Destinations Council Destiny Awards > Digital Campaign

Visit Savannah Midweek Campaign

About This Entry:

As a result of the pandemic, meetings and conventions business came to a halt in beautiful Savannah, Georgia. While we were fortunate to experience steady weekend visitation - the depletion of meetings, conventions and business travel left our hotels virtually empty from Monday through Wednesday. We knew we had to do something. We could not idly sit by and watch our hotels struggle while waiting for meetings business to rebound. Thus, our very first Midweek Campaign was born! From March through April of 2021, we utilized a variety of data partners to identify and target:

1. Users that used credit cards in Savannah during the middle of the week in 2020 and index for midweek travel.
2. Non-residents whose mobile devices were located in Savannah from Monday-Wednesday.
3. Look-a-likes of these individuals across the internet.

The aforementioned individuals were targeted via programmatic and paid social media with compelling ad creative depicting the midweek Savannah experience as less crowded and cheaper - but just as magical - as the weekend experience.

To make our ad creative exceptionally compelling, we called on our hospitality partners. We sent out an email to every single hospitality member inviting them to submit a deal incentivizing midweek travel to their hotel, attraction, restaurant or retail store. Over 60 hospitality partners submitted a unique midweek special ranging from 55% off hotel rooms to 20% off trolley tours and more. These deals were then added to our CRM and pulled into our official Midweek Campaign landing page. Once the landing page was complete, we built programmatic ads and paid social ads that included the deals as the main headline and a video to entice the user even further.

Campaign Strategy:

From March through April of 2021, we partnered with UberMedia to collect the device IDs of the following consumers:

1. Users that used credit cards in Savannah during the middle of the week in 2020 and index for midweek travel.
2. Non-residents whose mobile devices were located in Savannah from Monday-Wednesday.
3. Look-a-likes of these individuals across the internet.

The aforementioned individuals were targeted via paid Facebook ads.

For programmatic, we leveraged Epsilon’s transactional data to reach likely midweek travelers to Savannah who resided in the following feeder markets:

1. Georgia
2. Florida
3. South Carolina
4. North Carolina
5. Knoxville DMA
6. Nashville DMA
7. Chattanooga DMA

The true stars of the show were our hospitality partners. We sent out an email to every single hospitality member inviting them submit a deal incentivizing midweek travel to their hotel, attraction, restaurant or retail store. Over 60 hospitality partners submitted a unique midweek special ranging from 55% off hotel rooms to 20% off trolley tours and more. These deals were then added to our CRM and pulled into our official Midweek Campaign landing page. The landing page was accessed via ads that included the deals as the main headline and a video to entice the user even further.

Results:

The project's total budget was $135,000.

The Epsilon programmatic ads received:

6.1 million impressions
7,000 clicks
0.11% CTR

The Facebook ads received:

6,721,390 impressions
64,263 landing page views
1,805,933 people reached
99,563 link clicks

Adara Impact estimates, based on real-time transactional data, that the midweek campaign has already resulted in more than 2,403 bookings and over $854,841.00 in revenue. The conservative estimated ROAS for this campaign element was 633%. The final Net Economic Impact report via Epsilon will not be delivered until July so no further economic impact statistics are available at this time.

Why This Is A Finalist: 

Really creative way to target the correct audiences. Excellent use of data and just an overall smart campaign. Excellent buy in from partners showing their well connected to their clients and they hit the right need at the right moment.

The shining star for innovation in this campaign was their use of data to identify the right target audiences. Really well thought out and super inspiring to see the use of data and creativity come together so well. Few do both well but Visit Savannah totally achieved it.

Fantastic results for the size budget they had. We've all seen off season and discount campaigns, but they did in a really smart results driven way. They felt the need from the partners and they delivered and did so with a relatively modest budget.