Delaware River Waterfront Corporation

Challenge

The Delaware River Waterfront Corporation aims to transform Philadelphia’s waterfront into a vibrant destination for recreational, cultural, and commercial activities for the residents of and visitors to the region. They host year-round activities, from concerts and fireworks to ice skating and s’more-making. In an effort to boost sales to their winter events and build awareness around their newest property, Cherry Street Pier, DRWC turned to Slice for their paid social media expertise.

Insight

Slice kicked off the engagement with a comprehensive data analysis of DRWC’s current paid social media campaigns. After reviewing the last two years of ad performance, Slice identified several opportunities to increase efficiencies and optimize DRWC’s budget in order to increase sales. Using this data as a roadmap, Slice developed a 3-month series of ad campaigns that included 25 ad sets across four main objectives:

Sweetheart Skate

With the ultimate goal of selling tickets to WinterFest’s Sweetheart Skate on Valentine’s Day, our efforts were broken into two phases. The first phase generated brand awareness for the Sweetheart Skate and was delivered to three highly strategic ad sets through a short video. After two weeks, we retargeted those who had engaged with the video in the first round of ads and demonstrated some level of interest. Our end result? Facebook ads contributed to roughly 1/3 of total sales. For every $1 spent on Facebook ads, $6.20 was earned.

Cabin Rentals

DRWC wanted to increase WinterFest Cabin Rentals for the remainder of the season, so Slice started with a conversion campaign that reached three highly targeted ad sets, including a custom audience built from a pixel event that pinpointed the exact behavior demonstrated by past renters. In over six weeks, we rented 75 cabins through our campaign at an incredibly low cost per rental ($3.30).

Silent Philly

DRWC regularly hosts silent discos, known as the Silent Philly series. We couldn’t track sales for Silent Philly because ticketing was handled outside of DRWC’s hosting channel, so we were tasked with finding a new measurement of success. Link clicks were one indicator, and we optimized for traffic. But engagements were also a clear indicator of the content resonating, and we were happy to see our target audiences earning engagements at less than $0.01.

Cherry Street Pier

For Cherry Street Pier, our goal was to raise awareness and build DRWC’s email subscribers for this property. We implemented an awareness campaign delivered to two ad sets for four consecutive weeks resulting in a 14,300 ad lift recall (amount of people who would remember seeing our ad). According to Google Analytics, these ads drove 331 new people to cherrystreetpier.com, which was 7% of new user traffic from February 1 to March 8.

Slice then implemented a lead generation campaign which resulted in 324 new emails, at $1.24 email, which was an outrageously low cost compared to the industry standard.

Case Study