Situation: a national event planning company needs a holistic multi-location campaign management solution
Wedgewood Weddings & Events is a leading provider of professional events across the United States. Since its inception in 1986, the company has hosted over 500,000 events and now manages more than 70 locations.
The company’s internal team focuses on wide-ranging marketing campaigns that promote both the brand and individual venues within multiple localized markets. Their digital advertising budget accounts for more than 70% of overall costs, encompassing multiple channels (including paid search, paid social, and display) for over 70 locations.
Highlights
Challenge: resource-intensive localized campaigns
The internal ad ops team at Wedgewood Weddings & Events manages a complex multi-location portfolio. The company owns more than 70 unique venues, each requiring dedicated digital advertising support to meet specific business goals.
Managing this array of multi-location campaigns efficiently was a significant challenge because nearly every process depended on hands-on, manual procedures. Creating and managing campaigns with the right customized touch to hit local and brand portfolio targets was extremely time-consuming and error-prone.
Wedgewood Weddings & Events tried using other workarounds to address these scalability challenges. However, these solutions didn't meet their unique portfolio needs for budgeting and pacing across multiple venues.
Instead, the team had to manually track spend, pacing, and performance across the 70+ location portfolio. This daily work was never-ending and prone to errors, resulting in unoptimized budgets.
In an effort to adequately monitor each campaign with these manual workflows, the company relied on outsourced partnerships and a large in-house team, which drove up their operational costs.
Solution: automation for multi-location management at scale
Wedgewood Weddings & Events turned to Fluency for a comprehensive operational solution that would enable bespoke campaigns for its individual venues.
Fluency worked with Wedgewood Weddings & Events to centralize all their data and account information, including budgets and campaigns, into a single operating system. This gave the Wedgewood Weddings & Events team cross-channel campaign management capabilities for every location in their portfolio.
At the core of their new strategy for holistic multi-location campaign management was Fluency Blueprints. Blueprints gave Wedgewood Weddings & Events’ ad teams the ability to rapidly build campaigns and streamline their QA process, significantly reducing the time needed to implement new strategies or make bulk changes. Bringing these workflows and data together into one platform eliminated data silos, manual workflows, and errors.
Fluency’s platform also leveraged automation for budget pacing and reallocation across the entire Wedgewood Weddings & Events portfolio. The team could set different automated pacing strategies for different venues based on what worked best for each one. The platform’s reallocation capabilities streamlined the shifting of funds to optimize spending across channels, locations, campaigns, and ad sets.
Plus, Fluency continuously provides the Wedgewood Weddings & Events team with proactive notifications around issues, opportunities, and other insights so that teams can stay focused on optimization instead of redundant grunt work.
Results: improved performance and operational workflows at less cost
The implementation of Fluency enabled the Wedgewood Weddings & Events team to reduce their daily ad management time from 300 hours per week to less than 30 hours: a 90% reduction in campaign management hours.
With this saved time, the ad ops team gained immense strategic agility. They could develop and test new campaign strategies in hours instead of weeks or months, enabling them to rapidly adapt to market changes and opportunities. Fluency’s platform provides incredible nuance in campaign management, allowing for clear insights into which levers to pull and when.
This proved to be pivotal to the organization when COVID-19 struck in early 2020. Wedgewood Weddings & Events was able to completely restructure their paid media campaigns within 48 hours using Blueprints, helping them maintain advertising momentum during a challenging and unprecedented period of uncertainty for the events industry.
Even though the team was primarily looking to improve their internal workflows, they were delighted to also see performance improvements across their entire multi-location portfolio. For example, they:
- Reduced cost-per-acquisition by 49% year-over-year during their busiest months
- Reduced monthly paid media operational costs by more than 50%
- Improved lead generation, including a 17% increase in appointments per location, indicating more effective targeting and conversion
The impact on Wedgewood Weddings & Events’ bottom line was also significant. They eliminated outsourced partnerships entirely and now manage their digital advertising with a small internal team supported by Fluency's automation.
By partnering with Fluency, Wedgewood Weddings & Events transformed their entire approach to digital advertising, achieving significant cost savings and performance improvements. Fluency's automation and customization allowed the company to effectively manage its complex portfolio of venues across the country, reallocate resources to high-value tasks, and respond quickly to market changes at the local level. This partnership with Fluency solved immediate challenges for Wedgewood Weddings & Events while positioning them for sustainable growth in their future digital advertising efforts.
