Case Study
Wellington Surf Lessons
Background
Wellington Surf Lessons is a locally owned family surf school, run by local surfers Stuart & Lisa. As lifelong ocean lovers, Stu and Lisa have built a lifestyle and business based on their passion for surfing.
Stuart grew up in Wellington and took up surfing with his dad back when he was twelve. His partner Lisa grew up in Ireland, surrounded by some of the world’s top surf breaks!
They are both extremely passionate about giving their customers the best surfing experience, providing fun and enjoyable lessons for both beginner through to advanced level students. They also have a gorgeous Yorkshire Terrier called Akela, who is a notable part of the team.
Introduction
Welly Surf Lessons originally approached us looking for some help with some one-off campaigns to test the waters. As with any good campaign, the foundations start with a solid set of tracking & analytics – something they did not yet have visibility on.
The first step here was to set up some tracking live, getting insight into all key online actions (including bookings made) and better understanding what channels were driving current users/performance. This included setting them up across Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and implementing their Facebook Tracking Pixel – so we could attribute bookings back to our campaigns.
Now that they had the tools to measure and track online activity, it was time to move forward into the second stage of our project –
Considering the highly engaging nature of the business, Digitella knew from day one that social ads would be the ideal way to reach and engage with their target audience.
We identified that there was a huge opportunity to take advantage of the Summer appeal – as well as the opportunity to connect with the audiences by telling (and visually demonstrating through imagery) how much fun it could be to take on surfing for the holiday season.
Surfing is sometimes viewed as inaccessible, but in reality Wellingtonians are blessed to have some great beginners surf right in our own backyard (Lyall Bay). Communicating this through our ads helped remove any barriers to giving it a go, and created a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out) across our target audience.
Strategy
The first batch of ads went live as an Engagement campaign – allowing Facebook to show the ads to as many people as possible, with the objective of warming up and testing the audiences, while creating brand awareness.
After two weeks of performance this campaign had already reached over 20,000 people – with over 1,500 engagements across our ad. We knew it was time to push our second step, some messaging more targeted at booking classes and programs.
From there, things got wild! For the next two weeks after the strategy shift (the last 2 weeks of 2022) – Wellington Surf had over 100 booked lessons/programs sold, with an average return on ad spend (ROAS) over 20.
Moving into the new year, Wellington Surf Lessons were stoked with performance, with most classes sold out in advance. This led to them extending some of their surf programs to meet this demand!
Taking our learnings and building out a bullet-proof set of always on ads allowed us to hit January with a splash – across our retargeting, lookalike and interested-based audience we saw results continue to creep up and outperform our clients expectations:
- A 160% MoM increase in lessons/programs sold
- A 36% Drop in their average cost per acquisition (CPA)
- A 210% boost in transaction value (sales), finished off with an additional 83% ROAS boost – settling with an average 38X return on ad spend.
Needless to say, Stuart and Lisa could not be more stoked with the results they were able to achieve in such a short period!
The Result
Stuart and Lisa are still busy fitting the over 500 booked lessons Digitella helped them book (coming JUST from Socials) over the last quarter.
The whole team at Digitella looks forward to working with Wellington Surf Co for the next Summer season, and continuing to encourage Wellingtonians to give surfing a try.
From The Client
“They have been proactive, efficient, communicative, and great to work with.”
The Team at Wellington Surf Lessons.
