Attraction Marketing Using Google

Digital Marketing:

Attraction marketing using Google

Introduction

Brunel’s SS Great Britain

Brunel’s SS Great Britain is Bristol’s number one visitor attraction and a top 10 UK museum (TripAdvisor 2022). It is home to the world’s first great ocean liner, the SS Great Britain, the Being Brunel museum, and the Brunel Institute, which houses one of the world’s finest maritime and Brunel collections. The charity that manages and maintains Brunel’s SS Great Britain and collections is the SS Great Britain Trust.

SS Great Britain Trust

The SS Great Britain Trust is the charity that runs Brunel’s SS Great Britain and the Brunel Institute, caring for the SS Great Britain on behalf of the nation along with collections comprising 70,000 objects and artefacts in the two museums and the archives. The charity runs community engagement programmes and specialist education programmes that inspire future generations of engineers, helping to address inequality and barriers into engineering and STEM careers.

Brief

Brunel’s SS Great Britain originally came to Strange to fix their struggles with deploying their Google Ads Grant budget and effectively acquiring ticket transactions from their digital marketing activity.

Approach

The first step to increasing budget deployment was to do an account-wide audit looking for opportunities to increase spend. From this, we found that the current account structure was inefficient and so we developed a more granular campaign structure. We extensively researched new keywords and added generic terms that we knew worked well due to previous experience advertising attractions. We also added a new campaign using keywords relevant to products being sold in their online store, allowing us to provide further reach and a secondary revenue stream.

At the same time, we rebuilt all conversion tracking in order to accurately record the effects of the increased spend. Crucially, the new conversions included how much each ticket transaction was worth – allowing Google’s machine learning to optimise towards bidding for users likely to buy more tickets.

After our actions in the Grant account led to such a strong performance, we launched paid activity. Despite Google Grant providing a $10,000 budget for free, they cannot appear above paid ads or spend over $2.00 on a keyword bid. Having set the Grant campaigns up first, we had the best keyword research available and knew exactly which keywords to bid on. Furthermore, paid and Grant accounts can never compete against one another, so if the paid account has used up its budget for the day or there is a keyword we don’t want to bid real money on – the Grant account can still serve ads.

The other advantage of using a paid account is the ability to create display campaigns. We used prospecting campaigns that targeted people similar to those who had searched for our most valuable keywords and remarketing campaigns that targeted people who had previously visited the website but had not purchased a ticket.

Result

We were able to deliver significant performance improvements from month 1 of our engagement including;

48.5% increase in Grant spend YoY.

50% increase in Grant ticket transactions in peak trading period.

Significant improvements in the Paid Account perfomance with the ROAS achieving 11+.

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Increase in Grant Ticket Sales

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Increase in Grant Deployment

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Paid account ROAS

Testimonial

The team at Strange are excellent. They’ve worked hard to understand our challenges and rework our Google Grant and PPC accounts to deliver much improved performance, plan an awareness strategy that’s helped us reach new markets and consult with us on our social marketing strategy. They’re a trusted extension to the team and their broader travel and tourism marketing knowledge is great to have.

Noah Burrows
Digital Operations and Content Manager, SS Great Britain

Charles Stanley Direct PPC

Digital Marketing:

Charles Stanley Direct PPC

Introduction

Charles Stanley Direct is a popular direct investment service for the savvy investor looking to manage their own investments. The platform provides a first-class service to implement your investment decisions, through a secure website and app.

Brief

Charles Stanley set us the challenge of delivering improved performance from their PPC campaigns. In a highly regulated industry, with multiple stakeholders to govern marketing activities and an ever changing market, the brief called for exceptionally high levels of service, reporting and flexibility.

Approach

We restructured the PPC account to open up opportunities to attract new customers, and applied a creative and intelligent data driven approach to deliver improved results in this highly competitive market. With thousands of investment funds, trusts and shares available to trade, deciding which ones to promote with PPC required some smart thinking and detailed data analysis.

By keeping a close eye on trading trends and using our market leading reports, we adjusted budgets and bids for hundreds of campaigns as different funds, trusts and shares constantly go in and out of favour with the direct investor. This deep dive into the workings of the market and inventive use of trading data is typical of our approach and part of the way we get better results.

Result

Strong numbers of new users opening accounts and transferring investments and a continued focus on high efficiency by closely monitoring CPA.

The success of the PPC campaigns has allowed us to collaborate with Charles Stanley on a wide range of projects including a strategic review of their digital offering, radio adverts, Google Local optimisation for their branch network, Google analytics audit and sponsored Tweet campaigns.

Testimonial

We kissed an awful lot of frogs in the digital marketing space before finding our prince in Strange. From the moment they approached Charles Stanley Direct we knew that their level of detail, technical ability and knowledge of our sector was exactly what we required. They have been first class in their execution, delivery and ongoing optimisation of our account and we have been impressed by the continual striving to deliver for us. The team is highly personable, pragmatic and honest and we recommend them highly.

