The 38th annual British Columbia Highland Games, ScotFestBC, returned to Lafarge Lake Park in Coquitlam on September 3rd and 4th, 2021. Events such as caber toss and putting the stone, and competitions in playing bagpipes and Highland dancing form the core of the festivities. The British Columbia Highland Games is proudly presented by the United Scottish Cultural Society, an umbrella organization of some of B.C.’s major Scottish cultural groups. The Games Organizing Committee is a year-round committee of 35+ volunteer members.
The ScotFestBC Highland Games reached out to Glacier Media Digital (GMD) /The Tri-City News (TCN) to help them advertise this event to the Tri-cities and neighbouring area. This is the first year that the games were held in September, so advertising was very important to them, and the client was open to strategies that the GMD–TCN team brought forward to them. Their main marketing objectives were:
- Increasing awareness that the ScotfestBC Highland Games were being held this year
- Driving people to their website and article
- Getting people to purchase tickets to this event.
Glacier Media Digital proposed a one-month plan that had two destinations/ points of conversion. The first reach tactic was to write an article about the games and host it on the Tri-City News website as sponsored content. Posting an article on a news site can help increase awareness, credibility and help users understand the event in further detail. GMD helped promote this article by launching community display ads and social ads. Secondly, GMD created Branded Community Display ads and Social ads to drive traffic directly to the ScotfestBC Highland games landing page. Community display is a great vehicle to reach local audience, as are social ads for events because the average cost-per-click is generally low. Glacier Media also sponsored the ScotFestBC Highland Games, including print advertisements in The Burnaby Now and The Tri-City News.
The results were amazing! The client mentioned the turnout for the event was incredible, more than in recent memory.
Key Performance Indicators
- The Sponsored Article ended up generating over 1,000 reads with a whopping average time on page of 5 minutes, 52 seconds. Additionally, 356 people shared this article with friends and family. The social ads driving traffic to this article reached over 5,800 people and drew 335 clicks.
- The Branded Community Display ads included Mobile Persistent Banners and Wallpaper ads. With these ad sizes together, GMD managed to deliver 221,237 impressions, 674 clicks with a click-through rate (CTR) of 0.30%.
- The Social ads only ran for 13 days with a Facebook Ad spend of $1,000. In this short period of time, and with help of GMD targeting strategy, the social ads were able to generate a whopping 15,281 clicks with an average cost per click (CPC) of CA$0.07. The average CPC for Facebook ads across all industries is usually $1.72.