Back in summer last year (2017), we ran the Active 10 campaign on behalf of One You Hounslow to tackle inactivity in the borough. It encouraged people to sign up to the campaign, so they could receive more information about local walking opportunities – active travel, walking routes, parks and walking groups. Afterwards they received a series of behaviour change emails where they were encouraged to download the free Active 10 app, received details of the walking routes and groups and also useful tips about getting active.

You can read the full case study here.

Although over 1000 people signed up, One You Hounslow didn’t see the uptake in walking groups they wanted.

We developed a new approach and ran another campaign in January this year where we got people turning up to the walks. Here’s what we did.

Facebook lead ad campaign

The results

We ran the campaign for a few weeks in January, a time of the year when people set new year’s resolutions and have a strong desire to become more active.

We used our standard marketing strategy – the 2-step process:

• Step 1 is all about driving enquiries and
• Step 2 is following-up.

With a £600 ad budget we reached more than 14,000 people living in Hounslow and 213 of them signed up to receive more information about the health walks.

Step 1 of 2-step process

Set up

Targeting

We wanted to reach all over 55s interested in health walks so we used Facebook’s core targeting by age, gender and location.

The ads

We followed a few steps to make the campaign successful:

• We had an offer we knew people liked.
• We used images of people our audience could relate to.
• We wrote a few lines of copy about the group and benefits people will get by joining it.
• We included a Call to Action, the next thing we wanted them to do.

This promotion generated:

• 1418 link clicks
• 190 post reactions e.g. like and love
• 20 post comments
• 32 post shares
• 26 page likes
• 213 sign ups

Step 2 of 2-step process

Follow up

Once the campaign started we had to deal with all the enquiries that came in!

We made sure that we followed up with people as soon as they signed up. No matter what time someone filled out the lead ad form, we wanted them to get a confirmation letting them know that they have registered successfully. Therefore, we set up an automated confirmation SMS message and email that people received immediately after signing up.

Confirmation SMS message

We connected the lead ad form with the SMS provider using Zapier. Here’s what the message said:

‘Hi First Name, thanks for your interest in Health Walks in Hounslow. We’ll match you with the nearest walk in the next day (Monday to Friday) and send you the details. Thank you, The One You Hounslow team’

Confirmation Email

Here’s the email people received:

We collected people’s postcode when they first signed up, so we could check which walk was the nearest to them and we sent them an SMS message with the details.

Around 10% of people attended the walk after hearing from us once. To increase that number we kept in touch with people for the next 3 weeks. One day before the walk we’d send an SMS message reminding them about it.

People really appreciate this support. We all know how busy everyone’s lives are and even though we have every intention to get active some other things get in the way.

By following up for 3 weeks after the sign up we managed to increase the attendance to 22.5%.

Analysis of results

We wanted to know how many people actually attended a health walk, so we analysed the new walker forms as well as sending an SMS survey to everyone who registered.

The health walks monitoring forms showed that out of 28 new people 26 came from Facebook. That’s 93%!

The SMS survey had a great response, 52% of people replied answering yes or no. Whereas if you survey people by email you can only get on average a 10-15 % response.

22.5% of people said that they attended a walk. Based on this around 50 people attended at least one walk in January and February so far! This number is higher than the new walker forms suggest – which tells us that there are probably new people turning up who aren’t filling in new walker forms.

Interview with Dan Ward from Public Health England

Daniel is currently Public Health England’s marketing manager for London, managing PHE’s relationships with key non-commercial partners in the capital, including all 33 London boroughs, the NHS, the GLA and London Councils. He has been responsible for developing and running digital marketing campaigns among other things.

One Facebook ad campaign they ran outperformed TV by 9:1!

If you’d like to hear the interview with Daniel then click this link to get the replay.

Are you active on Facebook? Have you ever used Facebook ads to promote your activities?

If you are trying to engage people into sports and activity, I’m almost sure you at least have a Facebook page.  

