Data-Driven Regional Event Marketing
Books by the Banks
Books by the Banks is an organization that celebrates literature and the love of reading! They host an annual event bringing readers and authors together in Cincinnati at the Duke Energy Convention Center.
To avoid revealing information proprietary to the client, ad spend and detailed data have not been revealed. All visuals are publicly available.
Opportunity / Problem
“A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.”
Readers come to talk to the authors, hear from them in workshops, buy books and get them signed. Most authors are based in the Midwest with several national headliners. The 13th annual Books by the Banks Cincinnati Regional Book Festival in 2019 was slated to bring more than 100 authors to Cincinnati, and they turned to us to step up their marketing.
Books by the Banks’ main concern was that attendance had been flat for several years. They wanted to increase attendance.
Books by the Banks had been reaching the same types of people year after year via school and library connections. They wanted to reach new people – both outside that set, and within that set but in more meaningful ways. After all, not everyone looks at the papers the teacher sends home! They had also been working to bring more black and Hispanic authors and wanted to ensure we reached those audiences.
Books by the Banks’ volunteer staff do an amazing job posting relevant content daily all year round. It is truly not just an event but an organization promoting love of books and reading. Yet there was little design consistency and no concerted effort to promote the posts. This problem wasn’t identified by them, but there was clearly room for improvement.
Books by the Banks’ website looks like an organization, not an event. It’s both, and for the event they needed a website that looked the part. This also wasn’t a need they identified, yet there was clear need for improvement for the event.
Books by the Banks’ paid social advertising the previous year was a long-form video, a static post for educators and another for budding authors. The video got lots of views, but busy people want a quick view of what’s happening and why to attend. And the organization needed a more serious approach to reaching defined audiences and inviting appropriate actions such as engagement, event responses, or website visits. They also paid for advertising only on Facebook and Instagram, and needed to expand to Twitter, where they had an account but hadn’t used it for paid advertising.
Objectives
ATTENDANCE
Increase attendance at the 13th annual Books by the Banks event in Oct 2019 at Duke Energy Center.
AUDIENCES
Reach a wider cross-section of people, or reach them more effectively, than their usual methods. Reach a larger black and Hispanic audience was a sub-goal.
BRANDING
Up their game in the design and presentation department. The client was focused on numbers when they hired us, so in the beginning this objective was ours not theirs.
DATA
Provide a more serious approach to engagement, insights and data. This also wasn’t identified as an objective by the client at first, yet we knew better data would mean better insights for the future.
Planning
At signing on 26 August, there were 8 ½ weeks until the event on 26 October – just enough time for a kick-off meeting; 2 weeks of audience research, gathering materials and creating posts for client’s review; and 6 weeks of posts and advertising. Posts were 2x / week for six weeks, paid to show to a variety of audiences as they rolled out.
ASSETS
Client gave us access to their Facebook and Twitter pages and advertising accounts. Facebook was used to run ads on Instagram, though it was decided for current budget and their future labor that we wouldn’t start an Instagram account. Client provided vector art of their brand material and author headshots for those who signed the publicity release.
Social advertising in previous years had been done sporadically in various ad accounts, so we had only fragmentary data from previous advertising, mostly when on-page posts had been paid to promote
PLATFORMS
We chose...
Facebook for broad coverage,
Instagram because it’s strongly visual,
Twitter for news-legitimacy and appeal to word-oriented people.
AUDIENCES
After some research on the ad platforms, we choose these base combinations of interests:
Facebook + Instagram: interest in Fiction Books, Non-Fiction Books, American Literature, or Children’s Literature
Twitter: interests or conversation topics of Fiction, Non-Fiction, Historical Fiction, Sci Fi & Fantasy Books, Romance Books, or Biographies & Memoirs
On Facebook we narrowed the criteria to create a variety of audiences (see Supplemental Materials for the list):
Parents of young kids (per the client and our experience, these are the most interested attendees of a book fair), and parents of older and teens
Grownups for themselves
Teenagers (13-18 yo)
African-American and Latino
Employees of schools and libraries – client already reached them well, this reinforced the message and made it easy for them to spread the word
Facebook Page Likers – they’re likely to see organically but paying reaches more
Friends-of-Likers – always a productive audience (when combined with appropriate interests) since ads show an implied endorsement from their friends
Interested in Upcoming Events – an interesting audience on Facebook
On Twitter, this type of narrowing isn’t possible, so we stuck with one large audience.
