Serving up spectacular social results for Alcotraz prison cocktail bar

The crime of the time? That not nearly enough people knew about Alcotraz and the experience it offers. Whether a date night, hen do, birthday or team trip, the experience is as versatile as it is unique. The feedback is always the same — ‘amazing’, ‘hilarious’, ‘exceeded expectations’.

So, when we were challenged to do our time and find The Warden more inmates for their four cell blocks, we joined the line up. Our approach was simple: a holistic social media strategy that brought paid and organic together, working in unison to drive those all-important bookings.

Our key aim for the organic side to Alcotraz’s social: to attract and engage. We wanted to capture fugitives’ attention, and then have them talking to their friends, colleagues, partners about the Alcotraz experience — commenting on posts, sharing in WhatsApp groups or saving for later.

Already established on Instagram, Alcotraz needed to be not only active on TikTok, but thriving. Our strategy was to inspire (targeting local viewers and those planning weekend getaways) and entertain (tapping into trends, sounds, video styles and formats with exciting content) with point-of-view-style, native and authentic creative, playful captions and hashtags to invite comments.

We paired this with utilising content they received from inmates who have been granted parole to show off different perspectives, and collaborating with Influencers and Creators to ensure that whenever a prime suspect was scrolling, they couldn’t escape from Alcotraz content.

Our paid social activity focused on Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn. To drive private bookings, ticket sales and support growth, we implemented a custom approach for each.

Our blueprint for Meta, for example, was about standing out and staying ahead of the game. We made use of on-trend Reel videos, seeing what works organically and adopting it into our paid activity.

This included polished trailers, UGC, POV-style videos, on-trend video styles and sounds and influencer content. Using a combination of styles kept ads fresh, and helped us to reach as many placements as possible.

London is an especially competitive space for immersive experiences. Staying on top of our audience targeting allowed us to work as concisely as possible with the budget we had at our disposal.

We provided a full tracking review to ensure social was getting attributed as accurately as possible, with from-scratch tracking set up for LinkedIn and TikTok.

Our social media officers had certainly caused a stir for the prison guards.

With a Meta return on ad spend of 18:1, we've got Alcotraz's ad budgets working as hard as possible to drive new customers behind bars.

We transformed a two-week old TikTok account with low engagement into one that continues to inspire users to book their sentences — achieving three viral videos (and over 5.5 million views) along the way.

As well as a 55% uplift in engagements on Instagram, we collaborated with eight influencers and creators. They shared their own point of view, enabling us to tap into their earned communities.

We locked up an 80% year-on-year increase in last-click social revenue, as well as a 356% increase in Assisted Conversion Revenue.

So impressive were these results, that this campaign was even shortlisted as a finalist at the prestigious Prolific North Creative Awards 2023, in the category of Social Content!