It used to be that you could post on your page and people who like your page would see every post. Facebook has been gradually decreasing that as they’ve become more and more popular.

Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook has studied academic research and concluded that social media is only good for users’ wellbeing if they use it to “connect with people we care about”. In November of 2017, the company published a post that claimed “passive” social media use could be harmful, arguing instead for a more active and communal approach to the site.

As a result, Zuckerberg says, Facebook wants to promote the sorts of posts that encourage those interactions, while demoting those its data shows encourage only surface interactions – likes and shares but little else.

Here’s a graph that shows the organic reach of your Facebook posts throughout the years.

That means that if your page has 10,000 fans only 100 of them will actually see your posts in their News Feeds.

For marketing – this means that it’s now more important than ever to use paid advertising.

Why Facebook?

Targeting

The reason Facebook Ads are amazing is that they target people in whatever age, gender and area you want to reach, and by interest.

So you can choose to target ads just to women and girls, over 50s, people from deprived wards or people with disabilities or long term health conditions. Or a combination of all of those.

People of all ages are on Facebook, even over 50% of people over 50 are using this social media platform. Older people are the fastest growing group on Facebook and they are the most engaged audience out there.

You can even use Facebook ads to engage people who aren’t thinking about getting active yet, those at the pre-contemplation stage, by using branding videos, custom audiences and retargeting campaigns.

Cost

Using Facebook Ads will save you a substantial amount of money versus posters and leaflets.

In our tests, using leaflets costs about £48 per person registering including the cost of design, printing and distribution.

Facebook Ads are about £5.

Nearly every other industry has embraced digital marketing, and is doing fantastically. So using digital seems like a great solution for promoting sport and physical activity too.

Reach
Facebook is the biggest social network out there, and they also own Instagram. Their advertising system is 10x better than any other social network’s.

• Public Health England tested TV ads against Facebook for Stoptober
• Facebook outperformed TV by 9:1!

As you can see digital marketing is great, but … it’s hard to do well.

It’s really complex.

Before you get started you have to develop a digital marketing strategy. If you just ‘give it a go’ you’ll spend time and money and it won’t impact your main objective. You have to learn about Facebook Ads, Custom Audiences, Retargeting, Pixel and more. And once you’ve learnt the basics and how it works Facebook will change it!

This isn’t something you should run yourself but instead you should work with a Facebook ad expert, ideally one that has experience in marketing sport and activity.

So in summary Facebook ads are the most effective way to engage inactive people in sport and activity.

• You can engage hundreds or even thousands of people in your activities
• You build a list of people who you can get into other activities in future
• You can automate long-term behaviour change follow up
• People appreciate the support
  

If you like the idea of using digital marketing, but don’t know where to start then book a free strategy call with John by clicking here.

These are the results we got running a Facebook lead ad campaign in Redbridge. We’ll cover how we did it in a bit, but first, let’s look at the statistics.

Long term health conditions and physical activity 

15 million people in England alone have one or more long-term health conditions (LTCs), and the number of people with multiple conditions is rising. The conditions include diabetes, asthma, COPD, arthritis, cancer, coronary heart disease, mental health and other. (Department of Health, Long-term conditions: compendium of information: Third Edition (May 2012)

72% of the general population are in work whereas 59% of people with LTCs are in work. Only 35% of people with a mental health condition are in work.

Of the people who report that they live with long term conditions, 24% have two LTCs and 20% live with three or more LTCs.

Long-term conditions account for:

• 50% of all GP appointments
• 64% of all hospital outpatients’ appointments
• 70% of all hospital bed days
• 70% of health and care spend
• 64% of people living with long-term conditions, at present say they feel supported, so there is room for improvement.

NHS England, Long-term conditions (LTCs) infographic

Lifestyle factors account for 80% of long term conditions in the UK. Physical activity is a lifestyle factor in disease and premature mortality, along with diet, smoking and alcohol.

