The Brief
Two iconic winter attractions, Skate Manchester and The Queen’s House Ice Rink, were set to return for 2025 under new management, aiming to make the events bigger and better than ever before.
Skate Manchester would offer a convenient city-centre location next to the Manchester Christmas markets in Cathedral Gardens, with a fully covered skate rink suitable for all weathers and an outdoor skate lane. This year, the event was also set to welcome Octopus Energy as the official sponsor for the first time, who would instal a giant 50ft wind turbine to partially power the rink, making it one of the most sustainable attractions of its kind.
Meanwhile in London, The Queen’s House Ice Rink would offer one of the UK’s largest rinks against the backdrop of the Grade 2 listed Unesco World Heritage Site, the Queen’s House, in the heart of Greenwich.
Carousel were enlisted to provide PR, Social Media and Influencer marketing services in order to maximise awareness, engagement and audience growth for both events, to ultimately drive home ticket sales. With both rinks offering a broad variety of discounts and special offers designed to engage local community groups, schools and more, it was also key that we showcased this community spirit and strengthened ties within the community.
Our Response
We created a strategic three-stage plan to achieve these goals, from pre-promotion to a stand-out launch moment and post-opening campaign to capitalise on this momentum.
Pre-promotion
To create a strong initial burst of activity and maximise awareness, we drafted launch announcement releases for both rinks which were sold in to local and national press, highlighting the USPs of each rink and the partnership with Octopus Energy to land strong coverage. We also negotiated multi-piece paid partnerships with The Manc and London on the Inside to guarantee a steady flow of standalone articles, social media content and email coverage within each city, to rapidly reach the target audience and encourage early ticket sales.
On social media, our challenge was to grow the audience for Skate Manchester following months of the channels being dormant, and to attract a new audience from scratch for The Queen’s House Ice Rink, which did not have existing standalone channels. With limited existing assets for both rinks, we started by creatively cutting together footage from previous years with stock visuals to create eye-catching video content to drive paid and organic activity. This was matched with messaging pushing scarcity with super earlybird/earlybird pricing cutoff dates to maximise sales, alongside highlighting key special offers for community groups, schools, NHS workers and more. We also began outreach to local partners, running weekly collab competitions that allowed us to tap into existing fanbases to convert new followers and drive spikes in reach and engagement within the local area.
Launch events
Next, we held a stand-out launch event for each venue, heavily pushing invitations to our press and influencer contacts to attract over 500 attendees. In Manchester, we secured the Lord Mayor to officially open the rink with a welcome speech and local celebrity Jorgie Porter to attend with her family, and in both locations we kicked off proceedings with a performance from professional skaters, with Dancing on Ice stars Dan Whiston & Vicky Ogden wowing the crowds in Greenwich.
These events led to hundreds of earned press and social media mentions, and we also enlisted two paid influencer partnerships with high-reaching creators for each city, including paid social advertising usage in our packages to ensure their content could be used to maximise ticket sales post-event.
On social media, we captured, edited and posted stories and a hero reel for each event live on the night to maximise visibility and capitalise on in-the-moment relevance, including footage of Octopus Energy’s gians octopus costume character on the ice! We also monitored mentions to reshare tagged content during the launch night and opening weekend, broadening visibility and spreading word-of-mouth referrals.
We also enlisted professional photographers and videographers on the launch night and opening weekend to capture a variety of stills and footage to promote the events through key marketing channels. This included PR wire photography to maximise press-coverage in line with our ‘now open’ sell-in, and a variety of drone, go-pro and handheld camera footage to create stand-out social media content, covering both day and night views of the rink and including attendees to represent all our key target demographics, from families and students to couples and friendship groups.
Post-launch momentum
Post-opening, we created multiple video edits to appeal to different demographics and showcase different elements of the rink, including aerial drone views of the sun setting over the rink at The Queen’s House against London’s skyline, skating tips from our professional performer in Manchester, action shots of talented skaters, reviews and vox pops from attendees to provide social proof. These were used to maximise the effectiveness of our social media advertising, matched with retargeting of website visitors and engaged viewers to drive down conversion costs and increase return on ad spend.
From an influencer marketing perspective, we continued to book in free-of-charge influencer visits to sustain earned mentions on social media, resharing strong content on the brand channels, as well as hosting a follow-up dedicated influencer day and Octopus plushie giveaway for another burst of strong social media content. Meanwhile, we pushed PR leads and reactive approaches to ensure the rinks featured in all Christmas round-up guides for each city.
"“Carousel has been instrumental in making Skate Manchester and The Queen’s House Ice Rink the most talked-about attractions this winter. Their PR & influencer marketing expertise allowed us to host packed-out launch events that generated countless press & social media mentions, and the social media team has created showstopping content that has driven incredible follower growth and ticket sales.”"
The Results
The campaign delivered exemplary results on all fronts, driving mass awareness and audience engagement as well as converting strong sales.
From a PR and influencer marketing perspective, we drove over 390 pieces of coverage with a combined total reach in excess of 888M, including hits in BBC News, the Evening Standard, the Mirror, Time Out, Metro, Manchester Evening News & many other key regional titles. This also included over 15M total reach from influencer mentions, maximising social media visibility.
Likewise on social media, our organic and paid social strategy drove 2.59m in owned channel reach, delivering over 1.5M video views, 46k engagements and 8.7k new followers within the campaign’s 4 ½ month run. This activity also drove over 1.6k social media conversions, generating over £81k in sales revenue with an average ROAS of 6.41.
Want us to help your event or attraction glide into the headlines, stun social media audiences and make ticket sales fly faster than a pro ice skater?
Then get in touch.
