Valley of the Sun YMCA

Challenge

Valley of the Sun YMCA needed a paid social strategy to balance the association’s needs with those of its individual branch locations.
Their audience expects a tailored experience and that tailored messaging depends on each branch’s amenities and programs, which vary widely from location to location. In addition, Valley of the Sun YMCA wanted to control lead flow dynamically based on each branch’s membership results.

Solution

Big Marlin Group strategized a layered Facebook strategy across the entire marketing funnel. Higher in the funnel, brand awareness messaging is consistent across the association, building memorability over time. Toward the bottom of the funnel, demand generation ads are localized to control ad creative and lead volume for each branch.

An important consideration was avoiding ad learning phases, which can result in a higher cost per lead (CPL). We structured the campaigns to avoid this issue, ensuring that branch lead flow has no impact on ad effectiveness.

Here are the average monthly results for each layer of the paid social campaign in Q4:

• The program campaign, with association-wide messaging, saw a 19% increase in form fills.
• The membership campaign, with association-wide messaging that can be turned on or off at the branch level based on availability, saw a 32% increase in form fills.
• The hyperlocal campaign, which is closely targeted for each branch location, saw a 49.7% increase in reach.