A UK study following up 4886 adults for 20 years looked at the individual risk of each of four main lifestyle factors (Kvaavik E, Batty DG, Ursin G, MD, Huxley R, Gale CR, Influence of Individual and Combined Health Behaviours on Total and Cause Specific Mortality in Men and Women The United KingdomHealth and Lifestyle Survey ARCH INTERN MED/VOL 170 (NO. 8), APR 26, 2010).

The researchers calculated how much the risk factors contributed to all-cause mortality, cardio vascular disease (CVD) and cancer mortality based on each health behaviour. For physical activity the population was divided into those completing more than 2 hours and less than 2 hours of leisure time activity per week.

In Figure 1 the results show that smoking and inactivity have equal all-cause mortality hazard ratios but that for cardiovascular disease physical inactivity is the most important risk factor.

Allender et al (Allenda S, Foster C, Scarborough P, Raynor M, The Burden of Physical activity-related ill health in the UK. J.Epidemiol, Community Health 2007; 61;344-348.) calculated that the direct cost to the NHS of physical inactivity in England was £1.06 billion per year. This is acknowledged by the authors as being an underestimate since arthritis, prevention of falls and the social care required to look after the elderly who have become dependent due to inactivity are not included. It also does not include the large burden on mental health.

Table 1 shows the costs of inactivity for each disease area. This is further adapted for London which has 6.1 million adults or 14.7% of England’s adult population of 41.4 million adults.

The above statistics and many other research reports show just how important physical activity is for prevention of these conditions as well as improvements in quality of life for people already living with long term health conditions.

It is hard to engage these people into physical activity because not only do they have psychological barriers like most of the population, but also physical barriers caused by the conditions.

In the past most of engagement work has been done in person through GPs and other health professionals with various levels of success.

We decided to take a different approach and use digital marketing to engage these people. According to a study of the market, 71% of 55-to-75 year olds now own an app-capable handset. And about 50% had Facebook installed compared to a 70% figure for all adults. Read full article here.

We already ran successful campaigns for over 50s in general and people with disabilities, so were pretty confident we could engage this audience too.

The Facebook lead ad campaign

The results

We ran the campaign in the first few weeks of January. As it was early in the new year people had a strong desire to become more active.

We used our standard marketing strategy – the 2-step process:

• Step 1 is all about driving enquiries and
• Step 2 is following-up.

With a £600 ad budget we managed to reach more than 14,000 people living across Redbridge and 300 of them signed up to receive more information about the walks.

That’s £2 per person with long term health condition!

“I wasn’t convinced that Facebook Ads would work for engaging a hard-to-reach group like those with Long Term Health Conditions. But the response has been amazing.

I’ve just sent John through the list of new walker forms, and normally there’s just a few – but this time there’s a huge stack of them.

It’s really exciting – and I can see that digital marketing and Facebook Ads work for engaging hard-to-reach groups, and they’re the way forward.”

Michelle Wood, Vision Redbridge

Set up

Detailed Targeting

To make sure we were reaching the right audience we used Facebook’s Detailed Targeting feature. The social network has nearly two billion users and offers a staggering amount of free content that keeps most of us engaged for hours each day. The more time Facebook keeps users on the site, the more data it can collect on each of us. Facebook stores major demographic data like age, location, and gender, from when you first set up your profile. It also has data on:

• Your income level and property ownership
• Anniversaries, your birthday, your relationship status
• Whether or not you work at an office
• Your car’s make and model, and how much would you spend on a new car
• Your credit information
• Your operating system and email provider
• Your interests—everything from sports and shopping habits to restaurants and travel

Facebook is able to collect information beyond what you offer up on your own profile. It can read cookies on other sites you visit. All of this adds up to a lot of information.

We researched interests related to long term health conditions, for example:

• Cancer related interests were National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Support The Fight Against Breast Cancer, Macmillan Cancer Support, Pink ribbon etc.
• Mental health interests were – Mental Illness Awareness, BP Magazine for Bipolar, World Mental Health Day etc.
• Diabetes – Diabetic diet, Diabetes Health, Diabetes UK, The Diabetes Awareness Ribbon etc.

