Local World: Delivering Digital Seminar Bookings

The growth of its digital audience is leading the industry and the insight put at their customers’ disposal to access and target this audience is transforming the local media landscape.

At a regional level, Local World planned a series of nine free seminars in Bristol, Gloucester and Bath to reposition Local World as a ‘Digital Business’ and not just a newspaper publisher. The objectives of the seminars were to:

• Raise awareness of Local World’s digital capabilities.
• Inform and educate customers about how Social Media could improve their business.
• Boost sales of one of the advertising packages available following the events.

Each seminar carried the brands of the relevant newspaper for recognition – the Bristol Post, Gloucester Echo / Citizen or Bath Chronicle.

It was essential that the best possible decision-makers were invited to the seminars, in order to maximise seminar attendance and advertising sales.

Customers were segmented by their previous activity to help prioritise targeting and all had advertised with Local World between 1st January 2013 and 31st July 2014 and were based near Bristol Gloucester and Bath.

Chord developed an approach to firstly qualify customers’ responsible for marketing and social media and then stimulate their interest and excitement to attend one of the seminars.

Chord verified current data for decision-makers, job titles, email addresses and telephone numbers, so that they could be reached effectively and invited to the most relevant seminar either verbally or by email. Chord initially sought permission to send out an invitation to verified contacts, sent out the invitation and then followed up by telephone.

Each stage of the customer journey was classified and recorded by Chord. Attendees who confirmed that they wanted to book registered for the seminars by using the online ‘Eventbrite’ service.

The effective qualification and telephone follow up successfully led to 180 seminar bookings being secured.  Chord initially qualified 2,284 customer records, sent out 1,843 seminar invitations and verified and updated data for 2,163 records.

Over both the qualification and follow up phases the 180 bookings were achieved via direct telephone contact with 1,014 decision-makers – a conversion rate of nearly 18%.

Chord also delivered intelligence about the respective responsiveness of the 3 areas targeted. The businesses in Bath and Gloucester were far more receptive to receiving information and attending the seminar than those in the Bristol area. One of the factors for this may have been the Bristol event was during half term. In this instance, Chord was able to direct a number of these customers to the Gloucester event.

The campaign has also delivered updated customer and prospect data, including email address collection and opt-in, to enable Local World to market more effectively and reduce costs.