the marketing attractions podcast

Conversations on How Nonprofit Attractions Drive Attendance Through Marketing

Why Your Attraction Should Spend More on Paid Social

Most nonprofit attractions aren’t allocating enough of their marketing budget to paid social.

Paid social now rivals television in terms of reach and impact. Yet, we see TV budgets increase while paid social budgets stay flat. 

We discuss…

  1. How paid social can be used to both achieve your Impactful and Opportunistic goals. (See our Media Planning Guide for Nonprofit Attractions for more.)
  2. When attractions should consider adding TikTok to their paid media strategy. 
  3. Some pitfalls attractions get caught in when running paid social media campaigns. 


This podcast is produced by attend media.

attend helps nonprofit attractions drive visitation through paid media. Download our free guide to media planning for nonprofit attractions at our site – attend.media

Episode Transcript:

You’re listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast. Conversations on how nonprofit attractions are increasing attendance and sharing their missions through marketing. Your hosts are Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of Attend Media. All right Jenny, today’s topic, why your attraction should spend more in social? You ready? I am ready. Yeah. Okay, so paid social media. What exactly are we talking about? Let’s get some definitions out of the way. Yeah, I think the organic social would be you are posting content about your attraction or free, honest, maybe a production cost on your social channels or paid social is our paid ads such as credit card, as a campaign manager account, we’re putting money behind promoting either this content or creating separate ad sets that really allows to do much more with our targeting and who we’re trying to get our ad in front of beyond just our followers. Yeah, and I think today we’re just going to be talking about meta and TikTok. So meta, Facebook and Instagram, TikTok, I do want to say that we’re very aware that there are more social media platforms out there, but for today’s conversation, meta and TikTok, so why don’t you give us a quick little review on Facebook? Well, first, Facebook and Instagram both fall under meta. I think everyone’s aware of that, but Facebook is really going to be our channel that dominates in total reach. And we also tend to see if we were looking at just an older audience, maybe like a 55 plus, they may be more limited to only using Facebook, whereas as we started getting younger and our 35 and under, particularly, we’re seeing them use multiple platforms and the two that really stand out there, of course, Instagram and TikTok. Instagram and TikTok, we really see being utilized more for driving engagement. We see consumers using it to both create and share content, but also to consume content. For like Facebook, we still see a lot of like joining it and being active in it because of communities that you might be up often. So my neighborhood community group is on Facebook. So I go to check that to see what’s happening. Yeah, we’re updating it for your grandmother, just so that she sees what’s going on in your life. I think our audience knows this, but it’s like my mom’s on Facebook, my little brothers on TikTok. But from an advertising perspective, you have a note here, meta is pay to play. Yeah. So from an organic perspective, just to think about how these platforms share your organic content, I think everyone knows that over the years, Facebook, particularly that in organic reach rate, meaning the amount of my followers I can reach in my organic content has gotten lower and lower. So it’s down to about 2%. So 2% of my followers on Facebook as an attraction would see the content that I’m posting on Facebook organically without me boosting or promoting that or putting money behind it. Instagram’s a little bit better. It’s about 20%. And then TikTok’s actually fantastic. It’s about 118% meaning not only will your followers see it, but also people like your followers that they think are interested in that may be interested in your brand or what you have to say, can also see it. So much higher organic reach rates on TikTok, meaning you really have to have a solid ad strategy on meta to ensure that any content is seen. Okay, so here’s the question. How much of my budget should be on allocated towards paid social? Yeah, so there’s I think a lot of things that can impact this, but for them most part, we really recommend that you’re spending at least 10% of your annual overall budget on paid social. You know, the most attractions that we see are actually spending too little on this. So we see attractions maybe dabbling and closer to like 5% of their budget or they don’t really have maybe a strategy for win and why and how they spend budget on this platform. So that’s something that I think across the board almost any advertiser, we would say you probably should be spending more. Okay, so let’s say I have a a million dollar annual budget 10%. Yeah, I like to look at the budget line around a million. So if you’re spending under a million dollars, you probably should be spending a little bit higher. Right, if you have a half a million dollar budget, I want to see you spending more than $50,000 on your paid social overall. So you may be spending closer to 15% of that budget and then anything the other variance comes with like campaigns. So illicitly we want you to spend 10% the minimum of 10% of that budget on social, but campaign by campaign can vary. So if you’ve got maybe a small campaign like your annual booat the zoo that you do every year, you know, you’re not going to drive a lot of people from outside of your market to this event. It’s very