How Macmillan made the world's biggest coffee morning even bigger online using video Facebook ads.
World’s Biggest Coffee Morning is Macmillan Cancer Support’s best-known fundraising event. In 2017 Macmillan set out to raise awareness about the event and to get more people involved. Facebook played a huge part in helping Macmillan achieve this, this blog explores how Macmillan used video format and Facebook ads to create a buzz in the lead up to the big event.
The Campaign
In 2017 Macmillan worked with a digital marketing agency Ayima, to encourage more people to take part in hosting or attending a Macmillan Coffee Morning. They did this by making use of video on social media, they focused on the Facebook newsfeed.
With the main aim of the Facebook campaign being to encourage people to host a Macmillan Coffee Morning, the videos created needed to excite people and keep their interest from the moment they signed up to the big day itself. Macmillan previously had used video on both Facebook and Instagram to increase their brand awareness, they had noticed that people had been engaging with video ads on social media more.
The team at Macmillan were keen to try video content again, aiming for it to be even more creative than what they had trailed previously. To help them understand what content people would engage in, Macmillan used several different creatives in a number of different formats.
For example:
- Videos
- Boomerangs
- Slideshows
- GIFs
This content was seen by people who had expressed an interest at different times in the build-up to the big event. This tactic saw a 43% increase in the amount of World's Biggest Coffee Morning hosts recruited year on year by simply clicking through on the Facebook video content. Not only this, engagement levels for the event were at the highest they’d been since 2014.
Macmillan Fundraising Marketing Manager, Abby Solomon said:
“Motion formats played a huge part in driving both awareness and participation for
Macmillan’s World’s Biggest Coffee Morning, ensuring there was a real buzz online
in the lead-up to and on the day of the event.”
These impressive results came from understanding what videos/content were receiving the most attention, which allowed Macmillan and Ayima to give a personalised experience to people, ensuring the content shown was relevant to what they had engaged with in the first place. This meant there was a 66% increase in post engagements and a 65% increase in page engagements compared to the previous year.
The use of video accounted for an amazing 97% of overall post engagements. Macmillan and Ayima were creative and effective with the use of video ads, allowing those who engaged in posts to be shown personalised posts in the build-up to the event, which kept the buzz and excitement of the event in the forefront of people's mind.
This blog was originally published by MarketingWeek. If you need help increasing your engagements via Facebook ads get in touch here and arrange a FREE consultation with a member of our team. If you’ve found this blog insightful check out more blogs like this here.
