Business Context

Skift approached us to help them drive ticket sales for their Skift Asia Forum conference in Singapore and Skift Tech Forum in San Francisco. Their head of Marketing recently left the company and they had no institutional knowledge on how to utilize paid and owned channels to promote their conferences, since media buying was outsourced to freelancers.

Assess Digital Marketing Plan

Working in partnership with their internal marketing team in New York and London, we quickly identified gaps in their paid marketing plan, particularly around how to utilize their existing owned audiences.

We understood that a travel industry conference would only be interesting to people who already read and trusted Skift.com. Rather than leaning on 3rd party audiences, we leveraged Skift’s CRM software (HubSpot) to identify three audiences to promote the conference:

1. Previous conference attendees and research purchasers

2. Returning web traffic

3. Engaged email subscribers

Launch Paid Marketing Experiments

In order to surround the target consumer, we leveraged a combination of Google Adwords, LinkedIn, Paid Social and programmatic banners to reach Skift readers who were most likely to purchase last minute conference tickets.

We tested a range of emotional triggers to drive click-through and ticket purchases, including:

• Mirroring the corporate executive

• Fueling FOMO, or “Fear of Missing Out”

• Promoting connection among peer-group

Leveling Up Skift’s
Programmatic Media Partner

Through the process of promoting the conferences, we noticed that Skift’s programmatic banner partner (Criteo) didn’t provide sufficient reporting on viewability metrics. Furthermore, we found that the attribution windows were inconsistent with the windows that Skift was using across the rest of the paid media channels. Ultimately, we decided that the managed service wasn’t proactive enough in providing a tailored solution for Skift and helped them migrate their programmatic media buying to Google Display Network (GDN).