Our brief was to boost the number of engaged likes for the English Heritage Facebook page, providing a larger audience for the new season launch on 1st April.

We articulated the excitement around the launch of the new season through a sophisticated geographically and demographically targeted ad campaign incorporating Social Stories to ensure we made the most of the social connections.

Alongside this we ran a Sponsored Stories campaign that reached out to friends of the existing users of the page, and promoted their interaction with the page to encourage more interaction and likes.

This was all incentivised by a competition to win an annual English Heritage family membership through a competition app where the user had to tell us which English Heritage property they would love to visit and why.

The campaign was a huge success with over 100% increase in likes at a cost per like well under target and a 956% increase in daily visits to the page during the campaign. However, more importantly than this, once the campaign finished we saw a 325% increase in reach and 233% increase in ‘people talking about’ the Facebook page showing how engaged the new users were with the brand.

After demolishing targets it is needless to say, we have a very happy client. Tamsin Burwell, Digital Marketing Manager at English Heritage said, “We’re delighted with the results not just in the volume of likes but the legacy we are seeing of a truly engaged audience. This is in no small part down to True’s excellent strategic targeting and consistently engaging creative.”

If you’d like to find out how we achieved all of this, please do get in touch.

This season saw us develop a brand new site for Cheltenham, aiming to widen the attraction of the famous racecourse to a broader audience masses, and make all 4 days of their famous Festival a roaring success through a media campaign delivering increased ticket sales.

Cheltenham wanted to create a head of excitement around the world’s finest Jump racing event and attract new faces to horse racing and to the Cheltenham Festival in particular. Also part of the brief was to make the Festival more accessible – a must for your social calendar.

The Festival campaign was fully integrated, working with Cheltenham’s other agencies, and included direct mail, posters, TV and radio working in tandem with digital media, including social channels such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

The website provided a hub for all of Cheltenham’s marketing efforts. A new Kentico CMS helped create bespoke user journeys, allowing everyone from novices to seasoned race goers to find exactly what they were looking for, from a beginners guide to racing or travel information to race entries, videos and results – with a compelling drive to buy tickets and hospitality packages throughout. News feeds and twitter updates keep the site live and current and improve search rankings.

In the run up to the Festival, bespoke homepage feature areas and dedicated landing pages (e.g. Ladies Day) promoted each of the 4 Festival days: Champion Day, Ladies Day, St Patrick’s Thursday and Gold Cup Day. An online countdown clock added to the anticipation. Cheltenham TV on the site allowed people to view last year’s event for a taste of what’s to come.

Meanwhile, sophisticated behavioural targeting and PPC campaigns were aimed at attracting racing virgins to the first 3 days of the Festival (Gold Cup Day is almost always a sell out), while retargeting display and email campaigns helped retain existing customers, up-sell hospitality packages for those days and encourage people who had already bought tickets to add more to their party.

Basket abandonment emails proved phenomenally successful in converting waverers.

An affiliate program promoted the campaign through hundreds of sites on a CPA basis while the use of social media helped boost Cheltenham’s appeal to B2B and B2C consumers in a tough market place.

The creative direction for the new site was focussed on delivering a strong emotional engagement for Cheltenham Racecourse. We used stand-out imagery and energetic copy to convey a sense of drama, excitement and anticipation, presenting Cheltenham 2012 as bigger, bolder and better than ever.

Cheltenham’s Twitter feed keeps the content live and current and Cheltenham TV and radio gives the user access to more insight, more expertise, more voices of the people behind racing.

While the site celebrates Cheltenham’s history and heritage, it also embraces people new to racing too, with a simple beginners guide and a prominent links throughout to Facebook and Twitter, where people can share their experiences.

A Festival countdown clock, bespoke hero areas and tailored landing pages capture the spirit and passion of the four individual Festival days and inspire prospective racegoers to be part of them.

Each of the four days (Champion Day, Ladies Day, St Patrick’s Thursday and Gold Cup Day was given its own distinctive badge and style to reflect the personality and appeal of the day’s entertainment.