Demographic targeting

We targeted men and women 55+ living in Redbridge.

The ad

We followed a few steps to make the campaign successful:

• We had a great offer – We’ll send you information about the Health Walks in your area.
• We used an image of people our audience could relate to.
• We wrote a few lines of copy about the group and benefits people will get by joining it.
• We included a Call to Action, the next thing you want them to do.

This promotion generated:

• 1160 link clicks
• 245 post reactions e.g. like and love
• 39 post shares
• 67 page likes
• 300 sign ups

Follow up

Once the campaign started we had to deal with all the enquiries that come in!

In the first seven days we had 190 sign ups and the next eleven days 110. We made sure that people were followed up with as soon as they signed up. No matter what time someone filled out the lead ad form, we wanted them to get a confirmation letting them know that they have registered successfully. Therefore, we set up an automated confirmation SMS message and email that people received immediately after signing up.

Confirmation SMS message

We connected the lead ad form with the SMS provider using Zapier. Here’s what the message said:

‘Hi First Name, thanks for your interest in Health Walks in Redbridge. We’ll match you with the nearest walk in the next day (Monday to Friday) and send you the details. Thank you, The Active Redbridge team’

Confirmation Email

Here’s the email people received:

We collected people’s postcode when they first signed up so we could check which walk was the nearest to them and we sent them an SMS message with the details.

Around 10% of people attended the walk after hearing from us once. To increase that number we kept in touch with people for the next 3 weeks. One day before the walk we’d send an SMS message reminding them about it.

People really appreciate this support. We all know how busy everyone’s lives are and even though we have every intention to get active some other things get in the way.

Here’s one of the replies we received:

Analysis of results

We wanted to find out how many people actually attended a health walk, so we analysed the new walker forms and registers as well as sending an SMS survey to everyone who registered.

The new walker forms showed that 50% of new walkers came from Facebook.

The SMS survey had a great response, 60% of people replied answering yes or no. Whereas if you survey people by email you can only get on average a 10-15 % response.

This led to over 50 new walkers in the health walks in January and February so far! A fantastic result.

Interview with Luke & Louise from Walking for Health

Luke Martin and Louise Sheridan from Walking for Health have been responsible for developing and running a series of Facebook ad campaigns that have engaged over 20,000 people interested in walking groups.

They focused on people in England aged 50+ who have demonstrated an interested in cancer charities/support/awareness because they are funded by Macmillan Cancer Support.

If you’d like to hear the interview with Luke and Louise then click this link to get the replay.

Do you want to make your marketing 10x as effective? Depending on what you’re doing at the moment, this might be possible.

There are a few thing absolutely crucial in order to be able to really up the effectiveness of your marketing.

One is the 2-step process, which we are going to cover in more detail here. It’s really important to have this 2-step process in place.

Let’s talk about The 2-step process!

The “normal” way of doing marketing in sport and activity historically is to use what we call a one-step process. We basically only market the activity. Someone will make an ad or a leaflet saying “This is where the activity session is” by using posters and leaflets, and expect that people will turn up.

The main problem here is the lack of confidence that people have.

So people see the details of your activity, they think it sounds good, and then all of their uncertainties, nervousness and doubts start to come into play and they don’t decide to take part – and then we’ve lost them!

This means that we often only attract those people who are more confident – those who are already active.

Instead of this one-step process, we have developed our 2-step process.

Step 1 – Drive enquiries through marketing                                                                   

Step 2 – Respond to enquiries

At first glance, this doesn’t seem as it makes a big difference but it’s really important and it had an enormous effect on the way we do marketing.

1. Drive enquiries through marketing

To make this work we still need:

• Right marketing tactics
• Target the right people
• Right messages
• Right imagery

But, all we are doing here is trying to get people to make an enquiry in some way, to let us know they are interested.

This is a much smaller step than turning up to the activity, so we get a much larger number of people taking this step.

We can then follow up with them and get them to come along and take part. What this leads to is a large number of enquiries for the same (or smaller) budget.

