OVERVIEW
The American Horse Council (AHC) works daily to advocate for the social, economic, and legislative interests of the United States Equine Industry. AHC with United Horse Coalition, Microchip Lookup, and EWDC under their umbrella. AHC wanted to expand their audience to horse owners and professionals all over the country. However, without a marketing department, AHC volunteers were the ones who created social posts and there was little to zero marketing strategy in place for this organization. Nonprofit Resources (NPR) analyzed different solutions to aid AHC with their marketing and decided that a Feathr Campaign, NPR’s most effective marketing tool, would be most effective in social media engagement.
APPROACH
The NPR Staff members working on this campaign include Kristin Bennett, President and CEO, Account Executive, taking the Quality Assurance role on this project; Christine Do, Digital Marketing and Data Specialist, taking on the Feather Specialist and Meeting Leader roles in this project; and Clara Bennett, Administrative Assistant, taking on the social media coordinator role in this project.
There was a large data pool from member survey results for NPR Staff to use to consider where the target locations should be as well as other important metrics. Using this data, it was decided that geo-fencing campaigns and keyword search campaigns would be most effective. The team also discussed that regular social posts are another necessary tool to expand AHC’s audience. These courses of action were carried out through Social Pilot and Feathr. The team scheduled social media posts, monitored campaign results, and reported back regularly during the run-time.
RESULTS
Performance metrics:
- Clickthrough rate (CTR) ranged from 0.41% to 0.72% across all campaigns. Average rate (as suggested by Feathr is 0.10%).
- Campaign reach (total number of people who viewed marketing materials) ranged from 14, 664 to 26, 092 depending on the campaign type and length of campaign.
- For Microchip Lookup campaign, geographical interest seemed to be the most diverse. See Figure 1 below.
- The UHC Keyword and Retargeting Campaigns had similar geographic interest, but more concentrated in the Eastern regions (less so Midwest and West)
Effective strategies and key takeaways from this campaign were:
- Top performing graphic types:
- Filmstrip (300 px x 600 px)
- Mobile Interstitial (320 px x 480px)
- Pull (320px x 50px)
- Mini Leaderboard (300px x 50 px)
- Usage of a CTA button that is direct (“LEARN MORE”) performed much better (in comparison to other non-AHC Feathr campaigns)
- The geofencing campaigns were the most and significantly effective. Using a direct target audience that we know is interested and serving them ads that pertain to the activity they are taking part of (ex: event, convention) creates an engaged audience.
CONCLUSION
This type of campaign utilizing Social Pilot and Feathr for marketing strategy can be replicated for other clients. This successful partial service project provided NPR with remarkable metrics that have been used to expand AHC’s audience.