local. Maybe you’re spending, you know, $5,000, $10,000 to promote it. That is most likely a 100% social. Right. So as your budget decreases, your percentage should really increase when it comes to your investment on paid social. I like that. Say that again. As as your budget decreases, your percent spent on social should increase. I like that. Okay, so annual budget 10%. We’re doing these one off campaigns to promote some events. If a smaller budget, you’re recommending more of that smaller budget be spent on paid social. That yeah, and then keep mind if you’re spending more than 10% great. This is this is your baseline for like checking like are you spending enough to even be good one. Well, yeah, that’s what this episode’s about like we’re going to try to convince you to increase that budget. Right. Okay, so why? Why should nonprofit attractions be spending more of their budget on paid social? Well, let’s start with why they’re probably spending too little. So this is a channel where there’s never really been any minimums on, right? So you can spend $50 on paid social ads. You could spend $100,000 on paid social ads, right? Doesn’t matter. So I think because of this, there was a lot, there’s a lot of like testing and just like some trial or maybe have a little bit of budget left there or just throw it to Facebook. And there’s not there’s not always a lot of guidance on what you should be spending, right? So think about it. Are you going through and doing any type of exercise to say this is my audience’s and this is what I can spend like I might not spend that entire amount, but what is that universe look like? Like what can I actually spend against my audience to then see like well, if I can spend $30,000 a month, I think it’s my audience, why am I only spending $3,000 a month? So I think there’s like some there’s an exercise that you can do to help you determine what you need to be spending in these channels. But I think because there’s been no minimums, people will just sort of put their left over remaining dollars into social media. Yeah, I’m thinking, okay, you know, I was a former broadcast TV rep. I wouldn’t let a new client spend on my TV station say, all right, I just want to do one commercial per week. I wouldn’t let them do that. Like, hey, just save your money. Don’t need any worth it. Right, there’s no one there telling you why you spend a $50 a month on Facebook or $50. So we are, you know, whatever that is. No one’s going to push back and tell you not to do it. So you can do it. That’s why he’s been too little. I think one of the other reasons is that it was always this channel that was very cost efficient, right? The CPMs were very low. You could get a dollar or two dollars, maybe $3 CPMs. And that’s just really not what we’re seeing anymore. The CPMs have increased quite a bit and quite honestly if I if I do an audit on a plan and I see that they’re getting, you know, putting down two dollars as their CPM for Facebook, my first thought is, okay, well, there’s no strategy here. Like, what are they buying? Because when you start building out a strategy based off of various objectives and you’ve got video running and you’re optimizing towards a conversion, your CPMs are going to increase quite a bit. So we think about video alone. You could see it run anywhere from, you know, maybe a $7 CPM if you’re really just trying to reach as many people as possible to a $15 CPM if you’re trying to drive conversion with a video. So if CPMs have increased three, four or five times what they were, but budget seven increased three to five times of what they were, you know, five to ten years ago, then you’re getting even less out of your small budgets than you were before. Like those budgets just have not increased. I mean, every year when we think about our TV buys and we know those rates increase, we know we have to spend a little bit more to get what we were getting last year. So a higher investment to get the same to achieve the same amount of reach or frequency. And I just don’t see people treating social media that way. Okay. Okay. So what do we have to gain by increasing our budgets on paid social? So I think the first thing I would think about is the fact that social media users have grown, we’ve had more platforms introduced to this space. So reach really now is on par with TV. E-Marketer, insider intelligence, just really something early, I think the summer that really show that by 2025 social media users will surpass TV users. So we know that’s partially because linear TV viewing is declining as social media usage is increasing. But if you’re looking at what’s happening right now today, I mean, in 2023, it’s almost as many social media users as TV users. By next year, 2024 is predicted to be the same and then by 2025, social impact it increases our beyond TV. So it is important to understand that social media is a really great channel for driving reach. I think we use to think that was just our traditional channels that drive reach and our digital, particularly social channels. We’re really for like very niche, small audiences and that’s just not the case anymore. We can reach virtually anyone in social. And when you say reach, why does that matter? It’s because you can reach my mom and you can reach my little brother. It’s multi-generational. Exactly. So unlike linear TV where we would say that’s, well, actually let’s think about TV when we say TV, we have linear, we have broadcast, we have cable, we have streaming. So we have different platforms or ways of viewing TV, just like we have different platforms in social. So when we think of a full social media strategy, a multi-generational social media strategy, I might need Facebook, a very heavy Facebook play for a boomer