You’ll get a lot of people signing up telling you that they are interested.

For example, we were running a walking campaign recently in Redbridge and we had 320 people sign up telling us they were interested.

2. The next step is then to respond to the enquiries

When we respond, we link people up with the right activity for them and we send them the details of it.

We use email and text messages for that.

SMS is very important and works really well. We’ve covered why SMS works so well here.

Then, if people have questions they come back to us with their questions or if they decide to turn up they tell us if they are coming along.

Finally, we have a chance to follow up with them again and again weekly sending them details of any future events or reminding them to take part in the activity.

What that does – it leads to those inactive people who were nervous about getting started having enough contact from us to actually come along and take part.

This allows you to address people’s uncertainty and give them reassurance.

They have a chance to engage with a real person and find out the answers to any of their questions and then they come along and take part.

This 2-step process is really effective in getting more people into activities, specifically those inactive people or hard to reach groups.

Next thing to talk about is using the right marketing tactics, we’ll soon cover this in our future blog posts.

Some of our results:

• In Bucks, more than 2000 people became more active.
• In Hounslow, more than 1100 people were involved in their Active 10 Campaign.
• Walking for Health engaged more than 4000 people with a Facebook ad campaign.
• In Wandle Valley, we’ve reached almost 500 people.
• We’ve reached almost 200 people with disabilities in Yorkshire.
• We currently run campaigns that have engaged hundreds of people across Hounslow and Redbridge.

You can find each of these as a case study on our Blog page.

Remember text messages? SMS? That old-school way of texting people before the i-message, Facebook and Whatsapp?

Don’t worry, most other people have forgotten all about them too! Did you know that 98% of all text messages are read and, although most people don’t like to admit it, 90% of those messages are read within 3 seconds of receiving!

It’s no secret that consumers and marketers today love email. But with an open rate of 98 percent, according to Mobile Marketing Watch, SMS messages can give email some serious competition.

They work for everyone (even without a smartphone)

SMS, or Short Message Service, utilizes the text messaging functionality of a mobile device and can reach anyone with a phone that has texting capabilities. SMS messages consist of 160 characters with standard messaging rates. Because we’re all so connected to our phones today, SMS makes reaching customers quick and easy.

Online Marketing

Make Sport Fun specializes in engaging people in different healthy and fun activities through online advertisement and social media. We’ve mentioned our 2-step-process many times in the past (if you want to read more about it – click here).

Here’s a quick summary of this process. Our approach to social media advertising is using Facebook Lead Ads. Facebook Lead Ads makes it easy for people to register.

The way Lead Ads works is that people just have to click sign up, and they’re shown a pop-up form on Facebook. The name and email address fields in the form are pre-populated, as Facebook already knows those details. Then all they have to do is click submit. That’s it!

But this is just step 1 of the 2-step process.

We have driven enquiries, but what do we do now?

Step 2 of the 2-step process is the most important one – Following up!

After someone registers for an activity – we have to make sure they get the right info as soon as possible.

In the past, we’ve normally used Email automation, and it worked pretty well.

The problem with sending emails is that people don’t check their emails that often, and open rates are often 30% or lower. If you called people that would work, but you and I don’t have time to call everyone.

The future of SMS and text
messaging is customer engagement and conversion.

While there are certainly other methods of mass communication,
the text message is comfortable, versatile, and powerful. While some may
predict SMS to wane in popularity over the years, tech experts strongly believe
there’s a bright future ahead.

Are your Facebook ads targeted well?

Images and photos are a powerful way of communicating on Facebook. That’s what catches people’s eye in the first place. Research at 3M Corporation concluded that we process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.

Below are Facebook’s three ad image best practices. See what you think:

• Choose an image that is directly relevant to your product or service
• Use an image that is bright and eye-catching, even when viewed at a small size
• Avoid images that have many small details or text and opt for something simple instead

General guidelines

To keep adverts high quality and engaging, guidelines have been set for the amount of text you can include in an image.

