If you run a small visitor attraction you know it can be hard getting the marketing right.
For a lot of attractions the problem isn’t getting more people to visit on a sunny bank holiday weekend in August, it’s those drizzly October weekdays when you wonder if it’s even worth opening the doors.
We recently ran a social video marketing campaign for a small visitor attraction to boost visitor numbers in September and October. The results were really very impressive and in this article we share what we did and what we learnt.
So what is social video marketing? Many businesses have had a video made and it sits somewhere on their website clocking up just a few views a month and it’s impossible to work out a return on investment. Social video marketing is different because it provides the opportunity to get a specific video to a very specific audience at a very specific time using paid social media advertising. The great thing about this approach is it provides a whole host of ways to measure what is and what isn’t working.
We had been commissioned by the visitor attraction to produce a fairly straightforward video for their website homepage. We spotted an opportunity to use the footage for a social media campaign and broke the longer film into smaller segments. The client provided a small budget for a social media advertising campaign and we set to work.
We chose to focus entirely of Facebook as a platform to reach our target audience as client already had 6,400 page likes and it is a social media channel they have used for a number of years.
From the very first film the results were immediately encouraging with 4,700 people viewing the video, 119 liking it and 16 sharing. From there we spread the films out releasing them every few days and allocating a small advertising budget to each.
The compound effect of a series of films with more and more people sharing them meant that both the organic and paid reach of each film grew along with a substantial increase in word-of-mouth.
At the end of the campaign we had
- reached 173,000 people within 25 miles of the attraction (more than even the circulation of best selling national glossy magazines)
- increased the client’s Facebook page likes by 2,000 to 8,400
- received 2,150 post likes
- 9,242 post clicks
- 647 comments
- 283 shares
All for an ad budget that wouldn’t have got a two column spot in the local paper.
How did that translate into visitor numbers? Well the client reported a significant influence of first time visitors.
In fact the visitor numbers didn’t dip that much from the end of the school holidays (their peak), which is when we started the campaign, and stayed high right up until the end of the season.
The highlight of the campaign for us was being a major factor in completely selling out the Halloween events. With visitor numbers up 69% on the year before.
We look forward to continuing the relationship with the client and using their online ticketing system to provide hard metrics of the success of future campaigns.
Watch Some of the films below
Read Our Short Guide to Social Video Marketing for Visitor Attractions
Get breakthrough results from Social Video Marketing with our short guide.
If you have any questions you can leave them in the comments below or email David on;
David@BrightHornGroup.com
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