Blackmores brings the community together

As I'm doing the #bsrf10 half again this year I always like to track how the event is doing. Looking back at the last two events, the online campaign is growing in participation, much of the tone is around support and below is a snapshot from last year's event.

- Training product recommendations
- An online product sales component with a free training singlet
- Registration that assists the user to chose their appropriate event in the SRF
- An online fitness training calendar (tailored to the user's chosen event in the SRF)that delivered a training calendar (provided by the event Personal Trainer)
- 'Ask a Trainer' facility
- Dynamic content (feeding from the BSRF09 Twitter account)
- Course maps and videos

The campaign for Blackmores Sydney Running Festival 2009 was the most successful to date in terms of online engagement, as shown in the comparative data between 2008 and 2009.(Google Analytics)


• Visits increased from 46,626 to 89,433
We did not see an increase in new visitors to the site from the previous year, but we did see double the amount of visits. This demonstrates that we achieved our goal of improving the level of engagement race participants experienced on the site. Much of this can be attributed to the training programs offered – 10,000 people signed up for personalised training programs. This figure represents nearly 1/3 of all race entrants.
• Page views increased from 211,727 to 243,934 (+15.21%)
• A recommended new URL strategy for this years’ site. This helped push a 1046% increase in search referrals from the previous year. (20,661 referrals > up from 1,802 referrals in 2008).

New tools and resources were added to the site to help attract more visitors to the site and engage them more effectively. We also used social media tools to create Blackmores Sydney Running Festival communities.

• Embedded video allowed runners to view live footage of themselves crossing the finish line. The videos were watched a total of 127,957 times. This clearly demonstrates the viral power of online video, as a total of 32,007 people actually ran the race, but they used the Blackmores training site videos to relive their race day glory with friends and family an average four times each!



I think this year will again see a good result or as runners say: a PB

Happy running and good health