CASE STUDY
Design-2-Part
Integrating Digital Media into a Traditional Marketing Mix
Design-2-Part (D2P) runs regional manufacturing trade shows, and for years, their marketing mix looked the way it does for most organizations in the industry: trade publications, direct mail, and email. It worked, but there was a ceiling on reach. They brought me on to explore what digital advertising could add to the mix and to find audiences that traditional channels weren't touching.
Role: Paid media strategy, channel testing, campaign architecture, and performance optimization across search, social, and video ad platforms.
About Design-2-Part
Industry: Manufacturing Trade Show Events
Location: Prospect, CT
Company Size: 25–50 employees
For more than 50 years, Design-2-Part Trade Shows has connected American contract manufacturers with OEM engineers and buyers seeking suppliers for custom parts and services.
Performance Highlights
20%+
year-over-year increase in overall show attendance since launching digital campaigns
25%
of total show attendance is now driven by digital advertising
5,000
net new leads generated within a single year
“Lynelle has surpassed our expectations. Her knowledge of Google Ads, retargeting, and Meta has helped our company improve bottom-line results.”
Chris Davis
Vice President, Trade Shows
The Strategy
Multi-Channel Testing & Attribution
The goal was straightforward: find the channels, formats, and targeting strategies that could drive the most registrations at the lowest cost per attendee. Performance was measured across the full funnel, tracking cost per registration, verified attendance rate, and cost per verified attendee on each platform.
After benchmarking competing trade shows and analyzing audience behavior, the initial rollout focused on Google Ads, LinkedIn, and AdRoll for retargeting. Google quickly proved to be the strongest acquisition channel, while LinkedIn and AdRoll underperformed relative to their cost. The mix was then expanded to Microsoft Search, Meta, X, and YouTube to diversify spend and reduce reliance on any single platform.
Through ongoing testing and optimization, the strategy consistently delivered under $50 cost per registration and under $100 cost per verified attendee.
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Optimizing for Lead Quality
As registration volume increased, lead quality began to slip, with more irrelevant attendees entering the funnel.
To correct this, I built a feedback loop that fed lead scoring data from registration forms back into the ad platforms. This tightened lead quality while keeping acquisition costs efficient, ultimately protecting the value of the attendee base for exhibitors.
Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram)
Meta delivered strong results quickly, largely due to aggressive A/B testing across audiences, creative formats, and messaging from the start.
The best-performing audiences were CRM database matchbacks, lookalike audiences built from those lists, and interest targeting aimed at engineers and manufacturing professionals. On the creative side, slideshow, carousel, and video formats consistently beat static imagery.
With roughly 90% of impressions coming from mobile, both the ads and landing pages were optimized for mobile-first experiences to reduce friction at the point of conversion. Messaging also evolved over time, moving away from generic terms like "manufacturing show" toward more specific language targeting OEM and design engineers directly. That shift made a noticeable difference in both audience relevance and registration quality.
Google AdWords & Microsoft Search
Search advertising became one of the most efficient acquisition channels, largely due to strong user intent. Campaigns were structured by show location, with geo-targeting built around realistic driving distances to each venue.
To stretch the budget further, I separated Branded and Non-Branded campaigns. This prevented branded search traffic from eating up spend that should have been going toward new prospects. From there, ongoing refinement of negative keywords, geographic targeting, device bids, and day-parting drove click-through rates up and cost-per-click down over time.
YouTube Video Ads
D2P's existing library of high-quality event footage made YouTube a natural next channel to test. Ads were built around a hook-first strategy, with the first 10 seconds doing the heavy lifting to keep viewers engaged before the skip option appeared.
All campaigns ran as non-skippable in-stream ads between 30 and 90 seconds. The strongest performer was a 60-second cut targeting competitive manufacturing keywords and lookalike audiences. Observation audiences were layered in over time to surface expansion opportunities, with bid adjustments used to prioritize viewers closest to each show location.
Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram)
Meta delivered strong results quickly, largely due to aggressive A/B testing across audiences, creative formats, and messaging from the start.
The best-performing audiences were CRM database matchbacks, lookalike audiences built from those lists, and interest targeting aimed at engineers and manufacturing professionals. On the creative side, slideshow, carousel, and video formats consistently beat static imagery.
With roughly 90% of impressions coming from mobile, both the ads and landing pages were optimized for mobile-first experiences to reduce friction at the point of conversion. Messaging also evolved over time, moving away from generic terms like "manufacturing show" toward more specific language targeting OEM and design engineers directly. That shift made a noticeable difference in both audience relevance and registration quality.
Google AdWords & Microsoft Search
Search advertising became one of the most efficient acquisition channels, largely due to strong user intent. Campaigns were structured by show location, with geo-targeting built around realistic driving distances to each venue.
To stretch the budget further, I separated Branded and Non-Branded campaigns. This prevented branded search traffic from eating up spend that should have been going toward new prospects. From there, ongoing refinement of negative keywords, geographic targeting, device bids, and day-parting drove click-through rates up and cost-per-click down over time.
YouTube Video Ads
D2P's existing library of high-quality event footage made YouTube a natural next channel to test. Ads were built around a hook-first strategy, with the first 10 seconds doing the heavy lifting to keep viewers engaged before the skip option appeared.
All campaigns ran as non-skippable in-stream ads between 30 and 90 seconds. The strongest performer was a 60-second cut targeting competitive manufacturing keywords and lookalike audiences. Observation audiences were layered in over time to surface expansion opportunities, with bid adjustments used to prioritize viewers closest to each show location.
Impact
Digital advertising has become a core part of how Design-2-Part markets its shows. Paid media now drives a meaningful share of total registrations while consistently hitting efficiency targets and maintaining attendee quality.
The results made the case for what this engagement set out to prove: that performance-driven digital advertising doesn't replace traditional marketing, it extends it. By going beyond the channels they'd always relied on, D2P reached a broader audience of engineers and sourcing professionals and grew attendance in a way that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.