with artists such as Melendi, Danny Ocean, Dani Fernández and La Casa Azul, and on a carefully crafted brand proposition to win over a young audience. The starting point was the hardest of all: launching a completely new event, with no previous edition and no existing community to build on.

The challenge

Launching a festival from scratch means starting with nothing: no database, no community, no audiovisual material from past editions and none of the social proof that comes from having filled a venue before. Idilic had to sell thousands of tickets for an event the public did not yet know, in a market saturated with well-established festivals. On top of that came a venue change just a few weeks before the event, which forced us to rebuild trust and communication in record time. The goal was clear and ambitious: fill the venue and turn the debut into a brand with a future.

How we did it

We acted as the festival’s full-stack digital marketing team, combining digital product, paid media and a launch narrative designed to create demand where there was none.

  1. Multilingual website with integrated ticketing: we built a two-language site, with a custom content type for artists and ticket sales integrated into the ticketing platform, so the whole purchase journey ran without friction.
  2. Full-funnel paid advertising: we orchestrated Meta, Google (Performance Max and search) and Twitter Ads coordinating prospecting, conversion and remarketing, adjusting budgets month by month according to the sales pace.
  3. Email marketing and automation: 18 email campaigns plus an automated wristband top-up flow, all synced in real time with ticketing to personalise every message.
  4. SEO and content from scratch: web architecture, blog and on-page optimisation to build owned organic visibility and not depend solely on paid media.
  5. Blind pre-sale to trigger FOMO: we put tickets on sale at €39 before announcing the line-up, generating scarcity and social proof from day one.
  6. Borrowed notoriety and micro-influencers: we leveraged the notoriety of artists and promoters and activated a network of local micro-influencers to amplify reach and lend credibility to a brand-new event.

Results

The first edition of Idilic Festival hit SOLD OUT two weeks before the event, with close to 10,000 attendees. The campaign data confirms the impact of the system:

  • 2,073 sales conversions attributed to paid campaigns (Meta, Google and Twitter Ads), peaking at 906 in May after the pre-sale.
  • ~18x return on ad spend: around €356,000 in attributed ticket sales against a media investment of roughly €19,500.
  • From 0 to 1,008 organic keywords in just seven months, with 19 in the top 3 and 97 in the top 10 of Google.
  • 18 email campaigns plus an automated wristband top-up flow, synced in real time with the ticketing platform.
  • A brand-new event turned into a must-attend date on the Costa Brava, with owned digital assets ready to scale in future editions.

"Thanks to their digital strategy and superbly executed campaigns, we hit SOLD OUT two weeks before the event and positioned Idilic Festival as a must-attend event on the Costa Brava from its very first edition."

I
Idilic Festival Team
Festival organisation