DESIGN WORK
We designed two styles of visuals to match their branding:
Individual author focused
Inspirational event focused
Once finished in square aspect ratio for FB and IG, we adapted them to horizontal for Twitter.
We created the landing page on our favorite website platform for design Squarespace (see Supplemental Materials). This linked to the FB Event for “registration” and spreading the word, and linked to main website for super-complete details. We also created the Facebook event.
Execution
We posted twice weekly for six weeks, and paid to show them as they rolled out. Call-to-action on the on-page posts was Learn More with link to the event landing page. We used the same visuals to make off-page ads for the FB Event.
Client handled all comments on posts.
CHANGES DURING EXECUTION
Their website wasn’t fully updated with event details until late September, so when we started advertising, the call to action was a link to the FB Event instead of the landing page. Our landing page linked to their website for full details, like parking, complete workshop schedule, complete list of authors, etc.
Our initial emphasis on post engagement wasn’t productive for sharing, so we stopped the basic engagement ads in favor of promoting the FB Event and the event website.
On Instagram and Twitter, we realized that sending people to the FB event was a disjointed user experience, so we stopped those ads after a week and shifted most Instagram and Twitter calls-to-action to the event landing page.
During the late phase, we had planned a few new ads with logistics such as times and parking, with links to the event landing page for full details. But the visuals were attractive and generating good results, so we kept running the existing visuals.
We initially included all surrounding metro areas (Cinci, Lex, Louis, Indy, Cols) for website visits, but after a week realized the audience was too large for the budget. Although they wanted visitors from surrounding metro areas, they would still only be a small fraction, so for focus we pulled back to just Cincinnati and Lexington after a week.
About two weeks before the event, the cost per response for website visits on Twitter fell significantly below FB + IG, so we shifted spend to Twitter. Also around that time, FB Event responses were declining, as we expected, so switched spend to website visits. And we started a new audience for our FB Event responders to get them the info and attraction to the actual event.
The first post of the campaign.
Results
“That which cannot be measured cannot be proven.”
Attendance
2019: 4500 | 2018: 4500-5000
This was likely a slight decline from the previous year. Many factors affect event attendance, so reasons are hard to say, but discussion follows below!
Facebook event responses
2019: 3129 | 2018: 2335
This was a 34% increase from the previous year. Why this didn’t translate into a +30% increase in attendance is an open question. One possibility is we reached more people but they were less serious about the event. Yet we’re confident from the audiences that we reached more, equally-interested people, and something about that particular day or 2019 kept people engaged in other activities.
Next year (whether it’s 2020 or more likely due to Covid-19 2021), we or whoever does their advertising will have access to all the 2019 data, serious audiences and results to build on, and ability to hit the ground running with improvements.
Audiences
Most of our audience selections didn’t specify school or library interests, yet the extent to which we reached whole new people vs reinforcing connections the client already made via schools and libraries is hard to quantify.
Here are some of the audiences we reached…
Friends of their Facebook Page Likers with interests in fiction or non-fiction books, or American or children’s literature.
110k PEOPLE IN CINCINNATI; REACHED 25,300
Friends-of-Likers are useful because users see an implied endorsement from their friend. Our experience is Friends-of-Likers alone isn’t sufficient and they need to be qualified with interests.
African-American or Hispanic multicultural affinity with interests in African-American literature, fiction or non-fiction books, or American or children’s literature.
70k PEOPLE IN CINCINNATI; REACHED 16,900
These proved to be receptive audiences with high engagement rates. We ran visuals with as many multicultural authors as the client could provide for publicity.
People with interests in fiction or non-fiction books, or American or children’s literature.