Excessive text in ad images may result in your ad reaching fewer people or not running at all. Try to use little or no image text when possible. The guideline is called Facebook text overlay policy. It’s a condition stating that any picture used for marketing must have no more than 20% text in it. There’s a tool that can help you determine how much text is in your ad image.

Review period

When you place your advert order, it goes through a review process to make sure that it’s OK with Facebook policies. Advert reviews may take up to 24 hours but are faster in a lot of cases. When it’s ready to go, you’ll get a notification that your advert has been approved.

Here are a few pictures that work

What images should you use in your promotion?

We have done a lot of testing. We found that the most effective images should generally be showing someone similar to the people you’re trying to attract, smiling and looking like they’re having a good time. 

Inactive people don’t want to see sweaty, red-faced people doing the activity, so don’t show anyone who’s really intense. 

You can find free photos to use in your promotion at www.promotingactivity.com.

Here you can see 3 images in their respective Facebook ads

Would you like to know how to engage almost 500 people in different activities? 

That’s just what happened in Wandle Valley with Facebook Ads.

Make Sport Fun started on a project of filling up walking groups for Wandle Valley Regional Park Trust and ended up engaging almost 500 people in a range of different activities.

We’ll cover how did we did it, but first, let’s start with some info about the Wandle Valley Park project.

The start of the campaign

At the beginning of the year, we ran a boosted post to promote two of the walking groups. We focused on people over 55 living near Morden.

As it was early in the new year people had a strong desire to become more active. 

We used our standard marketing strategy – the 2-step process.

Step 1 is all about driving enquiries and step 2 is following-up.

A few weeks ago we’ve covered the 2-step process in more detail, check it out if you want to learn more.

For only £67 we managed to reach more than 7400 people and more than 650 engaged with a post.

That’s less than 10p per person!

You can check out the post here.

Then in March we ran a second ad campaign. Again – our main objective was to fill up two weekly walking groups.

We set up and ran a 30-day Facebook lead ad campaign to promote two walking groups in Morden. It was aimed at women over 50 years of age living within a 3-mile radius of the walks.

We got 110 leads in only 30 days!

We followed a few steps to make the campaign successful:

• Write a headline to explain the offer
• Find a great image
• Write a few lines of text about the group and benefits people will get by joining it
• Include a Call to Action (the next thing you want them to do)
• Set up your ad
• Deal with all the enquiries that come in!

You can read how to do each of these steps here.

Continuation

Because of the success of these two campaigns we were then asked to promote other activity sessions Wandle Valley had trouble filling up – Walking Football, Cycling, Running and then Family Golf – mainly focusing on older people and parents with younger kids.

Overall results were as follows:

• More than 45000 people reached.
• Total budget on ads £923.73.
• We got 463 overall leads.
• That’s less than £2 per person!

Would you like to know how we engaged more than 3000 women in local activities in Bucks?

If you’ve already read some of our posts, you know about our 2-step process and if not, this is going to be the perfect example of how it works.

We all need a marketing system that generates leads, and that’s what our approach guarantees.

Let’s start from the beginning.

How did we start?

We started by building a database of activities – collecting details of thousands of activities taking place each week across the whole of Bucks, finally gathering more than 2000 activities.

This process required emailing sports and leisure centres and private activity providers.

Everyone who agreed to be a part of the Active Bucks project would get free promotion of their activities in exchange for at least one free session.

At the same time, we built an activity voucher site where people can find their ideal activity and download their free activity voucher.

This page is simple to use and there are no distractions.

Step 1 of 2-step process – Drive enquiries

Facebook ads

We used Facebook ads and advertised the offer of a free activity session to the target demographic: women aged 35 years and older living in Buckinghamshire.

There’s one really important thing about targetting a vast area like Bucks.

Be aware of where your activities are located. Most people are interested in activities no more than 3 to 5 miles away from their work or home. So if you have a cluster of activities in one area, focus on advertising up to a 5-mile radius.

