The Challenge

Carriage driving. What’s the first thing you think of? If it isn’t heart-pounding, fast-paced teams of horses and drivers navigating some of the craziest things you’ve ever seen, you clearly haven’t gotten to experience the world of combined driving. That’s all about to change.

Here in Kentucky, we do equine sports of all types. We’ve got thoroughbred racing at Keeneland, Standardbred racing at the Red Mile, the world-renowned Rolex Three-Day Event, and the Kentucky Classic Combined Driving Event, held annually at the beautiful Kentucky Horse Park.

The founder and organizer of the Kentucky Classic, Misdee Wrigley Miller, approached us about promoting the event on social media. We jumped at the chance to share the story of this incredibly cool but under-appreciated sport with the wider world.

The Goal

Promote the 2016 Kentucky Classic CDE by generating increased buzz on social, a promotional video to show what the event was like, and attendance of 100 to 500 people.

The Plan

Our social media team created a two-month content calendar to build enthusiasm, increase page followers, and drive traffic to the early-October event. We created an event page, a promo video, and a strategy for how to boost posts and use our budget for maximum effect. Our design team crafted customized art to maintain a consistent image that would greet the audiences about to come flooding into the CDE’s profile and event page. Then we hit go.

The Results

During the course of our two-month social promotion, the content we crafted for the Kentucky Classic reached over 360,000 people. The promotional video we created and boosted reached well over 250,000 people and was viewed over 150,000 times and shared 785 times, earning over 3,400 reactions. The event page reached over 74,000 people, with nearly 1,000 responding that they were interested or intended to go. The Kentucky Classic CDE Facebook page increased its followers by 55%, giving the organization an even bigger platform to start with when promoting next year’s event.

And we achieved the attendance goal the Kentucky Classic set for us, with an estimated 340 people in attendance over the course of the four-day event. This was a massive increase from last year’s event attendance, and gives us a solid benchmark to work from next year! Additionally, our friends at Post Time Studios live-streamed the event on Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday, with more than 8,700 views from 48 states over the course of the weekend.