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Literary Festival Strategy: Building Year-Round Digital Engagement

Social Media & Communication

A photograph of one of the most important festival activity, with clean editorial design highlighting the event on social media.
A professionally designed post introducing a festival guest, featuring his photograph and a short biography.
A social media post designed by A NEW DAY, featuring a curated list of book suggestions from a festival sponsor.

The Challenge
The Maratona de Leitura da Sertã, a three-day literary festival, faced a common challenge: maintaining relevance year-round, not just during the event itself.

 

Our Strategy
Our strategy focused on building a continuous digital presence to sustain interest and engagement. It’s about forging a strong, lasting connection to the region, literature, and the community, ensuring the festival remains top of mind throughout the year.

Challenges and Opportunities

Annual events often face the same issue:
a spike in attention over a short period, followed by long stretches of silence.
Our approach solves this by delivering regular, themed content that adapts well across platforms.

The time between editions isn’t a drawback — it’s an opportunity to strengthen ties with the audience, develop identity, and build real anticipation. With relevant content, we’re able to create ongoing cultural value and keep the festival active in people’s memory and in their feeds.

An Instagram carousel mockup, showing the slide sequence with book suggestions, demonstrating our content strategy.

Thematic Content Engagement

As an example of one of the several content strategies we’ve implemented, we created a series of three themed posts — interconnected but able to stand alone:

Land (Terra): Literary walks that link reading with the local landscape and geography.
Places (Lugares): Guided visits to key landmarks in the municipality, with a focus on heritage.
Water (Água): Activities by the riverside, with readings and symbolic gestures tied to the natural surroundings.

Beyond reinforcing the connection between the festival and its location, this content also highlights the region’s potential as a sustainable tourism destination. It adds value to the place through culture, local identity, and experiences that go beyond a typical travel brochure.

An image representing "land," with the design evoking the festival's tradition, roots, and history.
An image representing "place," with the design reflecting the importance of location and community to the festival.
An image representing "water," with the design evoking the festival's fluidity, innovation, and flow of ideas.

Next Steps

Although we’ve been working on the project for less than six months, the festival’s digital presence is already more consistent, structured, and active year-round.
As the next edition approaches, our strategy is shifting to a more dynamic phase: more frequent posts, increased interaction, and content designed to activate and mobilize the audience.

The goal is simple:
to ensure the interest doesn’t fade when the festival ends, and that the next edition starts with an audience already engaged and ready.

 

© A NEW DAY, 8 April 2025

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