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Formed in 2003 as the result of the merging of the Arabian Horse Registry of America and the
International Arabian Horse Association (IAHA), the Arabian Horse Association1 (AHA) is a nonprofit
organization headquartered in Aurora, Colo. currently serving approximately 84,000 Arabian, Half-
Arabian and Anglo-Arabian horse owners in the United States and Canada. AHA has over 26,000
members split into 18 different regions and maintains a database of over one million registered horses.

AHA offers over 400 annual Arabian events and competitions, and administers approximately $4 million
in prize money annually.

AHA seeks to preserve the rich history of the breed, and get members involved with the breed as well as
increase breed interest among nonmembers.

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https://www.arabianhorses.org/

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This campaign will be split into four categories including millennials, families (moms, dads and young
children), children (survey for parents) and seniors (55+). The goal for the AHA Membership Campaign is
to increase membership, as well as get more people—inside and outside of the equine industry—
involved with the Arabian horse.

This portion of the campaign will specifically target a 55+ audience both inside and outside of the horse
industry. We want to get seniors involved with an Arabian—whether they are interested in showing or
leisure activities, and we want to show them that this breed of horse is intelligent and versatile, as well
as a family horse. Many individuals in this target audience are looking for an activity they can do while
spending time with family members. We want to show them that no matter what equine activities
they’re interested in, they can do it with their family by their side.

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A 13-question survey—specifically written for a 55+ audience—was sent out to seniors through AARP
state Facebook pages including Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Maine,
Montana, Oregon and Utah. The survey was also sent out on AHA’s Facebook and Twitter pages,
through several Weekly Dish e-newsletters and a couple monthly e-newsletters, as well as on the
following Facebook pages: Estes Park Equine Assisted Activities2, Retirement Passport3, Harvard
Square Retirement & Assisted Living4, AARP5, Senior Assisted Center6 and Horse lovers7.

56 volunteers over the age of 55 completed the survey within a two-week time frame.

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https://www.facebook.com/Estes-Park-Equine-Assisted-Activities-1848518492131322/
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https://www.facebook.com/retirement/
4
https://www.facebook.com/HarvardSquareDenver/
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https://www.facebook.com/AARP/
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https://www.facebook.com/seniorassistancecenter.org/
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https://www.facebook.com/Horse-lovers-544800845728025/

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Survey questions and answers 8 are as follows:

I. Are you 55 years or older?

a. 100% - Yes
b. 0% - No
II. Have you ever been involved in the horse industry in one capacity or another? Please
explain your answer.
a. 72.73% - No
b. 27.27% - Yes
i. Breeding
ii. Showing; family showing; show help
iii. Training
iv. Exhibitor
v. Local club member
vi. Trail riding/leisure
vii. Polo and gymkhana
viii. Volunteering
ix. Ground work with yearlings
III. If you were previously or currently involved with horses, why?
a. 48% - Physical activity
b. 20% - Family activity
c. 16% - Other
i. All of the above
ii. Provides a challenge with each experience
iii. Without horses I would not be who I am
iv. Business
v. Passion
d. 12% - Social activity
e. 4% - Independence
IV. Has, or does, the financial prospect of the financial aspect of the horse industry make you
shy away from horse-related activities?
a. 50.94% - No
b. 49.06% - Yes
V. What is one of your favorite pastimes?
a. Going to shows, seeing friends
b. Trail riding with friends/family
c. Reading

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https://www.surveymonkey.com/analyze/_2Fcxp6YwQoq6f7JZDKy6CUFWN_2BYwZqiTLF9bSQDGh5y8_3D

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 d. Sport Horse watching
e. Cleaning tack
f. Quilting
g. Watching granddaughter learn to ride
VI. Did you know horses are used in a physical and mental therapy capacity to help individuals
suffering from such things as PTSD, depression, autism, brain or spinal injuries, and more?
a. 100% - Yes
b. 0% - No
VII. What type of involvement in the horse industry sounds the best fit for you right now?
a. 37.74% - Owning to show
b. 28.30% - Owning for non-show use
c. 16.98% - None of the above
d. 7.55% - Volunteering for local horse clubs
e. 5.66% - Taking riding lessons
f. 1.89% - Leasing a horse temporarily
g. 1.89% - Volunteering at a horse rescue/horse barn
VIII. Please select your gender.
a. 86.79% - Female
b. 11.32% - Male
c. 1.89% - Prefer not to answer
IX. Please indicate your age.
a. 50.94% - 61-70 years
b. 26.42% - 71-80 years
c. 20.75% - 55-60 years
d. 1.89% - 81+ years
X. Are you currently:
a. 40.38% - Retired
b. 32.69% - Self-employed
c. 25% - Employed for wages
d. 1.92% - Unable to work
XI. Please specify your ethnicity:
a. 96.15% - White
b. 1.92% - Native American
c. 1.92% - Asian/Pacific Islander
XII. What is the highest degree or level of school you have completed? If currently enrolled,
highest degree received.
a. 34.62% - Bachelor’s
b. 19.23% - Some college credit, no degree
c. 11.54% - Associate’s
d. 11.54% - Master’s
e. 9.62% - Professional
f. 5.77% - Trade, technical, vocational training
g. 3.85% - HS graduate, diploma, GED