300k PEOPLE IN CINCINNATI
This audience alone is too broad, and though these are the interests we identified on FB + IG, all audiences were narrowed in some other way. Facebook also has an interest in simply Literature, but that audience is even larger and would be too unproductive by including people using e-readers and audio books and only passing interests in books themselves. Our mission was to find people who like and buy physical books.
People with interests or engaged in conversations about fiction, non-fiction, historical fiction, sci fi & fantasy books, romance books, or biographies and memoirs.
200k PEOPLE IN CINCINNATI; REACHED 23,500
Twitter is a different animal than Facebook, with fewer options to narrow interests, yet it’s important for word-oriented people, and we assembled one audience here. Again instead of choosing a broad interest like Literature, we looked for people who are really into books.
See Supporting Materials for a complete list of audiences on FB, IG, Twitter.
BRANDING
This wasn’t on the client’s radar when they hired us, but as the event drew closer they became increasingly pleased with the design look and consistency of social posts and the landing page. See the supporting materials. The twelve visuals we designed and paid to advertise made an excellent combination with the high quantity and variety of daily posts by their staff.
Data, Insights and Engagement
On-Page Facebook Post Engagement
REACTIONS, CLICKS, COMMENTS, SHARES
2019: 2600 | 2018: 2700
Organic on-page engagement was approx the same as 2018, but numbers don’t really tell the story here. That year most engagement was on a long-form video, a post for educators and another post for budding authors. We did things much differently: most engagement was on twelve posts designed for their brand or to promote featured authors, plus three high-performing daily posts created by their volunteer staff. See Supporting Materials for these visuals.
Off-Page Facebook + Instagram Ad Engagement
REACTIONS, LANDING PAGE VISITS, COMMENTS, SHARES
2019: 2700 | 2018: NO DATA
We didn’t have access to last year’s advertising account, so we can’t compare to previous year’s off-page results, if any.
Twitter Beyond-Like Engagement
Tweetdeck had not been used previously, so comparison with 2018 wasn’t practical. Within one week before and after the event, not counting likes (sooo many!), total mentions, quotes, retweets and new followers were 335. For the spend, this was an outstanding total of beyond-like engagements, which we attribute to book and word lovers being more in tune with Twitter.
All Ads by the Numbers
Looking behind the scenes, we paid for 27 posts across FB + IG and Twitter – 12 designed visuals, each done in square format for FB + IG and horizontal format for Twitter, and 3 of their shared posts on FB – set up in 18 ad sets (audience-objective combinations) on FB + IG and Twitter, for a total of 155 individual ads.
(Multiplying the posts and ad sets yields 216, not 155, but not every visual was run in every ad set; as discussed, some ad sets were ended early and others were intended for specific audiences.)
Data for Future Insights
The client has far better data about audiences and calls-to-action to guide future campaigns and evaluate year-to-year performance.
Summary
“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
Books by the Banks’ primary goal of increasing event attendance was not met. Yet they were pleased with secondary goals and benefits…
Broadened their reach to new audiences – people they wouldn’t normally reach via school and library connections, as well as black and Hispanic audiences.
Provided design and branding consistency for the event – a consistent look for ads/posts and the landing page. Related to this, provided a landing page that looked like an event not simply an organization.
Provided a data foundation for insights for future campaigns.
Supporting Materials
“Why fit in when you were born to stand out?”
Branded Event Posts
Branded Author Highlight Posts
Event Website
Audiences
Weekly Reach
Relevant Links
Screenshots from the campaign are shown in the main supporting document. Links go to live current states of the online properties.
BOOKS BY THE BANKS’ WEBSITE
This is their main website. We didn’t create or modify it, but it was used in the campaign because it contained full event details.
EVENT LANDING PAGE
Their website looks more like an organization than an event, so we created this landing page for the event campaign
SOCIAL MEDIA PAGES
Current state of their Facebook, FB Event, and Twitter pages. Campaign posts are live in Sept - Oct 2019.
www.facebook.com/booksbythebanks
www.facebook.com/events/388362965410593
www.twitter.com/BBTB_cincy
