Immediate Media is the special interest content and platform company. Their brands include Radio Times, BBC Gardeners’ World, BBC Good Food and HistoryExtra.com

Following successful small-scale campaigns on single brands, they partnered with Upland Adestra to run a campaign across 6 brands, with increased investment to understand their ability to scale the activity. The long-term target being ‘always on’ campaigns.

Engaging users with content automation

They created a campaign named ‘Take 5 & Get Inspired’ that would deliver digestible content from 6 brands to prospects who may not have had engagement with the brand before. The customers would be encouraged to submit their name and email address in return for a free download + 5 days of content delivered by email. To complete the process (and the ‘5’ theme) customers would be offered 5 issues of the related magazine for just £5.

Prospective customers would be targeted through Facebook paid advertising. When clicking on an ad they would move to a landing page built in Unbounce, where their submitted data would be passed to Adestra, using Zapier to power the passing of data.

Nurturing new audiences

An automation program was built within Adestra to deliver the free download to the customer immediately, they would then be sent 5 content emails over 5 days, culminating in two further emails with the subscription offer. Immediate Media used Adestra’s Export Manager to pass the data to their data warehouse enabling full campaign reporting. This also allowed them to ringfence the data from any other active marketing campaigns while they were in the onboarding flow. This data could then be used for future campaigns.

The results

Immediate Media generated 13,189 leads, 612 subscriptions, and converted 4,799 contacts from opted out status to opted in. The success of this campaign led to a similar campaign in February 2021 named ‘Escape & Explore’. This was scaled across 29 brands and included a free downloadable issue, a survey follow-up, and a subscription offer. The campaign was a success and gave more insight into the way different audiences respond to Immediate Media’s lead generation campaigns.

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