Magnus Wheatley
Head of Digital Marketing & Communications, Charles Stanley

Avery WePrint – Content Strategy

Digital Marketing:

Avery WePrint Content Strategy

Introduction

We’ve always admired Avery’s passion for innovation and their commitment to offering a great service. Their custom printing service Avery WePrint encompasses just that. The website allows you to design or upload custom artwork for labels, business cards and other stationery products, and it’s then professionally printed and delivered by Avery.

Brief

As a long standing client we have a sound insight into their service and customer, along with lots of ideas about how to enhance their website performance. One key opportunity was to increase revenue from new and returning customers through adopting a content strategy with objectives to improve SEO for article pages and produce engaging content to link to from their emails..

Approach

Our approach was to routinely compile and publish articles aligned to the two core users intended for the content; small business owners looking for custom printing options and existing customers who would benefit from and be interested in broader small business insight.

To ensure topics were aligned to the sectors and seasonality of the audiences we reviewed user order patterns, explored keyword volumes and undertook research into core sectors to better plan topic timings. This meant we had a pretty good idea of what users were interested in and when.

Next came the fun part: writing a range of purposeful articles, incorporating relevant and useful links, information and advice. By adopting an authoritative but relatable tone of voice we were able to produce articles that resonated with the audience. Copy was of course optimised to rank well in search engines, along with ensuring titles and metadata was well thought through.

Ever the data fans, we monitored key metrics including traffic levels, page value and page performance indicators to gain insights into performance and continually adapt our approach based on the learnings.

Result

We have seen consistent month on month improvements for organic sessions to the article pages and the quality of the content is reflected in improved bounce rates and page duration. Uplifted pages per session and page value are also a testament to the effectiveness of the content in driving onward journeys and conversions.

We’ve seen a good response from the email audience too; with improved click through rates on emails with articles and onward actions and conversions from the sessions.

Going one step further to support Avery WePrint with SEO improvements, we analysed the key products and sectors to produce a gap analysis of missing article content.

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Increase Organic Sessions

%

Reduction in Bounce Rate

%

Increase in Email CTR

Testimonial

Strange has worked really hard to understand our customers and their businesses, behaviours and interests. This has been pivotal to the success of the content strategy and it’s great to see the positive shift as a result. Their review and reporting capabilities are second to none, so you can clearly see the results of the work and get key insights that often feed in to other parts of the business.

Kevin Power
Ecommerce Manager, Avery WePrint

Google Grant PPC Management

Digital Marketing:

Google Grant PPC Management

Introduction

The Centre for Ageing Better is an independent charitable foundation, funded by The National Lottery Community Fund. It creates change in policy and practice informed by evidence and works with partners across England to improve employment, housing, and to combat ageism.

Brief

The Centre for Ageing Better believes that more people living longer represents a huge opportunity for society and they want everyone to live a good later life. But changes are needed so more people are in good health, are financially secure, are socially connected, and have a sense of meaning and purpose in later life.

Approach

Strange has been working with Ageing Better for the last three years and have recently won the contract to continue working with them for up to three more years. As an agency, we are really proud of the lasting relationships we build with our clients, but more than that, we are proud of the results we are able to deliver for them.

One of the challenges we were facing managing the Google Grants account for Ageing Better was being able to deploy the full budget each month. We were noticing that standard search spend was flat YoY, so we needed to find a solution that was going to increase spend through the account whilst still being able to meet the client’s objectives and the Grants policies outlined by Google.

We had previously run some low level DSA campaigns with some success so wanted to see what more could be achieved with this campaign type. Our approach resulted in building out a complete DSA strategy that ensured full coverage of the website. Running this alongside the standard search campaigns opened up a whole new area of search that we had not previously been targeting. Careful search term report analysis meant we were able to build robust negative keyword lists to minimise wastage and maintain quality traffic reaching the website, whilst beginning to scale the account.

Result

As a result, we saw some staggering growth YoY.

Spend increased by 84%
There was an 88% increase in impressions
We generated a 20% increase in traffic to the website

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Increase in Spend

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Increase in Impressions

%

Increase in Traffic to Website

Testimonial

As a charity, it’s really important that our digital marketing spend is delivered as efficiently as possible. Google Grants search restrictions are challenging and mean we look to Strange to provide high-quality strategic thinking and optimisation. The implementation of the new DSA strategy has hugely contributed to the success in achieving our growth and performance KPIs.

Yehia Nasr
Digital and Content Manager, Centre for Ageing Better

Legoland Discovery Centre Launch Campaign

Digital Marketing:

Legoland Discovery Centre Launch Campaign

Introduction

We were delighted to win the brief to help Merlin Entertainments’ launch Legoland Discovery Centre, Birmingham.

The ultimate indoor playground was the second to be built in the UK and opened just outside the centre of Birmingham and ideally situated opposite the popular National Sea Life Centre.

Brief

The ambitious brief required us to:

Drive pre-launch awareness and engagement by increasing number of unique website visitors and impressions served on social media
Drive pre-launch bookings to support overall targets
Drive bookings and awareness once the attraction was open

Approach

We used a comprehsive data driven approach to plan a multi channel strategy to meet the brief.

