The world-famous Exhibition of the Lord of the Ring Trilogy was exhibited by Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS). Though HMNS expects that this exhibit will create a great deal of interest but it happened the other way, it didn’t have a lot of appeal to people. Every success of an exhibit lies in how well it was marketed.
The Houston Museum of Natural Science quickly called in Spur Digital to help reach the targeted demographic audience and generate interest in the Exhibit. HMNS was, also, hoping to acquire new patrons and members to their future revenue.
HMNS along with Spur Digital, spotted their target audience for the promotion and built up an integrated online media plan to achieve their goals.
It showcased an online challenge that was endorsed by online media outlets that included Search Engines, lists of third party E-mail and Web sites. Viral marketing was a vital factor of the campaign, therefore, Spur built an innovative plan to convince people to refer them to others.
Spur identified the target audience as males 18 to 34 years old who were fans of action and fantasy films, frequent video game players and movie renters, tech-savvy who generally didn’t hang out at museums.
Spur decided to use search engine advertisements based on this information which conveyed certain search words, sponsored e-mail advertisement, dedicated e-mail advertisements, banner ads on web sites that concentrated toward their market and a list of e-mails for HMNS.
The result of their marketing effort was outstanding. The impact of the viral marketing effort was undoubtedly great; more than 23% of contributors are from their feature called Tell-A-Friend.
The direct marketing efforts yielded impressive results as well. In total, the 12 week, locally-targeted online campaign yielded more than 2 million targeted impressions, 40,000 unique visits, almost 12,000 and 6,000 invitations sent by friends at a cost per action of less than $3.00. These contributed to the record attendance of almost 100,000 over 3 months.