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 h. 3.85% - Doctorate
XIII. What is your marital status?
a. 65.38% - Married, domestic partnership
b. 15.38% - Divorced
c. 11.54% - Single, never married
d. 7.69% - Widowed

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The target audience for this campaign can be broken down into four specific groups9 including: Money
& Brains; Cruisin’ To Retirement; Empty Nests and Traditional Times:

Money & Brains: These are affluent empty nesters with an average use of household technology. They
visit AARP and take lavish vacations. They are homeowners and management professionals.

Cruisin’ To Retirement: These are people with elite income-producing assets living suburban lifestyles.
Along with the Money & Brains group, this group also has an average household technology use and
drives more expensive cars and keeps up with everyday national news.

Empty Nests: Unlike the other two, this group is mostly made up of retired individuals, as they are in the
age range of 65+. They shop at slightly less prestigious/expensive stores and drive slightly cheaper
vehicles despite having income in the elite range.

Traditional Times: This group is almost exactly similar to the Empty Nesters, except for their below use
of household technology.

What Our Four Target Audience Groups Have in Common:

Basically, these four groups of people are over the age of 55 with high to elite income status. Just over
50 percent of the individuals who took our survey mentioned that the financial bindings to owning a
horse did not make them shy away from getting involved. Commonalities among this audience include
the following:

 They are financially stable and have extra spending power

 Over the age of 55 (slight majority 61-70 years)
 Average use of household technology
 Looking for a family activity
 Looking for a physical activity to stay healthy
 Have kids but are empty nesters
 Grandchildren

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http://segmentationsolutions.nielsen.com/mybestsegments

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Gender, Education and Marital Status:

The majority (80.64 percent) of audience members are females holding bachelor’s degrees (34.62
percent). 65 percent are married or in a domestic partnership.

Equitation Experience:

It would be beneficial to the campaign and to its results to note that a small number of our target
audience members (27.27 percent, according to survey results) have experience riding, owning,
breeding and training horses. And, the majority of this group answered that they were involved in
equitation because it provided them with physical activity. Also, 100 percent of the recorded responses
stated they were aware of the health benefits riding can provide for seniors.

For advertising purposes it would be smart to push this information out specifically to horse-related
businesses and activities and social media pages to ensure we are not leaving out a chunk of our target
audience.

Reason for Potentially Owning a Horse:

There were a few scattered answers recorded in the survey when asked what they would be using a
horse for, with the largest percentage (37.74 percent) of answers recorded stated our target audience
would be owning to show. The rest of the answers are as follows:

 Owning for non-show use - 28.3%

 None of the above - 16.98%
 Volunteering for local horse clubs - 7.55%
 Taking riding lessons - 5.66%
 Leasing a horse temporarily - 1.89%
 Volunteering at a horse rescue/horse barn - 1.89%

How Can We Reach Our Audience?

Since the majority of our target audience members have an average use of household technology, social
media, specifically Facebook, can and will be utilized for this campaign. The online presence of this
campaign will not only make it simpler to execute for AHA Marketing staff, but it will also work better
for the budget.

Since the survey was initially sent out through Facebook, we can get just as much of a response, if not
more so, if content is sent out through these same types of groups.

Here’s a specific example of who we are targeting and how we can use Facebook to reach them:

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Joleen is a 65-year-old married woman with a bachelor’s and is retired. When she was in her late teens
all the way up to around 30 years old when she competed in a couple different classes with her Half-
Arabian. She has since fallen out of the horse world, but is currently looking for an activity she can do
with her family, especially her granddaughter, that will also help keep her healthy and physically active.

Joleen stays active on Facebook because this is the easiest way to keep up with her family, mainly her
children and grandchildren. She follows Horse Illustrated10 and is a member of a couple general horse
groups.

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https://www.facebook.com/horseillustrated/

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The obvious answer is to generate more membership applications, as well as getting more people
familiar with the Arabian horse; however, we want to be slightly more specific than that.

