Case study: Caspian Media
Project: Event marketing
The client
Caspian Media is an award-winning media agency and owner of market leading business brands Real Business, Real Deals and Business Advice. As an agency, they deliver a range of magazines, digital services, and events for SMEs and their audiences.
The brief
With an increasing portfolio of events, Caspian Media needed to expand the team to set them up for growth. Whilst shaping the structure of the new events division and during the recruitment process, they required our event marketing expertise to drive their campaigns.
The focus of the project was to deliver delegates to their upcoming events: the Amazon Growing Business Awards 20th Anniversary Celebration, FDs' Excellence Awards, and the FD Surgery event series.
“Jemma worked well with our events director and the broader team. Her experience and instincts meant she was able to adapt to our needs and she is a pleasure to work with. I felt reassured by having Jemma work on our campaigns and would trust her to deliver again.”
The main event
We supported the Caspian Media team over a four-month period, delivering the following marketing support:
Marketing planning and campaign management
Leading on the marketing strategy, we created an agile marketing plan for each event. These were developed around user personas and segmentation, and driven by results.
Campaigns were executed using a coordinated marketing mix of targeted emails, PPC campaigns, direct mail, and the introduction of a brand-specific social media presence. All designed to reach the audience via multiple touchpoints to ensure ticket sales.
New branding and marketing materials
We worked with the team to launch their new brand for the FD Surgery. This involved the creation of a new website which carefully mapped the user journey and overcame the challenging task of bringing the series together in one place to allow cross promotion.
For their emails, we introduced drag and drop functionality with a brand-new template. This means less resource is now needed to create each mailing and the quality of the results has improved as the design is fully responsive.
Post-event reporting
After campaign completion, a full post-event report was created. This pulled together all of the data available from EventsForce, Google Analytics (using the goals and unique urls we set up), Adestra, and the PPC campaign platforms to give a full-circle analysis.
By reviewing the audience, booking behaviour, and marketing activity, the report informed strategy and planning for the next events in the series and provided valuable insights for the new team.
Recruitment
Getting the right team in to deliver Caspian Media's events was a must. We worked with the CEO and Head of HR to review event marketing manager CVs, attend interviews, and set candidate tasks.
Being external to the company but having worked alongside them within their office, we were able to provide an objective insight into this process and advise on the best fit for the marketing element of the future team.
“We got a great buzz as we watched delegates flock to Caspian Media’s events following our marketing campaigns”
The results
We were delighted with what we achieved during this project:
33% YOY increase in attendees
58% YOY increase in website visitors whilst maintaining traffic quality
60% improvement in email open-click rate following segmentation of data
32% decrease in bounce rate with new website
34% increase in open-click rate with new email template
The Caspian Media folk are a great bunch and they produce a fantastic collection of events which we were proud to market. With their target audience being SMEs, just like ourselves and many of our clients, marketing these events felt truly personal and was a joy to do.
