• by Tanya Gazdik , April 27, 2023

With the aim of driving ticket sales and increasing ROI, the Naples Zoo launched a digital campaign that resulted in a notable lift with Hispanic families.  

The effort, which ran from July 2022 to January 2023, aimed to bring the Naples, Florida zoo to the forefront of its target audience of mothers with school age kids, school trip decision makers and with interests in family activities and local attractions.

The campaign, orchestrated by Direct Digital Holdings's Huddled Masses, resulted in more than 20,000 clicks and more than 500 conversions. 

Initially, launch tactics includes behavioral targeting of “In-Market for Leisure Activities,” “Family Fun” and “Hispanic Families.” The effort targeted content related to parenting and families. It featured both Spanish and English versions of the creative when targeting Hispanic audiences and tested to see what drove more sales.

One week after the campaign launch, the agency looked at all the data and began making optimizations and moving budget towards the strategies that were driving the most conversions, creating new strategies based upon learnings and turning off strategies that were not working.

The “In Market Leisure Activities” segment was removed and more budget was shifted into "Hispanic Families" because it was performing better. The agency added "language browser targeting" and ran the Spanish creative on browsers that had their language set to “Spanish.”

Huddled Masses' proprietary algorithm created a seed audience from conversion data and targeted consumers who are similar to ones that are converting. The effort retargeted to people who visited the site but did not purchase a ticket. A unique remarketing strategy was create for users who had added tickets to their cart, but did not complete checkout.

Ultimately, the effort increased the number of minority families that visit the zoo, the number of schools that now visit the zoo yearly and yearly revenue.