After this campaign is completed, I hope to have anywhere from five to 10 new memberships, an
increase in total social media followers by 0.04% and an increase in meaningful social media
engagement by 110% with a total of eight ads in six weeks, bringing engagement up from an average of
6,339 in two weeks to 13,311.9. This will mean more housekeeping and a sharper eye out on our social
media pages, but it will help us figure out whether our campaign is headed in the right direction.

Ultimately, we want to increase our online visibility and membership benefits, especially among horse
people or those who are familiar with the horse industry.

We want the campaign, and its goal, to be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and
timely.

After defining our campaign objectives once, they can be referred to often to measure results and keep
our campaign on track.

We also want to take our audience to our Membership11 page on the website. This will act as our
landing page and as one of our end goals. The Membership page will be what’s advertised on social
media and on flyers so people know where to go and will understand the reason behind our advertising.

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https://www.arabianhorses.org/additional/membership/

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Throughout the campaign (specifically for the 55+ portion) Facebook, Twitter and Google Analytics will
be monitored. Checking the reach on all ads, reactions, comments, shares, conversation and website
bounce rates will be checked on a daily basis, often times several times each day. This will not only give
us the opportunity to keep the campaign on track, but also make any potential changes and/or
corrections along the way.

For example, it is possible certain ads or posts will not generate as much reach or conversation as
originally desired. So, in that case, we can try posting a different way (changing our types of Facebook
ads, re-wording posts, etc.) to see how our audience responds. We want to know what they respond to
and what piques their interest about the Arabian horse, or horses in general. And the only way to do
that after starting the campaign is to experiment with posts and content.

Any new e-newsletter signups will be considered successful to the campaign. Assuming this was the only
action taken by a target audience member(s), it still gets AHA information to their inbox every so often.
Chances are if they learn more about our organization and about the horse they might be more inclined
to join and/or get involved.

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The hashtag for the 55+ campaign—as well as the other targeted audiences for the campaign as a
whole—is #MyArabianHorse. After some discussion it was decided that having one universal hashtag for
the overall campaign would help make the campaign consistent, and it would be easier for anyone to
join in on the conversation.

Deterring Confusion

Having one, shorter hashtag is not only easier to type, but easy to remember. Therefore, it will make the
conversation more accessible to not only our target audience, but to current members and those who
follow us on social media as well. They won’t have to remember the specific ad and its corresponding
hashtag.

A Hashtag We Can Use In the Future

After some research, we have found that this hashtag is already being used. Not by other businesses or
competitors, but by Arabian horse owners, riders, trainers, etc. We can be the first organization to use
the hashtag and get in on a conversation that people are already having and increase the number of
posts and points of view.

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A variety of Facebook ads can be used for this portion of the campaign including the following:

Domain Ads

These are the most common types of Facebook ads. They’re either located on the right-hand side of the
screen on Facebook or in the middle of a newsfeed. The purpose for these is to refer people to a
webpage. We can use these to generate traffic to our Membership webpage. From there, we can
analyze our bounce rate on Google Analytics, what people are doing when they get to the website and
how much time they’re spending there.

Video Ads

Video ads are great for brand awareness and retargeting, in this case, specifically people who were
previously apart of horse industry in some aspect or another.

In this day and age it’s difficult enough to get people to observe your content for even several seconds, I
anticipate these videos to be no longer than 25 seconds. If we can get these ads down to six seconds
that would be ideal. This way, we can create our own six-second ads without needing a TV slot.

Lead Ads, If Necessary:

With lead ads, you can collect information about whoever gives their information without having to
leave Facebook. These ads look just like regular domain ads, but when you click on it, it prompts that
person for their name and email. There’s no guarantee anyone will input their information, but if they
do, this will give us exact lead prospects. These types of ads aren’t necessary at this time, but they are
an option in case our audience prefers this type of ad.

Canvas Ads

These are interactive ads using images and/or video footage with text to advertise whatever you’re
selling. A couple of these can be helpful when advertising our Membership webpage.

Boosting Posts

Depending on how well each ad performs will depend on which ones to boost and when. At the
beginning of the campaign, all of the ads we put out will be boosted to gain that initial traction. Once we
have a grasp on what our audience is responding to we can better understand what will resonate with
them.

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Switching Gears

Throughout the campaign we will have to do more than just monitor our social media. We will have to
analyze each ad to figure out how well it’s doing and how we can improve our content for the next ad.
We will have to alter our wording to get audience members’ attention depending on what audience
members previously responded to. This can only be determined after launching the campaign and
implementing these ads.

