The objective was initially to build brand awareness of Morden Hall and then to encourage engaged couples and wedding planners to consider downloading a brochure or book a space on an upcoming open day, before later retargeting visitors to book their space on this open day if this action hadn’t been completed. Considering this, we decided that the most appropriate initial way to boost brand awareness in a timely manner was through Paid Social advertising as Morden Hall had shorter term goals which required more aggressive expansion into the right markets. 

Using Paid Social meant that we could reach new audiences much faster, and target relevant users within a 50 mile radius around London to keep the audience pool highly relevant. 

Because Morden Hall wanted to expand into new audiences, we needed to understand audience and competitor research to identify market pain-points and how Morden Hall could amplify their presence as a solution to these. This resulted in a decision to tailor our approach into two relevant audience categories: engaged couples and wedding planners. This also meant we could tailor our ad messaging to these specific segments, and therefore maximising the impact of our ads. 

We also realised that the current website was not optimised for conversions and didn’t have clear CTAs. To combat this we created two new landing pages for our Paid Social campaigns with compelling copy and images in order to encourage users to download a brochure, or book a private visit or attend an open day. 

As we had different segmented audiences, it made the most sense to break down our conversion goals into segments as well, and ensure that the corresponding Open Day ads directed users to the most relevant landing page, and vice versa for our Brochure Download focused ads. This meant that we were covering the most common goals for interested users, and were maximising the likelihood of a conversion. This structure aligned with our engaged couples and wedding planner segmenting, and meant that we could better see which audience was performing better.

Our campaigns went live at the end of 2021, and targeted interest-based audiences at the top of the funnel in order to boost brand awareness. As there wasn’t an open day until February 2022, we initially focused all our ads on the brochure download conversion and so included a larger amount of information on the landing page and in the adverts themselves about the venue itself and what users could expect. These ads were launched just before Christmas and in December alone generated 24 brochure downloads at a cost per lead of £5.29, indicating that our ads were indeed driving new interest from relevant audiences in the target area. Considering that an average wedding booking was worth around £7,620, this was a significant return on investment.

In January, we introduced our campaign to encourage sign-ups for the open day at the end of February, which similarly targeted engaged couples and wedding planners. Considering that the open day could accommodate 100-150 people throughout the day, it was important to drive as much interest in this as possible to meet Modern Hall’s goals of booking 100 weddings for Summer 2022. 

Once this had been live for two weeks and started generating results, we set up a bottom of the funnel retargeting campaign which targeted users who had visited the open day landing page but had not made an enquiry. This was launched in order to catch any drop off after the awareness campaigns, and close the gap appearing between clicks and leads – as the top of the funnel campaigns had driven 275 clicks and 45 leads.

This generated a high level of success, and prompted us to continue on this strategy of focusing on driving cold traffic to the website to drive awareness and then recapturing these leads through retargeting campaigns. The bottom of the funnel campaign generated 15 leads at a cost per lead of £7.15, and we continued this strategy for the secondary open day in April 2022.