Our sister company Planning Solutions Limited manage three attractions and a hotel. They have been directly marketing visitor attractions and hospitality businesses for over 20 years.

General visitors have multiple ways to become aware of our attractions. Opportunities include the websites, social media channels, YouTube, (television advert in the past), adverts we place in various destination management guides, newspapers and other publications k. We also find ‘word-of-mouth’ recommendations remain a key way of generating new visits.

We recently (2016) ran an marketing experiment at CONKERS to see:

• How we could raise awareness of CONKERS#
• If we could do this cost effectively
• Can we manage this simply in-house, (we currently do all of our marketing in-house)

Our approach
Having considered a variety of options, we decided that using our Facebook page could help to meet the objectives. In January 2016 we ran two competitions, offering family day tickets as a prize draw.

We set up a post promoting and linking through to our schedule of February half term activities on the CONKERS website. To enter, people had to like and share the post. We also used the CONKERS Twitter account to help promote the competition.

The results
We were pleasantly surprised by the results, for example, the second post:

• Generated a page reach of just under 27,000 people
• Was shared over 200 times
• Was liked just under 200 times

Importantly, we saw a spike in the CONKERS Analytics account. On the first day of the competition when compared to the same day the week previously we recorded a 95.66% increase in sessions, a 101.38% increase in users and a 65.11% increase in page views.  Have a look at CONKERS.

We even ran a similar competition on Kent Life’s Facebook page and one of the members of staff ended up being interviewed on the radio!