The Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS) was chosen to display the world-famous exhibition for the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. HMNS quickly recognized that while the Exhibit was anticipated to create a huge amount of interest, it didn't have a great deal of interest for their main audience.



The success of the exhibition would therefore rest on how well it was marketed.

The Houston Museum of Natural Science promptly called in Spur Digital to assist in reaching the targeted demographic audience and create interest in the Exhibit. HMNS was also hopeful of obtaining new investors and associates to expand their potential revenue.

Spur Digital worked with HMNS to discover the target market for the promotion and developed a combined online media plan to reach those audiences.

The campaign featured an online competition that was marketed through targeted online media outlets including appropriate Web sites, Search Engines and third party E-mail lists.

Viral marketing was an essential component of the campaign, so Spur developed an original strategy to get people to refer their friends.

Spur recognized the target audience as males 18 to 34 years old who were enthusiasts of action and fantasy films, regular video game players and movie renters, tech-savvy who normally didn't spend time at museums.

Based on this information, Spur chose search engine ads that would go together with specific search words, dedicated email advertisements, sponsored email advertisements, banner ads on web sites targeted toward the preferred audience, and emails to the HMNS list.

Did the campaign work?

Like a well-oiled machine. The results were outstanding. The effect of the viral marketing effort was amazing – over 23% of registrants came from the Tell-A-Friend feature. The direct marketing attempts generated impressive results also.

Overall, the 12 week locally-targeted online campaign produced more than 2 million targeted impressions, 40,000 unique visits, almost 12,000 and 6,000 invitations sent by associates at a cost per action of less than $3.00. These were a factor in the record attendance of almost 100,000 over 3 months.

This simply confirms that viral marketing works - and works particularly well. So if you're not using viral marketing tactics in your business, such as creating viral information like articles, videos, contests, packages, etc, then you could be leaving a lot of income untapped.