The answer lay in Facebook, Search and Display to balance awareness driving impressions and direct response conversion elements. The campaign budget was weighted to meet the planned targets; maximising the Christmas opportunity to sell First 2 Play Annual Passes, before launching a broader awareness campaign, that culminated in focussed conversion activity in the countdown to launch.

Through a mix of targeting approaches, we were able to effectively identify and deploy ads to tailored audiences built from website visitors, lookalikes of customers and targeting modifiers from our experience and learnings. All activity was geo-targeted based on drivetime insight and brand growth opportunity to ensure budget was focussed where it would be most beneficial.

A highlight of the campaign was making the most of the well loved brand LEGO® to promote the launch of the attraction. We were able to make the most of key assets and photography to present the proposition in a digital-friendly and targeted way. The campaign plan was then put through testing and optimisation to refine the message to its optimum based on data learnings. We were reactive and flexible too, pro-actively adopting new elements to incorporate local PR activity and maximising countdown tools in the lead up to launch.

Result

The campaigns surpassed targets for website visits and bookings. And with total impressions in excess of 4 million, social engagements of 14 thousand and 12 thousand Facebook followers acquired, the campaign awareness and engagement eobjectives were met.

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Annual Pass Sales Target Achieved

Facebook Followers Acquired

Social Engagements on Ads

Testimonial

We’ve been very impressed with the results we’ve seen from both SEO and Social. Strange have worked hard for us to deliver a programme that produces good business results.

Liz Rodgers
GM, Holiday France Direct, a Brittany Ferries Brand

SEO and Social Success for Holiday France Direct

Digital Marketing:

SEO and Social Success for Holiday France Direct

Introduction

Like many businesses, Holiday France Direct wanted to increase the volume of visitors to their website from non-paid traffic, and increase their social reach and engagement. They came to us with a brief to upgrade their site to target potential customers better, and to set up and manage a programme of monthly SEO and Social activity.

Brief

Holiday France Direct came to us with a brief to solve 3 business challenges. Firstly to upgrade their website site to improve targetting of potential customers, secondly to set up and manage a programme of monthly onsite and offsite SEO activity and thirdly run their social media channels for them.

Approach

With thousands of properties located in popular destinations, we knew that Holiday France Direct could benefit from better organic traffic generated through an SEO programme.

We introduced a blog and content marketing strategy to help position Holiday France Direct as an authoritative information source. Keyword research and analysis of PPC traffic patterns showed a number of opportunities to increase the visibility of their inventory through renaming and relabeling to match user search language.

Search language also varied from region to region, even in close neighbours like Brittany and Normandy, so we took the optimisations down to a local level, producing curated lists of accommodation properties to match the demand shown in search.

Alongside this, social media properties were created on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest to further reach and engage with their target audience.

Result

Organic traffic grew 45% a year for two years running, generating increases in enquiries to property owners and the number of holidays booked through the site.

Social channels continue to perform well, providing new opportunities to reach and engage with potential customers.

%

Increase in Organic Traffic

Testimonial

We’ve been very impressed with the results we’ve seen from both SEO and Social. Strange have worked hard for us to deliver a programme that produces good business results.

Liz Rodgers
GM, Holiday France Direct, a Brittany Ferries Brand

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Attraction Marketing Using Google

Brunel’s SS Great Britain is Bristol’s number one visitor attraction and a top 10 UK museum (TripAdvisor 2022). It is home to the world’s first great ocean liner, the SS Great Britain, the Being Brunel museum, and the Brunel Institute, which houses one of the world’s finest maritime and Brunel collections. The charity that manages and maintains Brunel’s SS Great Britain and collections is the SS Great Britain Trust.

Charles Stanley Direct PPC

Charles Stanley set us the challenge of delivering improved performance from their PPC campaigns. In a highly regulated industry, with multiple stakeholders to govern marketing activities and an ever changing market, the brief called for exceptionally high levels of service, reporting and flexibility.

Avery WePrint – Content Strategy

We were tasked to increase revenue from new and returning customers by delivering a content strategy with objectives to improve SEO for article pages and produce engaging content to link to from their emails..

Google Grant PPC Management

Digital Marketing: Google Grant PPC Management IntroductionThe Centre for Ageing Better is an independent charitable foundation, funded by The National Lottery Community Fund. It creates change in policy and practice informed by evidence and works with partners across...

Legoland Discovery Centre Launch Campaign

We were delighted to win the brief to help Merlin Entertainments’ launch Legoland Discovery Centre, Birmingham.

The ultimate indoor playground was the second to be built in the UK and opened just outside the centre of Birmingham.

SEO and Social Success for Holiday France Direct

Like many businesses, Holiday France Direct wanted to increase the number of visitors to their website from non-paid traffic and increase their social reach and engagement. They came to us with a brief to upgrade their website and to run a programme of monthly SEO and Social activity.