Ultra-Trail Drakensberg

UTD2019
I was brought onboard the UTD team in Feb 2019, about 10 weeks prior to the 2019 event and 6 weeks till entries closed. In those 6 weeks, I overhauled the social media presence and email strategy and managed to double race entries by closing date.

At the 2019 event, I handled all race media for the 4 different races across three social platforms.

UTD2020
For the 2020 race, I rebuilt the site on Squarespace (see it here), moved ticket sales to Quicket (see it here) and kept building on the social strategy and momentum we had. I also created a UTD Merchandise range to generate additional revenue for the event. By the time we had to cancel the 2020 race for Covid, we has surpassed our target for entries and had a record number of elite runners entered, a key KPI for events of this nature.

We subsequently launched a successful Lockdown Edition for the event, complete with race merchandise and a race video made up from user generated content.

UTD2021
To kickstart the marketing for the 2021 UTD event; I designed race numbers and built a system where, once a person signed up, there were immediately sent a thank you email and their brand new race bib. This was a very successful exercise; as the runners shared their race numbers on social media; creating an even bigger surge of new entries

Entries for 3 of the 5 races sold out for for UTD2021 - and the 100km and 160km events had the highest numbers in the race’s history. Something I’m really proud of.

Ahead of the 2021, I we refreshed the UTD brand and all the event collateral - from race numbers, to race arch, to finish line chute. This is the rebrand that I’m most proud of and massive thanks to Marize Engelbreght who brought the vision to life!

The #ultratraildrakensberg hashtag received well over 5 million impressions during the 2021 event weekend.

A couple of examples of the email newsletters:

Pre-Race newsletter | Newsletter Example 1 & Newsletter Example 2

Race Coverage in 2021 via Instagram Stories (I saved the coverage in highlights pertaining to each distance):