audience or I might need, if I’m going after younger millennials or Gen Z, I might need a TikTok strategy. So social media channels can reach any generation. But I need a multi-channel, I’m a multi-platform strategy to be able to reach multiple generations. I mean, that makes total sense. Like if we look at, okay, we’re going to reach, we’re going to spend our money on TV and I’m going to put all my dollars into buying CBS 60 minutes. I can’t expect to reach 18, 25 year olds and 65 year olds. That doesn’t make it, you wouldn’t think about reaching multi-generational and just buying one TV station, one TV program. Same thing with social. Right, so back to West, I spend more on social, you need to buy more channels nowadays. I think this is kind of interesting because basically what you’re setting up is we should start thinking about paid social like TV. It’s on par with TV. Yeah, from a reach perspective, absolutely. And once again, yeah, that means multi-generational, that power to get way different audiences with this platform. Correct, yeah. Okay. Let’s talk about how paid social is a little bit different though. We can do a lot more executions on paid social compared to TV. Yeah, so we look at paid social, I think one of the biggest differentiators, benefits to running social is all of the various objectives that you can run. So paid social has this ability to be both an impactful channel for you and an opportunistic channel. So it can drive your awareness and it can drive a conversion for you. And it does it better than any other channel. There may be some other channels that can do this a little bit, but social is the absolute best at it. I think we need to take a step back here and define some words, some jargon for us here. At a 10, you wrote a guide, it was called the guide for media planning for non-profit attractions, were you defined, impactful, and opportunistic? And basically, what you say in that guide is by the way, which is available at attend.media for free with no sign-ups. How was that blog? That was pretty good. Yeah, thank you. So you define, you basically say all media channels need to be broken up into two buckets. One, be an impactful, the second, be an opportunistic. And impactful, this channel needs to be, the ad needs to be able to create excitement about the attraction. Right? So typically you’re seeing this as a visual, you know, radio, outdoor. This needs to tell that story, get people excited about what they’re going to see when they attend your attraction. On the flip side, an opportunistic channel, that has to have a reasonable expectation that that target can make a purchasing decision or even better go ahead and complete that purchase, like an online ticket right then and there. So kind of a, you know, use the funnel words, top and bottom funnel. Yep, exactly. They each conserve a different purpose. And by the way, much more than that guide, but you do say an annual overall budget, 60% impactful, 40% opportunistic, right? Right. We can’t expect to just hit people with a, you know, super quick, buy now message 24/7 year-round. We have to be able to build, impact and excitement to be able to have people act on buying a ticket. Tell the story 60% of the time, ask them to buy the ticket 40% of the time. Yep. You’re listening to the Marketing Attractions Podcast. Conversations on how non-profit attractions are increasing attendance and sharing their mission through marketing. Your hosts are Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of Attend Media. Attend Media is a media planning and buying agency, specializing in Zeus, Aquariums, Gardens and Museums. For more information, please visit attend.media. Now back to Ryan and Jenny. So let’s talk about some impactful strategies, or strategies within paid social with our impactful tactics. Yeah, I think when we think about impact, I think probably all of us think video, right? So it’s in some of our social channels like TikTok, like that’s all we are running as video. So if we think about a few strategies of impactful video versus opportunistic video, impactful video, think about like, I’m going to run my, you know, roughly 15 seconds spot. I’m going to communicate a lot of the different things that you can do at my attraction. If that’s a holiday event I’m promoting, it’s, you know, here’s all of the different exhibits that my holiday event that you can do, the difference in pricing, the difference in, you know, a premium night, a VIP, you know, whatever that is. There’s just a lot of stuff that you have to tell for some of your big exhibits, right? So how is that video creating the impact and telling me about a lot of different things about this exhibit? Or if it’s about the brand, you know, it’s a brand spot telling me all of the different things throughout the year that I can take, you know, that I can do at your at your attraction, maybe it’s a membership type message. On the flip side when we have a more opportunistic video play, we might be thinking of a very shortened call to action video six seconds or less, and it’s probably like a heavy retargeting play. Like you’ve seen my 15, now I want to just hit you with my call to action of buy tickets, buy tickets, it’s going to sell out, right? I’m, I’m, I’m following up with you multiple times to try to get you to, to complete that action. And then when we think about how we measure these two things, and I think this is why the length is important is because when we think about measuring that 15 second video that’s longer, it’s naturally going to have a lower video completion rate. So it’s not really something that we look as like our our main KPI, but we really start looking at this engagement rate. So how are people, you know, people liking