How Sixthman is building niche communities (that keep coming back)

The Partner

Sixthman is a festival company that primarily hosts festivals at sea, bringing their guests entertainment on their themed voyages. They pride themselves on their high-touch approach to specialized vacations and placing their guests at the centre of everything they do. 

Their wide range of events – including everything from live wrestling to heavy metal festivals to a Star Wars immersive experience – requires them to have sophisticated data organization tactics. Sixthman has built a centralized database of event-focused audiences and communities they can quickly pull from – all while systematically uncovering new data about their fans through authentic digital engagement.

The Strategy

1. Having a plan for every piece of collected data

Here’s what the Sixthman marketing team had to say about effectively collecting data.

The Sixthman team lives by this mantra, ensuring that every engagement they launch has a purpose. Most often, they use authentic engagement to build up what they already know about communities of fans tied to specific cruises.

What they really focus on is finding overlapping communities. 

They find which artists a community loves, what experiences they ask for, and how one segment of fans could mesh with another. This way they can bring fans on board more often, without losing the unique charm of Sixthman – an unparalleled seafaring experience.

2. Providing meaningful value to their audience

Data is a vital piece of any marketing strategy, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of a good fan experience. The Sixthman marketing team emphasized that the genuine feel of Tradable Bits’ campaigns is important to them, as it allows them to market in a way that doesn’t feel transactional and solely driven by sales. Through digital engagement, Sixthman is able to capture important information, but to do so in a way that feels meaningful to their communities. This exchange of information between them and their fans, paired with a cohesive plan for how to use that information, is crucial to how they form long-term, loyal communities.

The Results

1. Incredible ROI on pre-sale signups
2. Consistent participation in engagement initiatives before, during, and after a cruise

Short term, Sixthman has seen success in driving pre-sale signups, and in building that initial list of fans to reach out to come pre-sale. In fact, in 2023, Sixthman averaged over 1000x ROI on their pre-sale SMS campaign across multiple cruises. They have also welcomed 43K+ new fans into their database from engagement campaigns alone.

Long term, they’re benefiting from identifying the overlap in their cruise communities and how they interact online. With a growing pool of enriched data, Sixthman can now use their fans’ affinity for certain experiences and/or artists to craft brand-new tailored cruise experiences in the future.

The Conclusion

Using Tradable Bits, Sixthman not only nurtures their pre-existing, niche communities with targeted engagement but also uses smart segmentation to personalize their marketing approach for each cruise.

🐙 QUICK BITS: 3 quick-hitter tips

1. Don’t just let your data sit there: Make a plan for what you’re going to do with the data you collect.
2. Produce campaigns that are genuinely fun for fans: Combine transactional campaigns with those that are exciting to your fans so that they continue to engage with you. Have campaigns targeted towards data that will help you perform (i.e. presale signups) AND the shiny brand stuff that builds community (i.e. ‘complete all these fun tasks for a special festival badge’)
3. Start on SMS if you haven’t already: Presale lists. First-notified lists. Attendees lists. SMS is an important channel for reaching fans directly, and it performs exceptionally well as a launch channel. Even better if you can report on direct conversions from SMS to ticket purchases.

Interested in learning more about how to use first-party data to drive audience engagement and conversion? Get in touch with our team today.

Happy fan marketing!