Thankfully all of the hard work paid off, with a record attendance for the four days of The Festival, Website traffic was up 33% for the season, and up 53% over the four days of the Festival and online ticket sales rose 34%. We almost doubled our conversion rate from paid media, whilst halving the CPA. In fact, most media KPIs had over 100% improvements.

If you’d like to find out how we achieved all of this, please do get in touch.

We’ve been appointed by Aintree to promote one of Britain’s best-loved events, the John Smith’s Grand National. Our first task is to increase sales of hospitality and dining packages for all 3 days of the Grand National Meeting this April.

Emma Owen, Aintree’s Marketing and PR manager comments: “True’s impressive work for Cheltenham Racecourse made them the obvious choice when we were looking for online marketing support. The team at Cheltenham have nothing but praise for True. Having worked with them for a few weeks now, it’s easy to see why.”

Lindsey Richardson, Account Director on Aintree and Cheltenham adds: “The Grand National and The Cheltenham Gold Cup are world class sporting events and the undisputed highlights of the racing year. It’s our aim to make sure both meetings have their most successful year ever.”

Linked In activity for the National is already up and running, with display activity driving to a bespoke landing environment due to kick in mid February. Meanwhile keep an eye on www.cheltenham.co.uk as the countdown to the Festival begins.

Jessica Lamb , Irish correspondent for the Racing Post was amongst the first to tweet her views:

Impressive new site for @cheltenhamraces. Precise and simple. Urge all tracks to study site and way meetings are billed. #wellplayed

Her Racing Post colleague, internet editor Robin Gibson agreed: “The new look Cheltenham site is very good…certainly delivers impact…intelligently designed not only to showcase the Open but stimulate the glands for the whole term…super-comprehensive and could be presented as a guide to good design and navigation.”

While we’re obviously delighted with such high praise, the opinions that really count are those of the punters. Happily, Cheltenham’s Facebook followers are happy too. Their comments include: “love it”, ” looks great” and “really good, one of the best racecourse websites now.”

And we’ll save the last word for our lovely client, Cheltenham’s Communications Manager Mr Andy Clifton – never one to rest on his laurels:

“Thank you for all your hard work and inspiration. We have something we can all be really proud of and I hope will continue to set the standard as we develop it even further in years to come.”

Please do check it out yourself and let us know what you think www.cheltenham.co.uk

We have just launched a new website for global insurance and reinsurance specialist, Aspen.

The launch is the culmination of many months of collaborative working to achieve two key objectives:

• Develop a rich and premium online brand experience that enables Aspen to stand out more

• Offer increased user engagement, thereby establishing and nurturing new relationships.

We conducted a detailed planning and research phase with extensive stakeholder interviews involving over 70 key individuals from within the business. This informed the priorities for the website and the new information architecture design.

The website design aims to bring Aspen’s new brand positioning to life online.

Designed to provide more talking points between Aspen and brokers, the impetus behind the new brand demands rich and varied web content, delivered in engaging formats to encourage sharing.

Our stakeholder sessions uncovered the most desirable and relevant content and preferred delivery for Aspen users. A structured content strategy and customised EPiServer content management system was then developed to meet them. Their new CMS includes SEO, intuitive search, global reusable content, HTML5 video integration and RDF tagging.

We are also working with them to exploit the full potential of social media. Watch this space…

This year, Cheltenham Racecourse challenged us to exceed our 2010 results, despite the tough economy and, in particular, its potential impact on Irish visitors. We were happy to oblige.

Working closely with their above the line agency from the initial planning phase, we made sure all channels were completely integrated. We created persuasive, search-friendly promos and landing pages to give a real taste of the festival’s four days, each with it’s own unique flavour and a brand new, interactive hospitality finder.

We then set about driving significantly increased traffic to the site with a new search strategy, affiliate campaign, highly targeted behavioural email programmme and some fantastic Facebook activity.

Site traffic was up by over 21% and online ticket sales for each day up 18%. Planning now begins to make 2012’s festival even better!

Packed with exclusive news from clubs, managers and players, our npower football fanclub emails have also offered some fantastic prize winning opportunities. No wonder they’ve had phenomenal open rates!

