Case studies

Focus on Facebook: Cheltenham Racecourse

Background

Cheltenham Racecourse is one of our most prestigious racing venues, often referred to as the home of National Hunt racing. The Cheltenham Festival, including the Cheltenham Gold Cup, is the high point of the jump racing calendar and attracts around 210,000 people to the town across four days.

Cheltenham is part of the Jockey Club Racecourse group, which manages and operates 14 courses across the country.

Horse racing is facing challenging times with declining betting revenues, reduced racecourse attendances and an ageing fan base. As such, courses are looking to attract younger people to the sport and therefore open to introducing non-traditional methods for engaging potential fans alongside existing marketing strategies.

Keen to enhance its status as innovators in the sector, Cheltenham Racecourse was keen to explore the opportunities of social media but was unsure how to start.  Receiving an email in October 2009 about the launch of the new Vivid blog, Racing Sales Manager Craig Staddon got in touch with Vivid to explore how the agency might be able to help.

Aims and Objectives

To meet the Racecourse's communications objectives, Vivid recommended the development of a Facebook fan page. Vivid felt this would offer an effective method of connecting with a younger demographic and communicating with passionate fans who did not necessarily fit the profile of the typical member or racegoer. In doing so we aimed to find a new channel through which Cheltenham Racecourse could market their racing experience as well as creating an attractive online space for sponsors that could be integrated with their current sponsorship package.

Vivid looked to develop the Cheltenham Racecourse Facebook fan page as a means of engaging with young people to promote the excitement and enjoyment of racing. In addition, it would also look at developing the commercial potential of the page for the course.

 Strategy and Implementation

  • Enhance the design of the page, developing custom tabs and landing pages in line with the Cheltenham website branding.
  • Create original content such as interviews with racing celebrities (the celebrities were not paid) and share news stories from other sources such as the local and racing media.
  • Develop community management techniques to encourage conversations between fans and to give them opportunities to interact directly with the course
  • Construct special offers and competitions exclusively for fans based on the analytics provided by Facebook, including a Kauto Star vs Denman profile picture contest
  • Connect with potential sponsors and third parties to increase the value of the page
  • Send photographers in instantly recognisable ‘Facebook hoodies' to each race meeting to engage with fans in person and drive trafficback to the page
  • Complete the season with an integrated market research project to gather information on user demographics, meeting attendance and opinions on the page

 Results

  • More than 10,000 fans are now members of the page
  • Cheltenham Racecourse has the largest Facebook presence of any course in the UK and a case study of the consultancy's achievements is being shared with other members of Jockey Club Racecourses to provide an argument for the value of external agency support with a potential six-fold increase in consultancy fee
  • Traffic peaked on March 16th, when 2120 fans visited the page to find information about the Festival
  • We sold branding rights to Totesport for the duration of Cheltenham Festival and the page will be integrated into Cheltenham's sponsorship package for next season
  • Bloggers reported that tips left by Facebook fans on the wall of the page during the festival were consistently accurate
  • Income generated by the Facebook fan page in six months exceeded £2000 in ticket sales and sponsorship
  • An integrated market research report was comissioned to help understand fan motivation and drive activity for next season.

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