Exploring Expansive Cross-Channel Opportunities for Out of Africa Wildlife Park

First, we needed to understand the monthly trends in terms of year-over-year ticket sales revenue. Noticing consistent trends in certain months such as March, June, October and December, we knew that we had to focus on building brand awareness and driving new users to the Out of Africa website during other months.

We integrated Facebook, AdWords and Content to put the right message in front of our target audience. Our objective was serve the most appropriate message to the most appropriate audience, at the right stage in the buyer’s journey. Considering the highly visual and interactive nature of the brand, we had the ability to create compelling ad imagery and copy.

We designed our strategy to run parallel with the site visitor’s position in the buyer’s journey (for example, new users were in the “awareness” stage) and utilized remarketing tactics to nurture these users through the cycle. In months where ticket sales were historically slow, we would keep the Out of Africa brand top of mind and engaged with its existing users through Facebook and Google ads.

Taking this into consideration, we focused our attention on driving new users to the website in “cold” months, with the knowledge that these users will continually be nurtured through our tiered Facebook ads strategy. We created a quiz that was non-branded but interesting and exciting enough to capture the user’s attention on Facebook and take them to our site as “cold” or “new” traffic. Once the user visited the website, they then had the liberty explore the various pages and programs that Out of Africa had to offer.

However, understanding that taking a quiz did not equal ticket sales, we developed a tiered strategy that would remarket users based on the various pages that they visited, including the quiz page. We also had the ability to remarket users based on their quiz outcomes, adding an extra level of personalization to the ads they were seeing, which we typically see result in higher CTR and on-site transactions across the board.

Using Facebook’s variety of ad formats such as the Carousel to showcase the different in-park programs and compelling photography through Newsfeed ads, we would finally send highly qualified users to the ticketing page to complete a purchase. On Google, we would run remarketing ads with creative that was specific to the pages the users had previously visited, with a pathway to the ticketing page as well. This way, all users had the potential to see an Out of Africa ad on both the Google and Facebook networks and the opportunity to make an online ticket purchase.

Bucketing all non-converted users into these remarketing campaigns across two networks helped us drive high revenue numbers with greater efficiency. The quiz, among other popular programs were used to progressively drive new “cold traffic” users to the site, and in “warmer” or “hot” months, we saw an increase in ticket sales in terms of volume and revenue as a result due to our remarketing efforts in nurturing those who were already aware of Out of Africa to the purchase point.