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Meta Ads Case Study
As a leading social media advertising agency, we designed and delivered a full Meta Ads campaign across Facebook and Instagram to drive awareness and attendance for the Lakes Hospitality Trade Show 2026, achieving record-breaking reach, exceptional year-on-year growth, and a dominant share of all website traffic.
The Lakes Hospitality Trade Show (LHA) is the premier annual event for hospitality professionals across the Lake District and North West, bringing together suppliers, operators, and industry leaders under one roof.
With ambitions to significantly grow the show’s audience in 2026, LHA partnered with Staunton Rook to plan and execute a paid social strategy that would put the event in front of the right people, at the right time.
Challenges & Market Landscape
01
Building Awareness at Scale
Trade shows operate in a crowded events landscape. With attendees making decisions weeks or months in advance, building early, sustained awareness across the right professional audience was critical. LHA needed a campaign that would cut through and reach genuine hospitality industry decision-makers across the region.
Maximising Reach on a Focused Budget
Efficiency was essential. The campaign needed to deliver maximum visibility without wasteful spend, meaning precise audience targeting, smart creative deployment, and a platform strategy built around where the LHA audience actually spends its time.
02
03
Growing Instagram from a Standing Start
While Facebook had been used in previous years, Instagram represented a largely untapped channel for LHA in 2025. Activating it effectively in 2026 required building a new audience from scratch while maintaining strong performance on Facebook simultaneously.
Strategic Approach
A Two-Platform Meta Ads Campaign
01
Facebook as the Primary Reach Engine
Facebook was identified as the dominant platform for LHA’s core audience of hospitality owners, operators, and suppliers. We ran a combination of awareness and traffic-driving campaigns, using compelling visual content and precise interest and geographic targeting to ensure the show reached the right people across the Lakes and wider North West.
Key Tactics:
Key tactics included targeted video and image ad formats designed to capture attention in-feed, lookalike audience targeting built around existing event data, and ongoing campaign optimisation throughout January and February to maximise link click volume as the event approached.
Instagram as a Complementary Awareness Channel
Instagram was deployed alongside Facebook to extend the show’s reach into a new, visually-engaged audience. Paid placements across feed and stories ensured LHA appeared in front of a broader demographic, reinforcing awareness across multiple touchpoints and increasing the overall campaign footprint significantly.
02
03
Driving Traffic with Intent
Both platforms were optimised not just for reach, but for action. Ad creative and calls-to-action were designed to move people from awareness through to the LHA website, where they could explore exhibitors, plan their visit, and register to attend. The result was nearly 13,000 link clicks across Facebook and Instagram combined demonstrating that the campaign translated visibility into genuine interest.
Results
A Three-Stage Marketing Funnel for Maximum Conversions
Key Metrics Per Month
What These Metrics Mean
The results from the LHA Trade Show 2026 campaign demonstrate what a well-structured Meta Ads strategy can achieve for an event.
Reaching over 438,000 unique accounts across Facebook and Instagram, generating more than a million views on Facebook alone, and driving nearly 13,000 clicks to the website, all while recording year-on-year growth that in Instagram’s case exceeded 2,700%, the campaign set a new benchmark for the show’s digital presence.
Paid Social wasn’t just the loudest channel. It was the most effective, accounting for nearly two thirds of all website traffic and consistently converting awareness into action throughout the campaign period.
Meta Ads FAQ's
Facebook and Instagram together reach billions of active users, with Meta's targeting tools allowing event marketers to get highly specific about who sees their ads. Facebook tends to perform strongly for reaching established professional audiences and driving link clicks, while Instagram extends reach to a visually-engaged demographic. Running both in tandem maximises coverage and reinforces the event message across multiple touchpoints.
The best platform depends on your target audience and business goals:
- Facebook & Instagram – Great for e-commerce, brand awareness, and lead generation.
- TikTok – Ideal for engaging younger audiences with short-form video content.
- LinkedIn – Best for B2B marketing and professional services.
- Pinterest & Snapchat – Work well for visual and product-based businesses.
Ideally, paid social activity should begin at least three to four months before the event date. Early campaign activity builds awareness gradually, warms up audiences, and fills the registration pipeline without relying on last-minute urgency alone. The closer to the event, the more expensive and competitive ad placements tend to become, so an early start is both strategically and financially beneficial.
Meta's platform offers a wide range of targeting options including geographic location, age, interests, job titles, and behaviours. For trade shows and industry events, this means ads can be focused on specific professional sectors, regions, or even lookalike audiences built from existing customer or attendee data, ensuring budget is spent reaching people who are genuinely likely to attend, rather than a broad, unqualified audience.
Short-form video content and bold static imagery tend to perform strongly on both Facebook and Instagram. For events, effective creative often includes exhibitor previews, behind-the-scenes content, speaker or demo announcements, and countdown-style urgency messaging in the final weeks. Clear, action-oriented calls to action — such as "Register Free" or "Secure Your Place", are essential to convert awareness into clicks.
Key performance indicators for event-focused Meta Ads campaigns include total reach, unique accounts reached, link clicks, and website sessions driven by paid social. Where a ticketing or registration platform is involved, tracking click-throughs from the event website to the registration page provides a strong proxy for conversions. Year-on-year comparisons are also a valuable benchmark for understanding campaign growth and improvement.
Retargeting allows you to show ads specifically to people who have already interacted with your event, whether they visited the website, engaged with a previous post, or watched a video ad. For events, retargeting is a powerful tool in the final weeks before show day, re-engaging people who showed interest but haven't yet registered, and nudging them toward conversion with reminder messaging or last-chance urgency.
Absolutely. Meta's geographic targeting makes it particularly well-suited to regional events, where budget can be focused tightly on the relevant local and surrounding area. A well-structured campaign with precise targeting can generate exceptional reach and awareness within a specific region, ensuring the event is seen by the right professional audience without wasteful spend on irrelevant locations.
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