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Houghton Hall

Driving 79% of exhibition ticket sales through Meta ads

  • 14,297 Link clicks
  • 475 Pre-bookings
  • 1,339 Visitors in one day

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Completed Date

The beautiful Houghton Hall. A wonder to visit, this palatial manor was built in 1676 by Britain’s first de facto prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole. There’s a lot of history tied to this place, but we’re not going to spoil it for you, you’ll have to visit the hall in person to find out more.

Alex and Emily at Houghton Hall
The Goal

Seasoned locals and frequent visitors of Norfolk will know Houghton Hall is bursting with history. This county is big, the fifth-largest in England, in fact, and with all that space comes a whole lot of stories from the past. We’ve had a lot of royalty living here over the past several hundred years, so it’s fair to say we boast a rather impressive number of incredibly grand estates.

But why are we talking about the lovely Houghton Hall? Because we helped them with a paid social campaign, of course. Tracy, Houghton Hall’s marketing and events manager, reached out to us after being recommended by our friends at the Sainsbury’s Centre, looking for a bit of help improving ticket sales for their art exhibitions.

To say we jumped at the chance to get stuck into something drenched in Norfolk culture and creativity is an understatement.

After speaking with Tracy and Lady Rose Hanbury, the Marchioness of Cholmondeley and Lady of Houghton Hall herself, we set a goal to promote their current exhibitions through paid social ads on Facebook and Instagram. We wanted to raise awareness and engagement for their Sir Antony Gormley exhibit and their Dame Magdalene Odundo exhibit, increasing footfall and revenue primarily through ticket sales, and also through the cafe and gift shop.
What We Did

First, we needed to identify and explore the audiences these paid Meta (Instagram and Facebook) social ads would target. Upon discussing this with Tracy, we settled on three audience types – the art audience, the shopping audience, and the heritage and culture audience.

Audiences are identified by looking at the kind of content social media users consume. For example, an ‘art audience’ is identified by grouping together users who follow and engage with museum and art accounts and posts. These audiences are predefined by Meta and not something we or anyone else does manually. You will fall into many different audience types yourself, depending on what you engage with when you scroll.

What We Did

These three core audiences were targeted with three different carousel-style campaigns. Each one was designed specifically to catch the different attention types and interests of the three core audiences. We also targeted users based on location. In this case, we focused on Meta users based in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and London, knowing that art and culture lovers are often willing to travel a couple of hours for a worthwhile experience.

The three ads ran for just over a month, as intended, until the end of both exhibitions. Throughout the campaigns, Alex monitored the posts and tracked which images within the carousels people interacted with most, rearranging them when necessary to increase the number of users clicking through to the site to convert. He does the same with campaign AB testing, monitoring what does and doesn’t work with the targeted audiences. Yes, he’s very clever.

What We Did

We were fortunate that Tracy and Lady Rose Hanbury were more than happy for us to experiment with testing and explore different audiences.

It wasn’t just the campaign side of things that we supported them with. We also offered the Houghton team social consultancy, consisting of Zoom sessions on how best to utilise social media accounts, such as introducing interactive elements on Instagram stories, CTAs, the jab jab punch pattern, and how to effectively track their own campaigns in future. Social consultancy is all about helping people enhance their social presence independently, which we know the Houghton Hall team will master.
The Results

Houghton Hall’s average number of pre-booked tickets sat at around 60% of the total ticket sales before we began the campaigns. In the final week of our campaign, prebooked tickets made up 79% of that total. On their busiest day, 1,339 visitors stepped through the Hall’s doors! A whopping 14,297 users clicked the campaign ads and went to the website, and 475 of those users converted, booking an advance ticket.

The social consultancy sessions are also paying off, with Tracy and the team utilising Instagram’s features to increase the number of sessions to their website by 389% month-on-month.

We were very happy with the success of these campaigns, and so were the clients. They were so happy, in fact, that they invited Alex and our head of digital, Emily, to visit Houghton Hall and the exhibitions, where they met Tracy and enjoyed an incredible few hours exploring the hall and its grounds.

The Houghton team has already expressed interest in working with us again in the future, and we truly can’t wait to get back to supporting this slice of Norfolk history.

If you enjoyed exploring this portfolio, we’d be delighted for you to share it with others. And if you’d like to see how we can deliver similar results for your business or project, please don’t hesitate to get in touch, we’d love to discuss what we could create together.

Ben pointing at the camera

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