In April 2020, Glide Agency partnered with Perth Zoo – an iconic tourist attraction where generations of families have visited the wonderful animals since 1898.
Initially, the plan was to use Facebook advertising to increase general admission ticket sales over the Easter school holidays.
However, this plan came to a grinding halt when the zoo was closed due to the restrictions placed by the state government during COVD-19.
As the re-opening date was up in the air, Glide and Perth Zoo hatched a plan to promote their ‘Home Safari’ – a series of educational videos and activities for school aged children, to aid parents in keeping their children educated and entertained whilst home-schooling.
A Facebook live campaign was launched simultaneously to keep people engaged with the animals and employees of Perth Zoo, which involved weekly talks with the zoo keepers and interaction with the animals, who were left wondering where all their human friends had gone!
The results of this campaign were encouraging. More than 6,000 users engaged with the Home Safari content, with just under 3,000 downloads of activity sheets
from parents.
More than 42,000 people tuned in to watch one of the four Facebook live streams.
These campaigns helped grow Perth Zoo’s email list by 3,000, and created a huge retargeting audience of more than 100,000 people, ready to re-engage with the next stage of advertising.
In June, the floodgates really opened! After the easing of restrictions allowed Perth Zoo to re-open in early June, Glide created a ‘Re-Opening’ Facebook campaign, promoting general admission ticket sales.
This campaign utilised the warm audiences built during lockdown and the best performing ‘cold’ audiences tested in the Home Safari campaign.
The outcome was mind blowing – the campaign generated a 43x return on ad spend just on Facebook!
With the average ROAS from a strongly performing Facebook usually sitting around 5-7x, this result was truly exceptional.
This has enabled Perth Zoo to re-coup some of the revenue that was lost from the zoo closing during lockdown, and has provided a strong platform to utilise membership campaigns and end of financial year donation drives.
Glide Agency continues to partner with Perth Zoo, further growing revenue from Facebook, Instagram and Google advertising, as well as adding Snapchat and SEO to their arsenal.