Dartmouth Sailing Week 2025

How Feral partnered with KW Marketing to deliver record-breaking digital results for one of the UK’s most iconic sailing events.

Every summer, Dartmouth Sailing Week transforms the River Dart into a spectacle of sails, competition, and community. It’s one of the UK’s most iconic regattas, steeped in tradition and supported by a line-up of world-class food & drink sponsors as well as marine and lifestyle partners.

In 2025, the organisers wanted to do more than just deliver a great event on the water. They wanted to make waves online – using a bold digital strategy to expand reach, create value for sponsors like Rockfish and Salcombe Gin, and turn local buzz into national visibility.

To achieve this, they brought together two specialist partners:

  1. Feral, to capture the atmosphere and action with polished video content.
  2. KW Marketing, to amplify that content through a joined-up digital strategy, real-time posting, and multi-channel execution.

The result? A record-breaking campaign that delivered 745% growth in impressions and set a new benchmark for how digital can transform live events.

The Dartmouth Sailing Week 2025 challenge

Dartmouth Sailing Week is one of the South West’s most prestigious regattas, drawing competitors and visitors from across the UK. While the event already had heritage and local reputation, the organisers wanted to elevate its digital presence – capturing both the drama on the water and the atmosphere onshore.

The goal was twofold:

  1. To deliver exposure and tangible value for key sponsors.
  2. To reach a wider audience online, creating a sense of excitement that would outlast the event itself.

This was no small task. With just a short window to deliver impact and multiple stakeholders to satisfy, the event team needed a joined-up digital and content approach that could combine polished production with agile, reactive coverage.

Our approach – a partnership in action!

To meet this challenge, Dartmouth Sailing Week brought in Feral as lead production partner. Feral’s role was to capture high-quality video and daily highlights, building a library of compelling visual content.

KW Marketing worked alongside Feral to take this content live – supporting the digital strategy, managing social media execution, and driving real-time optimisation.

This collaboration meant the event could benefit from:

  • High-quality production (Feral’s edited highlights, reels, and features).
  • Fast, reactive posting (KW Marketing’s social strategy, live updates, and community management).
  • Multi-channel delivery across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X, ensuring reach beyond the local sailing audience.

Strategy in motion

Our digital strategy had three key pillars:

  1. Daily Highlights & Reels: Each day, Feral supplied professional-quality reels and highlight edits. KW Marketing managed channel strategy, ensuring these were optimised for platform performance.
  2. Real-Time Content & Community: Alongside scheduled posts, KW Marketing provided live updates, reactive coverage, and real-time community engagement. This helped keep audiences connected with the event as it unfolded.
  3. Data-Driven Optimisation: Using Sprout Social and native platform insights, KW Marketing continuously monitored results across channels. This allowed us to pivot mid-event, doubling down on top-performing content and reallocating attention to the channels driving the highest ROI.

The results

The impact was immediate and dramatic. Even before the final day of racing, results had exceeded all expectations:

  • 137,000+ impressions across platforms
  • 187,000+ video views in just a few days
  • 4,000+ engagements from audiences both local and international
  • +318 new followers, representing a 2,000% increase in growth vs. previous weeks

Facebook emerged as the star performer, with over 140,000 video views and a 4.8% engagement rate. Instagram drove the biggest audience growth, adding over 200 new followers. TikTok, X, and YouTube showed strong engagement relative to their size, highlighting clear growth potential for the future.

Importantly, these results weren’t just vanity metrics. They translated into tangible exposure for sponsors, including Rockfish, Henri-Lloyd, Salcombe Gin, Ancasta International Boat Sales, and Hunts Cider. Each brand benefited from content placements that connected them directly with engaged audiences – reinforcing their positioning at the heart of the event. For food & drink brands especially, visibility during a premium lifestyle event like this created authentic alignment between their products and an engaged, affluent audience.

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Why it worked

The success of Dartmouth Sailing Week’s 2025 digital campaign came down to three things:

  • Collaboration: Feral’s polished video content combined with KW Marketing’s agile social execution created the perfect balance between quality and speed.
  • Multi-Channel Presence: By leveraging Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X, the event reached beyond the traditional sailing community and tapped into new audiences.
  • Agility: Real-time reporting and optimisation allowed us to pivot quickly, ensuring the best-performing content was prioritised.

This campaign wasn’t just about polished highlight reels. It was about human, reactive storytelling that put sponsors centre-stage. From race-day reels to authentic moments like our Instagram video with Salcombe Gin featuring Laura from our team, the content strategy blended storytelling with sponsor visibility and that combination drove real ROI.

Lessons & looking ahead

For KW Marketing, Dartmouth Sailing Week was a powerful reminder of what’s possible when great content meets the right strategy. High-quality video alone isn’t enough; it needs a digital partner to ensure it lands in front of the right audience, at the right time, with the right message.

For the event, the results set a new benchmark. The 745% uplift in impressions demonstrated that digital can transform a traditional event into a global conversation.

And for sponsors, the campaign proved that event partnerships can deliver not just logo placements, but meaningful digital ROI.

We explore more about why most food & drink brands struggle to grow online (and how to fix it), and dive deeper on the Fuelling Foodies Podcast.

Final word

At KW Marketing, we’re proud to have played our part in delivering these results in collaboration with Feral. By combining creative production with strategic digital execution, Dartmouth Sailing Week 2025 became more than a regatta – it became a showcase for both world-class sailing and the brands that support it.

For food and drink sponsors, especially from Rockfish’s restaurants and seafood market to Salcombe Gin – this wasn’t just logo placement. It was meaningful digital visibility that placed them at the centre of the conversation and directly in front of thousands of potential customers.

As we look ahead, we’re excited to continue building on this model – helping events and their partners not only capture attention, but translate it into measurable growth. If you’d like results like Dartmouth Sailing Week 2025, book a free strategy call with Kate today. Let’s build a digital strategy that drives measurable growth.

Video by Feral and Skyflicks Media.