The Kitchen and Bath Industry Show (KBIS) is the largest international kitchen and bath industry trade event. Owned by the National Kitchen and Bath Association (NKBA), KBIS is dedicated to helping the industry move forward through education, collaboration, and exposure to the latest products and innovative designs. KBIS is produced by Emerald Expositions, a leading operator of large business-to-business trade shows in the United States, producing more than 50 trade shows and over 100 face-to-face events per year. KBIS is an amazing show that has run for more than 50 consecutive years – talk about longevity! Rebecca Corbett, Marketing Manager for KBIS, is in charge of keeping the momentum going.
Improving on Excellence
In the past, Rebecca had succeeded in that effort mostly via the traditional marketing channels of print and direct mail. While still working, the effectiveness of these channels was starting to trail off. And with the explosion of digital marketing, Rebecca knew that she couldn’t afford to ignore it any longer. “We had always used email to complement our traditional marketing efforts. But results just seemed ordinary, and open rates were starting to drop off dramatically. We needed a better way to use digital to get in front of our audience and boost attendance.” – Rebecca Corbett, Marketing Manager at Emerald Expositions When it came to plan for KBIS 2016 came around Rebecca was ready to make this year the one that saw a major investment in digital marketing. So she started looking at some of the options for digital marketing tools and services. Rebecca found the overwhelming and confusing landscape that is marketing and advertising technology. In fact, the research process was so daunting that Rebecca was considering putting off the decision altogether.
An Easy, Event-Tailored Digital Marketing Platform?
Then a colleague in Emerald’s Photo group talked to Rebecca about the results he had seen using Feathr. The results and experience he mentioned were impressive, but Rebecca was tentative – the digital marketing world still seemed complicated and didn’t seem suited to the work of an event organizer. Despite her doubt, she figured it was worth a call. So she reached out and spoke with Aidan, the co-founder of Feathr. After some mutual learning it became apparent that there was a great fit between Rebecca’s need for an easy-yet-powerful way to reach potential attendees online and Feathr’s Event Marketing Cloud. “The fact that Feathr was a digital marketing platform geared just for events was very appealing to me.” – Rebecca Corbett, Marketing Manager at Emerald Expositions. Rebecca’s main goal with digital marketing was to boost the attendance of KBIS 2016. Feathr’s programmatic advertising, which intelligently retargets event website visitors with optimized ads on other websites to encourage re-engagement, seemed perfectly geared to help with that.
Feathr’s programmatic advertising gets your event back in front of the eyes of your website visitors.
Rebecca was ecstatic. She had found an accessible digital marketing tool designed specifically for events and couldn’t wait to get started. She began by placing Feathr’s Super Pixel on the main KBIS website and on the sister site www.kbbonline.com, the home of Kitchen & Bath Business magazine, several months before the show.
Implementing a Robust Retargeting Strategy with Feathr
With her pixel in place, Feathr’s analytics showed Rebecca real-time information about her digital audience and their interactions with her websites. She was then able to organize her site’s visitors by segmenting them into the different audience groups she would later retarget. By setting up her analytics early, Rebecca built up a huge audience and had ample time to plan her future ad campaigns. Rebecca successfully launched not one, but five different retargeting campaigns catered to different segments of her audience. Working closely with her Customer Success Manager at Feathr, Rebecca periodically switched out her ad creatives to avoid “banner blindness” and continually engage her potential attendees.
The Results of Well-Planned and Executed Campaigns
Her eight-day early rate and three-month general audience campaigns had particularly impressive conversions – driving more than 700 registrations for less than $1,500 of media spend. Rebecca’s overall results for KBIS 2016 were outstanding. She achieved a $3.56 CPA average across all of her campaigns, impacting 11% of KBIS’ total audience. Overall, her ROI through Feathr reached $59,000.
And KBIS 2017 is Already in the Works
Rebecca has already renewed her Feathr subscription for KBIS 2017. In addition to retargeting, she intends to leverage Feathr’s referral marketing features, which allows her to easily promote KBIS to the audiences of her sponsors and exhibitors. With an additional year of analytics data (built up from the 2016 show) and the experience she has gained using Feathr, Rebecca is fully prepared to maximize the performance of her digital marketing for KBIS 2017.