Alongside this we’ve been conducting extensive user testing on npower’s online Quote and Switch journeys for residential and business customers. The findings are now being used to refine the online sales process, with further testing with SMEs currently underway.

Want to know more? Talk to Lindsey.

Our recent search seminar touched briefly on mobile search, sparking several questions and a great deal of post-seminar discussion.  It also turned out to be one of the most requested topics for future True seminars – watch this space.

In the meantime, here’s Denise’s ‘Top 5 Mobile Search Tips’ for 2011:

1. By 2013 there will be more internet users on mobiles than on computers.

This trend will be more prevalent in some countries than others, but even if you sell to regions with an established computer user base, be aware that mobile users will want to view your site.

24% of the UK population now have Smart Phones, and there is a 70% year-on-year growth in this market.

Check out the M&S website for an elegant mobile solution.

2. Advertising for mobile is driving a wealth of new ad formats – click to call, click to download, click to view a map and get a walking route to the location, click and see a voucher….

However, to take advantage of some of these you need to not only place the ad but have registered or setup other services.

Take a look at Google Places now and make sure you ‘own’ your place – then it will be quicker and easier to take advantage of opportunities later.

3. Natural search results for the mobile are much more ‘local’. Google Goggles is specifically designed to use your geolocation to tailor your search results, and even standard searches that don’t specify a location are often returning localised results.

Consider your strategy if you want to rank locally but don’t have an actual address in the town centre.

4. Google may not have as large a market share of mobile search as it expects.

Seriously. Go and find a windows phone and check out the Bing search. It’s beautiful. The results are probably not as good as Google, but they’re probably good enough for most people.

You shouldn’t assume that good mobile rankings on Google will capture your entire target audience. It depends almost as much on the handset as on the user’s normal search engine.

If you don’t know where you rank on Bing, check out their mobile search results pages and see.

5. There are other types of search. Did you know that if you scan a barcode you can automatically check prices for that product at online stores? Not in general usage yet, but look out for more and more people giving things a quick scan as they shop.

If you own a smartphone, search the app store for barcode scanners and have a play.

As the season of goodwill approaches, True’s fundraising expertise is kicking into gear with three new charity media campaigns.

In partnership with our friends and fabulous fundraising specialists, Different Kettle, we’re running a display and Facebook social ad campaign for Farm Africa to raise money to make a lasting difference to families in Africa. There are three elements to the campaign:

1. ‘Farm Friends’ invites people to make a simple donation this Christmas by buying a farmer in Africa a beehive, chicken, goat or camel on their friends behalf and then sending them a little animal toy

2. ‘Farm Africa Presents’ allows you to make a donation by sending your friends a personalised video

3. ‘Farm Africa ecards’ offers a variety of different ecards that you can send by making a donation, check out the recipe ecard for banana jam!

The campaign went live last week and will run until the last delivery date before Christmas which is the 17^th Dec, so if you’re looking for a gift with a difference, take a look.

We’re also running our first display campaign for Amnesty International designed to drive traffic to Amnesty’s site and encourage donations. The campaign tests three different messages – Join Amnesty to make world leaders take human rights seriously, stay on top of all world news by joining Amnesty and by supporting Amnesty you are supporting many causes such as poverty, hunger and homelessness. We will optimise the campaign to the best performing message. Find out more about Amnesty’s work here.

Last but not least, we’ve just launched the Christmas campaign for Wood Green animal shelters, using network activity and Facebook Social ads to help raise money to feed lots of hungry mouths this Christmas! If this year’s campaign is as successful as last year, there will be a lot of very happy cats and dogs around this Christmas.

Visit their site if you too would like to make a furry friend happy this holiday season.

Following a landmark study which raises many questions about the retirement plans of today’s mass affluent consumers, True have been helping Sun Life Financial of Canada explore what the findings really mean for IFAs and their clients.

A specially commissioned microsite: www.sensecheckatsixty.co.uk explores 5 key issues raised by the report.  IFAs are invited to give their feedback, see what their peers think and share thoughts and comments. Over time, the site will evolve to explore new questions and issues raised by the ongoing discussions. Sun Life Financial will use the findings to shape and refine their service and support – and to become increasingly valuable partner for IFAs.