it, sharing it, commenting on it, beginning a higher engagement rate with that video? Because we’re going to follow up with them with that shorter video and our opportunistic budget to retarget them, maybe at a lower cost to try to get them to, you know, complete an action. And that’s six seconds, but it’s just naturally going to get a higher completion rate. So I think we like to think through how we’re bucketing our video into these different strategies because if, if we’re just focused on like one KPI being a video completion rate across both buckets, what happens is we’re just going to tell you like create all sixes because they’re always going to have a higher completion rate. So this is where we have to be very careful with some of these metrics is, if you’re not thinking through how it’s supporting your your objective overall and the purpose of this channel and what you’re trying to do with it, you’ll optimize away from what you’re actually trying to achieve in a channel. And just in you’re going to create the you’re going to feed it the creative that’s going to allow it to achieve a particular metric is actually not going to support your objective. Yeah, this is discipline, right? Yes. And I think that’s going back to the guy. That’s why you set those those buckets. You got to keep the 60% of that budget in that impactful bucket. You can’t spill that over even though it’s so easy to do in paid social. All right, so just to kind of recap what you’re saying there, impactful executions, you’re really looking at a KPI of something like engagement rate, we know there’s some fallacy looking at just purely video completion rate. And just real quick, like could we use like an image ad does it always have to be video in order to be impactful? You can. I think obviously video is going to be more impactful than image, but it’s going to be more expensive. Right. But at the end of the day, you still are going to have to create some type of awareness around your attraction or your event before you can just start retargeting everyone, right? Like I’ve got to I’ve got to introduce it first. And if that has to be done with an image ad, that’s, you know, that’s fine. But obviously, video is going to be better at supporting or driving impact, but you can use image. Okay. And then flip it over to the opportunistic side. We’re looking at a KPI like a cost per conversion. Yes. So this is where ideally you’re looking to optimize for some type of conversion on the side beyond just a click on the the ad itself. And hopefully tracking, you know, all the way down through the ticket sale got it. And in a vacuum, 30,000 feet up, I’m thinking if we’re going to go and set up new campaigns for this, most of my impactful budget is going to be spent on platforms like Instagram, perhaps a TikTok, and then most of my opportunistic budget might slide over to Facebook. Is that? Yeah. I mean, when we were talking earlier about the purpose of these channels, people are going to Instagram and TikTok to consume or create content, they become more just naturally more impactful. Whereas Facebook, they’re spending less time on, and it really was a platform built for, you know, conversion based media. So we might not say Facebook is all conversion, Instagram, TikToks, all our Facebook’s all opportunistic and Instagram, TikToks, all impactful. But we might see more like 70% of our budget on Instagram and TikTok is going to be for impact and 30% is going to be for that opportunistic right retargeting, dragging the drive into a conversion. And on the flip side, we might say Facebook is going to be more like 70% conversion, 30% impact or driving some of that awareness. All right. So here’s another question that I see you get. When should my attraction start spending money on TikTok? Well, I think first is knowing that you’re spending enough on Facebook and Instagram because I think a lot of attractions still are not spending enough in those two channels. So we don’t really like to look at TikTok is saying, like, stop spending on Facebook, spend your money on TikTok, it’s more of adding TikTok to your social plan and you’re going to increase your social budget altogether to add TikTok to that. I think the first thing you got to think of is who is my audience. We’re talking to cultural attractions here and most of them, especially when I think I have to do Susan Aquariums, are now focused on like millennial parents, right? So is, does TikTok make sense for millennial parents? Absolutely. It doesn’t make sense for the younger side of this even more, right? I could see some attractions. Maybe if you’re a fine arts museum and you’re still focused on more Gen X or higher, maybe you’re not putting as much in, maybe your focus more on an organic play on TikTok right now before a paid strategy on TikTok. But I mean, I would argue that most not try to, you know, your children’s museum, my goodness, like have some fun on TikTok and get and start doing some ads. The other thing is with TikTok, you know, we’ve got a whole episode where we talk about how to how to work through an influencer program or create our content on TikTok. This is going to be the best place to start there. So if you are looking at building out an influencer program, then absolutely you need to start thinking about adding TikTok to your plan because it’s going to be the easiest way to really get that started. So we’re adding budget to our social paid social, where are we going to be pulling that budget from? So like we said, TikTok tends to be a little bit more impactful versus opportunistic. Again, especially if we’re using creator content, it’s very impactful when it comes to our ads and TikTok. So I would be looking at what, how can I pull from my other impact channels