March for Men is Prostate Cancer UK’s flagship fundraising event. An annual walking challenge held in Battersea Park, it’s the only in-person fundraising event the charity runs each year. Following the success of our campaign last year which beat fundraising targets by 22%, we were challenged with capturing high sign-up volumes with an efficient CPA.
As March for Men gives participants options to walk distances that range from 2.5km to 20km, it has a broad target audience. From families looking for a fun day out, to people wanting to take on a bigger walking challenge. Our strategy needed to consider audiences that were interested in walking challenges, those that wanted to raise money from charities, lookalikes based on Prostate Cancer UK’s own data and retargeting people who had completed fundraising events for the charity before.
Having worked with Prostate Cancer UK on its many challenges for two years now, we also wanted to evolve our strategy beyond conversion-only channels so that it also worked towards incremental growth.
Our paid search and social strategy combined a mix of awareness and conversion-driving channels based on previous learnings. For this campaign we tested the use of Google Demand Gen to push upper funnel awareness activity and then feed down into lower funnel performance activity. We also implemented smart targeting using AI Max: on Google it was used to help identify wider keyword reach that translated into conversions, across Meta and TikTok we used it to develop broader audience targeting.
To deliver the strongest performance across the full run of the campaign, we built a creative calendar using the client’s generous creative library while following best practices for creative across each channel. We targeted each audience with different creatives depending on the walking distance of the fundraising event that most suited their desires. We could also adapt messaging to ensure each walking distance had the right balance of number of participants as sign-ups increased. The structure of the creative calendar allowed us to be reactive based on ad performance and provide messaging recommendations to the client as the campaign developed.
For example, during the last week of the campaign, we suggested to the client that we launch a ‘Last chance to sign up’ message at the beginning of all social ads and a countdown headline across Google search activity. In doing this, we drove a 173% higher CVR and 64% more cost-efficient CPA in the final week.
The positive results we were delivering meant that the client increased our budgets by 13% throughout the campaign. By the end of the campaign, we had reached a 35% higher volume of signups than the previous year at a 26% more efficient CPA.
Most importantly, we also reached the fundraising target set by Prostate Cancer UK, helping to raise over £700k which will help fund lifesaving prostate cancer research into better tests and treatments to save men’s lives.
