Best Marketing Case Studies & Campaigns

Facebook video ads are the best way to ensure people remember your brand and come back to your site. Video isn’t just trending on Facebook, it’s a strategy that works to engage and convert website visitors. In order to push leads down the funnel in email marketing campaigns, and to fuel engagement across multiple social channels.

As one of the giant platforms in the sports business. Attracting more than 3,500 visitors and 150 high-profile speakers annually to its conference in Düsseldorf, SPOBIS is Europe’s largest sports business event. It is organised by the German sports industry content platform SPONSORs.

In this case study, we’ll take a deep look into how this prominent sports industry event made a huge breakthrough. As it scored strong ticket sales and a championship-worthy 9.5X return on ad spend when it created tailored Facebook video ads content for 2 very specific audiences.

PROBLEM

Ahead of SPOBIS 2019, SPONSORs wanted to drive ticket sales in a cost-effective way and position the conference as Europe’s must-attend event for the sports industry.

SOLUTION

SPONSORs had 2 clear audiences in mind for its ticket sales campaign, based on the kinds of visitors that it wanted to attract to SPOBIS 2019:
1. Senior sports industry executives and influencers who would be interested in the summit part of the event
2. Younger sports professionals and students who would be attracted to the expo.

• Together with digital agency LOBECO, SPONSORs created different video ad creatives that it tailored to each audience.
• To attract senior executives to the higher price-point summit, the team created ads that featured a combination of announcements from high-profile keynote speakers, summit highlights from the previous year’s event and highlights of the current year’s programme.
• To promote the lower-cost expo tickets, SPONSORs tailored video ad content to students and young professionals by showing expo highlights and majoring on the networking opportunities available, as well as adapting the accompanying ad copy to appeal to this audience.
• All ads featured a call to action to buy tickets and, knowing that many people would view the ads on their mobile, SPONSORs used mobile-friendly vertical video.

• Demographic, interest and location targeting made it possible for SPONSORs to show the right video ads to each specific audience in Facebook News Feed, Instagram feed, Stories and Audience Network.
• By selecting the conversions objective for the ads, SPONSORs could be sure that ads were automatically delivered to people who were most likely to convert—in this case, to buy event tickets through the website.
• To reach even more potential event attendees, SPONSORs used a Custom Audience of website visitors to create a lookalike audience, focusing on people in Austria, Switzerland and Germany. These people saw further video ads promoting the event and encouraging them to buy their ticket.

RESULT

Achieving a season's best, by tailoring content to different audiences and presenting it in an engaging, mobile-friendly ad format, SPONSORs achieved strong ticket sales. The May 11, 2018–January 29, 2019 campaign resulted in:

• 9.5X return on ad spend
• 72% of tickets sold were bought on a mobile device