versus how can I pull from Facebook and an Instagram necessarily? So can I carve off a little bit of my TV budget? Can I carve off a little bit of my radio budget? Can I carve off a little bit of my programmatic display budget? Right? Like you’ve probably got that sitting in your upper funnel channels and you can’t measure engagement. You can’t, you know, it’s not a video. Like can I carve some of that off to start adding TikTok? So I think that’s really probably the first place I’d look at not saying you shouldn’t be running display on your campaigns at all, but if you’ve got a hefty budget in display, I would start looking at peeling some of that away to add TikTok to your social impact plans. All right. So let’s talk about some pitfalls and running a paid social campaign. Number one, you have here some of the clients that you work with will treat all the platforms the same. Talk about that. So we kind of went into this a little bit when we were talking about, you know, the object, the, I’m sorry, the KPIs within each channel. If you’re going to look at it at all and say Facebook drives a higher click through rate than TikTok, so I’m going to move my money away from TikTok and give it all to Facebook. You’re missing out. You need to set a metric to measure in each channel based off of the purpose of that channel and you need to stick to it. Exactly. Right? Because exactly you’ll end up optimizing away from your impact all to your opportunistic if you’re just focusing on one metric across the board. I think another thing here is when we think about the channels as Facebook and Instagram often get treated the same. So it’s all under meta. You can build a campaign on meta and then you can choose if you’re going to break it out between Facebook and Instagram or you’re going to let meta basically optimize towards the audience between the two. There’s definitely pros and cons of each. Obviously it’s going to be much easier to build your campaigns out and let it decide and determine where to run. But there’s definitely benefits of breaking the two out. And I think, you know, by breaking it out, you’re able to get some more insight about what’s going on. But by breaking it out, you’re also able to say, okay, Instagram and TikTok now, let’s compare these two channels a little bit more closely in terms of performance, like engagement, and Facebook because we’re going to push a lot more towards our opportunistic buckets, we’re going to treat that one a little bit different. That way, we don’t allow our meta to auto optimize away from Instagram, which really is going to have a different objective for us. I like it. Number two, don’t over target and shrink your audience. Yeah, so one of the biggest benefits of social, I think, is just the ability to build really niche audiences. But it’s also one of the pitfalls because I think people get so excited that they build out these really, really specific audiences that become really small. And when we think about non-profit, cultural attractions, I mean, your audience is your market, right? We already talked about this multi-generational. You have various exhibits that speak to different audiences throughout the year. So, create those niche audiences as in order to have that be the audience that you’re going to bid the heaviest against, create the most frequency against, but don’t only create that niche audience. Make sure you still have a broad enough audience to actually drive traffic and drive ticket purchases, right? Drive your out visitation because if you over target, you limit your audience and you limit the ability to actually drive ticket sales. All right. Number three, I’m kind of chuckling on this one. You can’t track the ticket sale, so you just optimize to CTR. This sounds like a bigger problem. Yeah. I mean, I think this is a problem a lot, face of the first thing I would say is I’d have some conversations with who your ticket, who’s managing your ticket sales. A lot of the time, you might think you can’t track it, because they’re just not going to give you access to their tag manager account, right? So, have a conversation with them about how you can track it. We’ve seen this happen with many clients. They’ve just always assumed they couldn’t track it. We have the conversation with the third party ticketing software. They give us the playbook for how to set it up. You just need to set up your own tag manager account on that page. They’ll give you exactly how to set all the tracking up and then we can go into place tags. So before you just think you can’t track it, make sure you’re having those conversations. Just make sure you’re bringing the right people in to have the conversations with your your ticketing software. If you can’t, because I know that there’s still restrictions, it’s not all perfect, then at least track up to the last step before you lose it. So maybe that’s you drive them to a calendar page or what type of ticket you want to buy. And then once they click on that, you might lose them. But now you’re able to track really kind of who’s engaged on your page. So it’s not just the click-through rate for the landing page. Honestly, if that’s all you’ve got, I would focus on other metrics like video completion rates, engagement rates, like reach focus more on that than a click-through rate. I just think I’ve seen time and time again where the click-through rate just drives you away from what your main purpose goal and objective is in any campaigns. Jenny, thank you very much. I hope you spend more money on social. Thank you for listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast. If you have a suggestion for a topic or would like to be a guest on the show, please visit our website at MarketingAttractionsPodcast.com.