Back in March my colleague Simon B and I spent some time promoting a beer festival via social media. We took on this project with the specific goal of experimenting to see if social media, and in particular Twitter, could be successfully leveraged to drive people to a real world event. Cutting to the punch line, yes we were successful.
We have now published a short case study on the results of this social, which you can see below or by going directly to Cheers to Social Media on Slideshare:
One of the key findings was that there is a positive Social Media ROI. For this campaign (or event) we managed to drive:
- 63% of attendees were a result of Social Media Marketing
- £571 revenue per 1 hour spent on Social Media
- £11.41 for each £1 spent (=11x ROI)
- 5.6% total cost of sale for revenue generated by Social Media
We also believe the ROI can be significantly increased by deploying ‘emerging’ Social Media best practices and development of better tools to manage campaigns and review data (ie, a social media analytics work bench).
The primary lesson was that with attention at a premium, Social Media does indeed provide a great platform to ensure the success of marketing campaigns and in this case a real world event. In particular Twitter and Eventbrite proved cost effective and easy ways to drive awareness and consumer actions (e.g. attendance, footfall, purchases ).
Interesting to note that Facebook underperformed on what we expected. We also found that social media magnifies the value of search, at least for something very time based (ie, event).
For the event microsite we had 3175 unique visitors during the promotional period and the traffic sources were as follows:
- 61% search (Google 58%)
- 24%-38% social media (*estimated low end of 24% to as high as 38%)
- 4% blogs
As a follow-up – “sort of real time mini case study” – we are finding that social media again is proving a powerful way to drive awareness and interest in the actual case study!
Cheers To Social Media is currently being showcased on the ‘Business & Mgmt‘ page by our editorial team …
An additional proof point for success if using social media – here’s the screen grab is below.
