Impact of Advertising (Case Study: Rite Aid Cleveland Marathon)
The Challenge:
The Cleveland Marathon, first run in 1978, is the premier annual distance running event in the Northern Ohio area. Even though there are over 20,000 runners and walkers participating in the various events, most of these people participate “organically.” Simply due to the magnitude the event, many people sign up.
Driving new participants to the race is very difficult, especially those in more atypical demographic groups. So when the head of the marathon tasked their team to increase registrations, there weren’t a lot of different, efficient options.
The Goal:
A. Increase registrations for various marathon events, especially targeting first time registrants. Most important metric for marathon organizers is paying participants.
B. Maximize profitability of advertising. While the team has run direct response ads before with mixed response, the goal is to for revenue to be significantly higher than advertiser spend.
C. Save time for marathon marketing team. Creating and managing online advertising is incredibly time consuming. So if the team can save time, it will allow them to focus on other initiatives.
The Plan:
Boostable set about creating 18 ads for the marathon targeting distance runners throughout the Midwest as well as more casual runners. While there is more intent from distance runners they are more expensive to advertise to and represent a smaller overall audience. By combining the two groups together, Boostable was able to reach a wider overall audience who would be interested in the marathon.
Additionally, the marathon knew from historical results that discount codes perform well on social media. Therefore, we worked together to launch a “DAND20” discount code that gave runners 20% off their registration cost.
Here’s a sample ad:
From an optimization perspective, we the Boostable team focused primarily on Click Through Rate as a metric. By focusing on the ads with the highest user engagement, the team was able to drive down ad costs, even for the costlier distance runner audiences.
The Result:
The results from Boostable’s advertising were excellent and the marathon was thrilled with the results. With very little management, they were able to reach tens of thousands of people that they otherwise would have had trouble reaching.
Feedback:
“It went even better than I thought; we had a 2:1 ratio of sales to ad spend!”
– Kayla Henderson, Cleveland Marathon Event Coordinator
Start selling tickets now. Start using Boostable.
Contact us at team@boostable.com and find us here.
