Reaching new audiences through an effective media campaign to promote a brand partnership

WWT (Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust) is a charity that saves wetlands and works at the heart of issues like conservation, climate change and education. Founded in 1946, WWT is the largest international wetland conservation charity in the UK and one of the world’s leading science and conservation institutions in its field.

Our partnership with WWT spans managing their Google Ad Grants account, providing analytics support, and managing paid digital activity across various platforms for visitation, retail and regular giving campaigns.

Earlier this year, we launched a campaign to boost visitor numbers throughout March to May, including the Easter holidays and May half term, by promoting digital ticket sales and memberships through the strategic use of Google Search and Meta ads.

With nine wetland centres across the UK, there’s plenty to do and see for adults and kids alike. The centres are popular with parents as a fun-filled family day out, particularly on weekends and school holidays.

For this campaign, WWT secured an exciting brand partnership with Bing, the award-winning animated children's TV series which is produced by Acamar Films and airs on CBeebies. This collaboration targeted and effectively engaged families through Bing-themed trails, character Meet & Greets and other interactive activities.

We supported WWT in planning, executing and managing their paid digital ad campaign to promote this exciting partnership across all wetland centres. Creatives included CGI images and animations from Bing, as well as photos and videos of families meeting Bing and Flop and enjoying the various activities. The creatives included fun and engaging prompts such as ‘Join Bing and Flop to become a Nature Explorer’ and ‘Look who’s coming to visit us’.

Our primary channels for this campaign were Meta and Search.

With strong creatives, we were confident the campaign would capture attention on Facebook and Instagram feeds. To align with what was happening at each centre at various times, we split our campaign into three phases to promote Meet & Greets (a chance to meet Bing and Flop at select centres), activity trails, and a ‘last chance’ push to drive last-minute bookings.

We targeted the ads at families, especially parents and grandparents. We also included remarketing audiences who had previously visited the website or engaged with WWT posts or pages on Meta.

On Search, we split our campaigns into branded (including centre names) and non-branded terms (days out during half term/Easter and broader search terms for local activities in the centre location) to drive warm audiences and new audiences.

Across each platform, we overlaid location targeting, splitting campaigns by region to match the locations of WWT’s wetland centres. This ensured that our ads were relevant at a local level and were only served to people a certain distance from each centre that it is practical to travel for a day out. The geotargeting depended on the needs of each centre, with some centres opting for a simple radius around their location and others using a more granular approach by targeting specific postcodes.

This was the best-performing campaign we’ve run for WWT to date, as a result of partnering with a popular and well-known pre-school brand and implementing iterative learnings.

For a campaign like this, we typically expect the best results from Search, given the high intent of the audience. However, in a surprising result, Meta was the top performer due to Bing’s strong appeal among the targeted audiences.

We achieved over 2,400 trackable transactions including online ticket sales, memberships and donations. Compared to the previous campaign we achieved:

• An overall click-through rate of 2.3% - up 107%
• A 31% increase in conversion rate
• A cost-per-acquisition of £14.71 - down by 51%

The success of this strong partnership between WWT and Bing has sparked lots of creative ideas and provided learnings in terms of best-performing audiences and creatives. Analysing campaigns such as the top-performing elements and the reasons behind results becomes an iterative process which helps improve each new campaign going forward.

Our key takeaways were:

1. Brand partnerships allow you to reach an existing fanbase who might not have heard of your charity before. By including characters and key brand elements familiar to those fans, you can leverage existing brand trust meaning you’re likely to see a high level of engagement.
   
   
2. For Meta, videos typically work well for reach and engagement, whereas static images or carousel ads might see a higher conversion rate overall. This isn’t always the case though, so it’s worth ensuring you have a broad range of creative assets, formats and themes. That way, you can test what works best for your brand, campaigns and audiences, and allocate further budget towards winning creatives.
   
   
3. Simple calls to action (CTAs) are often the most effective, especially for direct conversions and sales. Tell the viewer what you want them to do and what to expect when they land on the next page, for example, we found that ‘Buy your tickets today’ works well for visitor-driving campaigns. We recommend testing a range of headlines and CTAs that provide learnings specific to your campaign.