Palm Beach International Boat Show 2019 Uses Full Funnel Digital Strategy

Large crowds packed the West Palm Beach waterfront to see more than 1,000 boats and yachts at the recent Palm Beach International Boat Show 2019, which saw an increase in attendance of more than 6.7% over last year.

The organizer of this iconic event, one of the top five boat shows in the US, maximized attendance from the millions of online ads it ran by using a full funnel digital strategy which not only targeted its website visitors and other first-party audiences but also focused on generating awareness with new audiences.

This objective was achieved by blending multiple digital tactics including…

– Interest-based targeting which served ads to people whose online activities indicated an interest in boating, yachting, etc.

– Demographic targeting which enabled the use of variables such as age, income and location to reach consumers that matched the show’s target attendee profile.

– Social ads which promoted the show’s message to prospective visitors as people shared the show’s content with their network.

– Geofencing which used location-based technologies to create a virtual fence around a major event with a highly desirable audience for the show, and then served ads to mobile users who entered that geofence.

– Retargeting which reached the show’s first party audiences.

The show’s upper funnel spend pushed net reach for the digital campaign well north of one million people, far more people than would have been reached through lower funnel retargeting alone.

We highlight our client’s strategy here because many event marketers overspend on the lower funnel with retargeting while either ignoring or under spending on upper funnel online advertising which is essential to filling your pipeline with new attendee prospects.

While it is very beneficial to stay in front of people who have visited your website, if you are only going after the low hanging fruit via retargeting, you will miss potential attendees such as people who don’t know about your show, haven’t visited your website, etc.

The more people you add to the top of the purchase funnel, the more people you will have the opportunity to move down the funnel to ultimately buying a ticket to your show.

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Posted on May 6, 2019