Festival websites and marketing in the UAE: what brings people through the gate

A festival lasts days. Its marketing lasts months. The website is where people decide to come, plan their visit and come back to check what’s on. Social media carries the festival live while it runs, and paid media brings people who haven’t heard of it yet.

This is what a festival website needs, how to market the days around it, and what we have learned from Liwa Village, Kayan Wellness Festival, the Mother of the Nation Festival and the GITEX family of events.

What a festival website needs

1. The essentials, clearly. Dates, location, programme, tickets or registration, and how to get there, in Arabic and English.

2. A way to plan the day. An agenda visitors build for themselves, save, and send to their calendar.

3. Something to do. A game, a quiz or an interactive feature gives people a reason to stay and come back.

4. Something to share. An agenda or a result people send to friends brings the next visitors.

5. Speed on a phone. Most visitors arrive on mobile, often on the way to the festival.

6. Updates all season. New content every week keeps the site worth visiting again.

Marketing the festival

1. Set the target: visitors, registrations, traffic and reach.
2. Launch the website early, before the big announcement.
3. Plan the paid media around the dates and the audience.
4. Cover it live. Photo and video on site, several posts a day and community management while it runs.
5. Build on each season. Keep what worked, add features, and compare the results with last year.

Common mistakes to avoid

• A website that only lists the programme.
• Launching the website a week before the festival.
• Social media that stops when the team gets busy on site.
• Building a new website every season instead of improving the last one.
• Measuring followers instead of visitors.

Festivals we’ve worked on

Liwa Village. We’ve built the Liwa Village website, part of the Liwa International Festival, every season for three years. This season we added an interactive Al Ayyala band feature, a swipe tool to build and share your own festival agenda, and a treasure hunt across the website. Website traffic rose by 34% on last year, and visitors spent 73% longer on the site. Read the Liwa Village case study.

Kayan Wellness Festival. We’ve built Kayan’s website for three seasons. This year we rebuilt it from the ground up: visitors log in to build their own agenda, save it and send it to their calendar, play a handpan on the site, and take a quiz on what kind of festival-goer they are. Traffic rose by 47%, bounce rate fell by 42%, and the average visit now lasts 2.5 minutes. Read the Kayan case study.

Mother of the Nation Festival. For ten days on Abu Dhabi’s Corniche, we ran the festival’s social media end to end: photo and video coverage on site, more than 100 posts, community management, and AED 500,000 of paid digital media. The festival welcomed 151,000 visitors, with 34 million impressions online. Read the Mother of the Nation Festival case study.

Dubai World Trade Centre: GITEX and partner events. Across GITEX and its family of events, we ran integrated marketing for exhibitors and visitors: strategy, event websites, digital ads aimed at audiences worldwide, WhatsApp marketing and social media. DWTC brought us back event after event.

How we work on festivals at Talk The Walk

The website, the social media, the paid media and the coverage come from one team, in Arabic and English, so the festival tells one story from the first announcement to the last day. See our web and app development services.