Beef Australia

Beef Australia

Beef Australia was first staged as part of a national program of events and celebrations to commemorate the Australian Bicentenary in 1988. The exposition in Rockhampton, Central Queensland was so well received, it has been staged triennially ever since. Now an internationally recognised event, it has grown immensely in size and offerings and in pre COVID circumstances caters for over 100,000 visitors, including in excess of 1,200 international delegates from 43 countries who attend to enjoy, learn, and share in the immense trade opportunities the expo generates.

The week-long program focuses on all facets of the beef sector with an action packed program of activities and celebrations from cattle competitions, a symposium and seminars, property tours, cooking and butchery demonstrations, live entertainment, and beef cooked every which way.

With the inability to host international guests due to COVID restrictions, to maximise results, in February, The Creative Collective were contracted for event marketing – to build brand awareness, reach, website traffic and ticket sales by running the event’s digital marketing campaign. With the event due to happen in May, a marketing strategy had to be developed quickly.

Activities conducted in the 3 month campaign included:

• Establishing conversion tracking (Google Analytics + Facebook Pixels + Linkedin Pixels) on the website
• Establishing a wide range of audiences inside Facebook Business Manager leaning on the extensive capabilities to create custom + saved audiences (around 50 separate target audiences)
• Activating extensive Facebook, Instagram & Audience Content Network campaigns across various stages of the funnel including Reach campaigns, Video campaigns, Traffic campaigns, Conversion campaigns & more using a wide range of ad formats including carousels, dynamic traffic ads, video ads etc.
• Activating a series of LinkedIn ads targeting different industry audiences
• Strategically boosting posts on Facebook + LinkedIn to the wide variety of audiences established to ensure a range of user groups were targeted
• Advising the client on activities they could do to support our activities such as establishing Facebook events for each of the satellite events, establishing a LinkedIn event and more
• Establishing x3 chatbot competitions

The campaign Facebook ad strategy:

In Month 1 we mobilised x10 initial ad campaigns with x4 in the top of the funnel targeting generally relevant audiences Queensland wide, and x3 in the middle of the funnel who were highly relevant audiences for website traffic. We only mobilised x1 audience in the bottom of the funnel which consisted of people who had engaged with the clients FB & IG pages + the database they supplied as we had only just inserted Facebook pixels onto the website and had no remarketing audiences collected to work with in Month 1 in this regard.

In Month 2 we expanded on our work in Month 1, mobilising 14 new campaigns in addition to continuing to manage the existing ad x10 campaigns from Month 1. x14 new campaigns were mobilised included those to new audiences with specific aspects of the event which the client said they had good capacity for. The client also directed us to push the entertainment program as creative assets for this in the form of images and videos became available. Having collected data in Month 1, we were also able to start to utilise Lookalike audiences and website visitor audiences.  Further, we mobilised ads to the client’s ‘drive market’ given accommodation was an issue and these markets were more likely to make a ‘quick decision’ and potentially ‘camp’ at the event or stay with friends, or return home each night i.e. low to no need for accommodation.

Further event marketing campaign highlights:

Three chat bot competitions:

– Post reach of 122,895

– Post engagement of 5,600

– 21,003 clicks

– An average cost per engagement of $0.72

– 7198 post comments

– Increase of 4090 contacts on database

Incredible Facebook Ads results:

• Spend = $5358.57 (on FB/IGads only)
• Reach = 427.035
• Impressions = 2,057,773
• Frequency = 4.82
• CPC = 0.29c
• CTR = 2.5%

OVERALL EVENT MARKETING RESULTS

• The client reports that visitation results were up by 15% – an astounding result given no international guests were able to attend
• The client reports that the event contributed around $80m to the local economy of Rockhampton
• The client reports that they achieved their goal of attracting more young people to the event and this was largely due to the social media efforts

We are incredibly proud of the results we were able to achieve in such a short time period. We won Best Social Media Campaign in Queensland at the Australian Marketing Institute Awards in 2021 for our work on this campaign.