Since Twitter does not have ad variety mimicking Facebook, our options will be limited; however, there
are still a couple ads we can run.

Promoted Tweets

This will be the most common Twitter ad we run in this campaign. For a fee, we can have specific Tweets
displayed to people who are not currently following the AHA Twitter page. Since very few of our
audience is on Twitter, I imagine we will not promote more than two ads throughout the duration of the
campaign. Just enough so we aren’t completely abandoning our Twitter page.

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Flyers can be used for multiple purposes including using them as visuals when advertising on social
media, and sending them to magazines to maximize brand awareness.

Each flyer should have a caption of the image, the campaign’s hashtag and AHA’s Membership webpage
URL. We also want to have a photo pertaining to our audience specifically.

For example, a flyer can be created using a photo with a senior woman teaching her young
granddaughter to ride a Half-Arabian horse with the caption, “My Family,” or, “This horse can do it all.”
Under the caption could be our hashtag, #MyArabianHorse. At the bottom of the flyer is our
Membership URL, arabianhorses.org/Membership.

Several different renditions of this flyer can be created to hit all points of what our audience would be
using a horse for; however, the main idea and goal of the flyers will stay the same.

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Here is one mock-up example of an ad we can run on social media. This type of ad can capture our
audience looking to get involved with horses as a family activity.

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Here is a second example targeting the group of seniors interested in having a horse for showing
purposes. This ad can also run on social media as well as in other horse magazines.

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Since we are trying to reach a portion of seniors who have been, and currently are, a part of the horse
industry we want these ads to be seen where they are already looking. An example of this is Horse
Illustrated12. Published in Lexington, Ky., this magazine starts at $14.99 for a print and digital version
annually, and there are approximately 191,000 readers13. The flyers we create in house can be what we
send to this magazine. We’ll want to make sure to put AHA’s contact information, as well as maybe even
what perks and benefits there are available to members.

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https://www.facebook.com/horseillustrated/
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http://www.gaebler.com/Horse+Illustrated-magazine-advertising-costs++28288

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There is an event coming up soon, the Hunter Jumper II Series held from 8 a.m. – 5 p.m. from December
16 – 17 The Colorado Horse Park14. This same event is also happening from January 20 – 21, 2018.

What’s good about this event is that it’s not specific to one or two breeds, nor are there age or skill
restrictions. If we decide to bring flyers and copies of the magazine, groups of all ages, skill sets and
breed preferences will see them. By attending this event we will be able to generate more brand
awareness among people already involved in the horse industry.

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http://chp.coth.com/events

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Another way to attract potential members is to tell them about the perks of becoming an AHA member.
This is what will differentiate this being a membership campaign instead of an awareness campaign.

To do this, we can either create who new flyers specifically stating what perks you get as a member, or,
by inserting blow-ins into the magazine that are dedicated to membership perks. We can then bring the
magazines with the blow-ins to the Hunter/Jumper event at The Colorado Horse Park so potential
members can see our magazine and the perks of becoming a member.

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Believe it or not, our competition is other horse breeds, not necessarily their corresponding
associations.

If audience members are already at the point where they’re thinking about purchasing a horse, we need
to give them reasons to get an Arabian. Many people opt for a Quarter horse, or a breed they know to
be sturdy and calm enough to be ridden and trained easily. But, chances are, they’ve heard stigmas
about the Arabian horse. To counteract this, we need to answer one question in our ads:

Why Should They Get An Arabian Horse?

Those of us familiar with the breed know it can have a very calm personality. This is also an intelligent
horse with great endurance, and can be used for a variety of different things. There are stigmas about
the Arabian horse that portray the breed as dainty, out of control and mainly used as a halter horse. To
counteract these stereotypes, we need to portray the breed as a breed that can do a variety of things
and would be a good fit for anyone.

The bottom line is that if we can show our target audience that this is a durable horse meant for all
types of tasks as well as a family-oriented animal then we can get our breed on their radar for when it’s
time for them to actually start looking to purchase a horse.

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  One Horse Illustrated full-page, black and white ad
o Onetime payment of estimated $860.0015
 Six Facebook ads to run over the course of six weeks
o Six payments of $20/each for estimated total of $120.00
 Two promoted Tweets, one every three weeks. Cost depends on engagement.
o Hope for 30 clicks per Tweet at $2.00 (high end) for each click
o Two payments of $60 for total of $120.00
 Campaign Total = $1,100.00

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http://www.gaebler.com/Horse+Illustrated-magazine-advertising-costs++28288

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