Picture perfect

We achieved a 61% conversion rate on a budget of £980 for the promotion of that year’s photographic competition. Open to all architects, the brief has always been for them to take a great shot of anything that's particularly unusual, preferably of the built environment, with a simple disposable camera.

In the early days, traditional on the page advertising was used to drive the call for entries, but as time and the media landscape has changed, so have our communication channels.

Now we produce a launch video, hosted on www.zumtobelphoto.com, and over the years we have promoted the competition through a combination of targeted e-communication, online advertising and social media. For 2015, we made the decision to cease all online advertising and promote the competition through social media alone with the objective of getting architects to engage and share content. This was partly the result of the falling CTR we had observed with online advertising.

As well as a schedule of organic tweets sent through the official @Zumtobel_Photo Twitter account, we introduced promoted posts to ensure we were getting the competition out to as many architects as possible - the results were fantastic. For a total budget of £980, our promoted post campaign ran for 9 days delivering 626 clicks to the microsite (of which 382 of entered). That’s a massive 61% conversion rate.

In just the first week following that year's competition launch, we had over 150 entries from Top 50 practices (as per the AJ Top 120) and level of engagement about the competition amongst the architectural community increased dramatically. In total the competition had over 1,000 entries.

It's a great example of how a brilliant concept can be re-invented and successfully promoted over the years as communications channels change.