Winner CIM Best Agency NI
Enchanted Winter Garden
How we sold out this annual Winter event in 2 weeks using Meta ads & TikTok ads
What is Enchanted Winter Garden?
Enchanted Winter Garden is an annual Winter event run by Antrim and Newtownabbey Borough Council – celebrating Christmas. Held in the award-winning Antrim Castle Gardens, Enchanted Winter Garden is Northern Ireland’s premier Christmas event perfect for families, groups and couples. The event features “dazzling illuminations, the marshmallow fire pit, artisan food stalls, walkabout characters and star attractions, including the Big Wheel, Helter Skelter and The Wonderland Wood”.
What was the goal?
Enchanted Winter Garden needed to increase the number of paid visitors to the event for Winter 2022. They needed to entice new people to the event through stunning content, engaging organic social media posts and well-constructed ads that stopped users from scrolling and made them consider purchasing a ticket! Being limited by seasonality, there was a timestamp on selling out tickets!
The results of Digital 24’s paid advertising strategy
Social media advertising using Meta ads (Facebook & Instagram) & TikTok ads
As discussed above, this event is Seasonal and – as such – tickets can only be sold within a short window when people are planning their Christmas activities – not before, and not after. For this reason, Antrim & Newtownabbey Borough Council required a strategy that would drive influence and action. This made advertising on Facebook ads (Meta ads) and TikTok ads perfect!
To maximise performance, Digital 24 took advantage of the opportunity to film content at the event itself itself. Because Digital 24 had worked with Enchanted Winter Garden previously, we were also able to make use of a historic bank of well-shot, high-quality content.
Before launching their campaigns, Digital 24 invested time in strategic planning, carefully analysing target audiences and evaluating the potential reach of each social media platform. By doing so, they were able to tailor their approach and ensure maximum impact.
Meta ads campaigns
Our objective for these ads was to reach & engage as many people in NI as possible, enticing them to visit Enchanted Winter Garden. A mixture of content shot by Digital 24 and UGC was used to produce these ads. Campaigns were split into target demographic groups, with tailored content in each set. Over the course of the campaign, Digital 24 optimised targeting towards users groups showing most interest around the event which expedited the selling of tickets.
107k
Total reach
33.6%
Video watch-rate
84.4k
Engagements
TikTok ads campaigns
The aim of our TikTok ads campaign was to reach & engage as many people in Northern Ireland as possible. We wanted to capture their attention, pique their interest and entice them to visit Enchanted Winter Garden. To create scroll-stopping ads we used a mixture of content shot by Digital 24 as well as UGC.
To optimise the effectiveness of our campaigns, we segmented our audience into specific demographic groups, tailoring the content in each ad set to best resonate with those viewers. The ads run were a mixture of regular TikTok ads and Spark ads for the purpose of driving profile traffic and followers on top of our primary objectives.
111k
Total reach
62%
Video watch-rate
3.98%
Engagement rate
Advertising strategy outcomes
With our TikTok & Meta ads, the Enchanted Winter Garden campaign actually had to be cut short – because they were fully booked 18 days earlier than planned! The ads successfully reached users within the Enchanted Winter Garden’s demographic with tailored content made to entice them to the event.
Not only this, because our ads on TikTok were run as Spark ads – Enchanted Winter Garden benefited from a growth in their follower size and video engagement that will benefit them in promoting future events.
