Your walk, your run, your bike ride…
People join your event for very powerful reasons: in memory; for solidarity; because your charity means no one else will have to struggle the way they have. And it may well be an opportunity to connect with their tribe, or disconnect altogether for a few hours. Whatever their reason, it’s got to be a good day out, and that’s also a very good reason.
Equally, people won’t take part for many reasons: it looks like hard work; they don’t know where to start; they’re shy to ask friends for money; it’s a big commitment and they may have enough going on in their lives as it is. Which are more reasons to keep it light.
Sounds obvious, but too often branding passes for brand, and the name of the event alone passes for a proposition – and far too often, the algorithmic promises pass for strategy.
Lean into brand
Your creative idea is how you lean into the brand promise, how your event becomes an extension of what you do, your logo alone won’t do this. Your creative direction will work for those with proximity to your cause, and those with no connection to cause at all. That’s a lot of ground it’s got to cover.
You’ll need a creative proposition that can cut through in your awareness stage, convert in acquisition and build deepening engagement once people have signed up. Which means it needs scope to flex and you need different ways to express it for different stages of the funnel. Your creative direction leads to consistency and cohesion – the journey we take people on needs to be joined up at every touch point.
‘The best optimisation you can make is to write better ads in the first place’
The creative direction articulates how your walk stands out from everyone else’s walk. It captures why someone will get up on a cold winter’s morning to train for your marathon and in its DNA is what they will say about it to each other, and about you, and what it says about them. It’s the blue print for all the different executions you are going to write. It becomes the North Star.
Licence for direct marketing
Each film, each ad, each lived experience, every dog in a bandana plays their part in building the story you want to tell. Your video holds people’s hands through the funnel. Your Ads reinforce their reason to be there and at the same time get them to do something about it. Your early bird looks helpful, your last chance doesn’t look desperate. Your granular content strategy shows how broad your creative direction is. While you help them on their training runs you help them to have those awkward conversations with friends about sponsorship. Your creative gives you license to use all the hard-nosed direct marketing tools in the box to increase engagement, increase commitment, and focus on banking. People are ok with being asked, if you ask nicely.
Change the game with the media agency.
You know pretty quickly if your CTR is down or your CPA is going to go in the wrong direction.
When the learning phase is a significant part of your campaign period digital marketing orthodoxy could be working against you. Letting the algorithm do its thing might work if you’re ASOS running continuous campaign, but for events you’ve really got to think about your short campaign window.
In-flight optimisation is effectively live testing within the different phases of a campaign – you need assets up your sleeve, granular with targeting, a well thought through messaging document on tap and the confidence to switch things on and off. In other words, pre-plan as much as possible, and approach awareness, consideration and conversion stages with a test mindset. Oh, and have someone who really knows their way around the campaign dashboard managing it.
How I can help
March for Men (Prostate Cancer UK), was a campaign I led using these principles. It was optimised in flight (thanks Dani Hughs) and the creative direction and broader content plan led to a 38% increase in banking and a 15% overachievement on sign-up targets. But that wasn’t all. My retro of the previous year identified that 30% of signup’s through the paid campaign had signed up the year before, but they’d not been treated as such. With a new warm campaign we were able to reach further in paid. See case study here