Founded in 1957, the Greensboro Science Center (GSC) has created and maintained their reputation as an innovator. They use technology to bring a new joy and interest to museums by bringing together a science museum, zoological park and an aquarium—all at one central location. In addition to their not-so-traditional take on science-based exhibits, they’ve added other attractions like SKYWILD and the OmniSphere Theater.  Learn more about the challenges they presented to Bouvier Kelly and how we helped solve them.

The Challenge

Throughout their 60+ years of existence, GSC has continued to grow their attendance to impressive levels. But as with any successful enterprise, it’s imperative to never rest on your laurels: there is always room to grow and share the wonders that GSC offers. Their team came to us to help devise a way to continue building their visitor numbers with both new visitors and previous guests. There is always more to see and experience at GSC, and our task was to demonstrate those offerings all while making the most of their budget. Maximizing their reach within their media budget was, and continues to be, a top priority.  

The Strategy

First and foremost, we dove into GSC’s existing strategy and found that they were already on the right track. Our job would be to add bandwidth, strategic thinking and refine their existing strategies to make them even more successful. To do this, we analyzed their visitor data from the previous three years, examining geography and other patterns. We reallocated budget by geography to maximize reach in areas with the largest opportunity for quick growth at first, slowly building growth from other target areas afterwards.

Then we focused on rebalancing their media mix to ensure they had a wide range of placement types. Any existing advertising outlets that remained were evaluated to ensure the placement was as high impact and visual as possible.

Next, we wanted to learn more about the cycle of visits the center experienced in the course of the year. In order to best allocate their budget, we needed to know which months typically yielded higher volumes of traffic. This was to strategically use those funds to create an even larger push during these high traffic months, as well as prioritize times when they had a big announcement, exhibit opening or event.

Finally, we implemented greater usage of Facebook advertising. We began delivering a series of targeted campaigns to different audiences with specific CTAs throughout the year. These campaigns were aimed at increasing traffic to specific events and exhibits, while also raising awareness and driving more visits to their website.

The Results

Overall, refining GSC’s strategy and reallocating their budget was successful, and the use of Facebook advertising helped the GSC reach a 7% increase in visitors for the year. Listed below are the total number of ad impressions each tactic produced: