Increasing event attendance with lower costs

Increasing event attendance with lower costs

A London-based University

The brief

Our client, a leading London-based University was a contributor to a large cultural and education event taking place in London. The aim of the campaign was to increase the number of attendees at that year’s event in order to raise the profile of all the contributing organisations amongst a number of varied types of audiences. These audiences included a number of differing age profiles and were intended to be new audiences with no existing relationship with our client.

A number of audience segments had previously been successfully targeted via Facebook but this option was no longer available due to GDPR restrictions. The event had also been heavily promoted in the London press in previous years.

The solution

Media Minds worked with our client to analyse the intended audience segments in more detail and identified that there were a number of interest points enabling us to reach this audience via a combination of contextually relevant digital display activity, supported by advertising on Twitter.

A media mix across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn allowed us to reach the audience through a number different routes, with a high level of frequency, encouraging attendance at the event.

The results

Attendees across all audience segments increase by 18% year on year.

Using a social media campaign also proved to be much more cost-effective than previous years’ press campaigns. We were able to successfully increase attendance for half the previous year’s expenditure.

18% increase in event attendance YoY

Contextually relevant ad placement drove increased engagement

50% saving in marketing expenditure

Campaign goals achieved with half the previous year’s budget