You don’t want to promote to people who don’t have any activities near to them – this will be a waste of money. That’s something we learnt from this campaign and we have been implementing ever since with great success.

Examples of ads from the Active Bucks campaign

Step 2 of 2-step process – Follow up

After someone registers for a free voucher, an automated confirmation email with the voucher is instantly sent to them.

This entire process is automated, so no-one needs to spend time manually sending emails.

What’s great about automation is:

• The person gets their voucher immediately via email, no matter the time of day, so they don’t have to wait for someone to send it.
• Nothing falls through the cracks. When you use tools like Zapier, Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor etc., you’re able to make sure everyone who opts in is responded to.
• It saves time. The more systems that you automate, the more you allow yourself to focus on other areas of your work.
• If at any point participants drop out of an activity, they are still getting our motivational emails encouraging them to stay active, and offering them other activities to try.

RESULTS

Results from running mobile ads were far better than desktop ads showing us once again the shift from desktop to mobile internet use.

• We got more than 17500 clicks
• More than 3000 people registered for an activity
• More than 4000 vouchers downloaded
• We’ve reached a total of 224,426 people
• Our average CPC (cost per click) was £0.35
• 70% are insufficiently active when they register
• 77% are women or girls
• 57% of people are more active 1 month after registering
• 28% of people are more active 3 month after registering
• 37% of people are more active 6 month after registering
• 32% of people are more active 12 month after registering

I’m so pleased that I got involved with the Active Bucks programme because I received a voucher to try out Pilates at a venue near me and it’s been so good for me. I was surprised at how demanding it is, and I have discovered muscles I didn’t know I had. I have made very good progress – the teacher is brilliant – and one year later I am still doing it. I’m much fitter, more flexible and stronger. I walk to and from the venue, so that’s a fitness bonus too. In between the sessions I practise Pilates at home and I’m walking regularly. It’s all been very positive.

Sylvia Gibson, Active Bucks participant

The Active Hastings Fitness Rave event engaged more than 250 people while spending only £23 on Facebook Ads. All of this in only 18 days – that’s a bit more than spending a pound a day on ads!

Why were they so successful? 

We are going to cover Facebook and campaign results, but first, let’s start with Active Hastings and go over their decision to start using Facebook ads.

Why Facebook ads, and where did she learn how to do this?

Make Sport Fun offers a free online workshop on How to Engage Inactive People. Heidi Tambeh participated at one of our webinars where John, the Director of Make Sport Fun, talks about why Facebook ads are the best way to reach inactive people. Heidi was immediately interested. She then booked a call wanting to learn more about Facebook ads. 

John coached Heidi over the phone helping her plan the campaign.

Facebook Ads

After realising what great potential Facebook ads have in reaching local people, with John’s help she started promoting her event.

Heidi’s Facebook ad campaign had a £23 budget and lasted from 31st of July until 17th of August when the event took place.

The Facebook event had a total of 944 responses, people sharing, commenting, liking, saying they’re going – in only 18 days.

Targeting

The campaign was aimed at women and men 18-65 in Hastings, reaching a total of 42,237 people.

An interesting point is that 85% of the audience viewed the ad on a mobile device, showing an ongoing shift from using PC to going mobile.

This means the mobile ad look is important. So, spend some time optimizing the ad for mobile devices! It will really pay off.

Also, use a simple CTA (Call to action) button.

Have a quick look and enjoy the atmosphere!

Heidi Tambeh on using Facebook ads

 

“Using Facebook ads proved to be really good. It spurred us on to run more ads on Facebook which helps us get more funding. A lot of the funding is based on the audience we get involved. A big focus is women at the moment. People want to give you money to start projects that are specific to women. By doing something like this it proves that we’re engaging women. That’s good for us. Proves we’re doing the right kind of activity.” Heidi Tambeh, Hastings Borough Council

If you’d like to ask Heidi any questions then her email is HTambeh@hastings.gov.uk. You can also see more details about the work that they’re doing in Hastings on Facebook and Instagram