For almost forty years, the Cleveland Marathon has been the premier annual distance-running event in Northern Ohio. The Cleveland Marathon is so well known that it’s on every local runner’s list, with over 20,000 runners and walkers signing up every year.
The only downside of being so popular? It’s difficult to drive new participants to the race, especially since most participants are local and register “organically” — without being shown ads. So when Kayla Henderson, the Cleveland Marathon Event Coordinator, sought to increase registrations, she faced the challenge with two key goals in mind:
1. Find an advertising method that drives registrations
The marathon’s organizers wanted to extend their marketing reach across the greater Midwest. They knew they wanted to focus on social media advertising, but also knew online ads can be time-consuming to manage. The team also wanted to be confident they could bring in revenue substantially higher than their ad spend.
Like most event marketing teams, the team was small and so were their budgets. To automate their work and efficiently test ads to make sure money was being well spent, they decided to work with Boostable. Boostable is a Facebook and Instagram advertising and retargeting platform that synced with their Eventbrite registration page.
The team built 18 ads targeted at long-distance and casual runners throughout the greater Midwest. They targeted these groups with an ad offering 20% off registration. Boostable then tracked how the ad performed by monitoring the click-through rate. They amped up the ad space for the best-performing ads and nixed the ones that underperformed. Continuous, automated testing helped the Cleveland Marathon maximize the value of their ad spend.
2. Achieve better returns on ad spend
With little hands-on labor, the marketing team was able to reach tens of thousands of runners. Ads were viewed 35,300 times, and the marathon’s return on their ad spend was 203%. And, most important, marathon registration surged.
In addition to a number of registrations using the 20% off coupon code in the ad, they also saw an increase in total marathon registrations corresponding to when ads began. This suggests that the extra branding and impressions from the campaign helped registrations — even without the price discount.
Using Boostable also freed up the marketing team to focus on other aspects of their marketing plan since the campaigns need very little oversight while running.
“It went even better than I thought it would,” says Kayla Henderson, the Cleveland Marathon Event Coordinator. “We had a 2:1 ratio of sales to ad spend!”
Want another example of how a race has powered their business using Eventbrite integrations? Find out how Tough Mudder streamlined their global events data using Eventbrite and Salesforce.
