Attracting a Global Audience to a Virtual Climate Conference with Social Media Advertising

Project Drawdown and the Global Council for Science and the Environment had twin challenges in producing a global climate conference in January 2021: the ongoing pandemic necessitating a virtual event and timing that hit right after the 2020 holiday season. 

The big unknown: after nearly a full year of Zoom calls and living online, would our targets take a screen break at the end December 2020 when we needed to reach them?

To hedge our bets, our engagement strategy dedicated most of our social media advertising to the weeks in Nov and Dec prior to December 25, with multiple creative executions across LinkedIn, Twitter and the Facebook network. During the period between December 25 and January 4, we narrowed our focus to the best-performing creative and audience targeting to reach our audience goal before the conference opening day on January 5.  

What We Did:

• Assisting in ad manager set-up and tracking tag installation.
• Creating lookalike audiences based on the two organizations' rich email lists. 
• Created six pre-awareness and six consideration stage creative executions.
• Developed a funnel tracker to map our prospects' buying journey and identify/fix dropoff points.
• Developed a UTM tracking code template for the client's ongoing use.
• Developed a series of emails to registered attendees before and during the event.

We worked with our creative partner, Copeland for the social ads, a few of which are below: