Find Your True North
Category
National State Tourism Directors Mercury Awards > Integrated Marketing and Messaging Campaign: State Marketing Budget Less Than $10 Million
Description
National State Tourism Directors Mercury Awards > Integrated Marketing and Messaging Campaign: State Marketing Budget Less Than $10 Million
Find Your True North
About This Entry:
More than a tagline, the Find Your True North campaign is an idea built on the shared values of adventure, culture and curiosity; a powerful way to shine a light on the experiences that make Minnesota a place for self-discovery through destinations and the journey between them. When COVID hit and shattered travelers’ original plans, we set out to craft marketing funnel goals that ensured we were meeting travelers’ changing needs. We shifted top-funnel awareness messaging to authentically connect with their new mindset - since our audience was dealing with the profound loss of their ability to freely travel,our messaging was inspired by and structured around the stages of grief; providing recovery, relief, rediscovery, and reconnection to help travelers navigate through the challenging times, reassuring them that Minnesota was here to welcome them whenever they were ready.
Additionally, we significantly adapted our mid-funnel approach. Rather than driving high quantities of visits to engage in immediate retargeting practices, we shifted focus to a more responsible and responsive approach. We began actively targeting quality and relevant traffic that would be more willing to spend time with the brand and showcase safe travel intent via their on-site actions. As airline travel diminished and more people welcomed new furry members to the family, new niche strategies were set up to give COVID-concious travelers unique ideas that capitalized on road tripping and pet lovers. Dynamic creative was placed in the market to speak to individual consumer interests, highlighting multiple COVID-safe tourism options, and these intent-based calls-to-action.
Finally to keep ourselves informed of the constantly changing circumstances, we developed a proprietary tool called the COVID-19 Scoring Model. This allowed us to actively monitor varying COVID-19 levels across markets, ensuring responsible and responsive advertising. The model incorporated CDC data crossed with interest in MN (as measured by both real-time website data and Google Trends data). The tool heavily influenced our creative and media strategy ensuring we supported the right message in the right channels and the right time.
Campaign Strategy:
This campaign was supported by an integrated media ecosystem, including broadcast, print, audio, video, native, social media, display, rich media, email, paid search and partnerships.
Our focus was on using content to help promote our story. We partnered with Trips to Discover, Daily Beast, and Trip Savvy to create custom sponsored content to engage their readers, which then we repurposed to push out via paid social media and native advertising to increase visibility. Additionally, we worked with four “doggie influencers” to show what MN offers for pet friendly travel. These 53 pieces of social content alone drove 145.4K engagements, 207% above engagement benchmarks.
Another focal point for our tactics was driving on-site action. We used dynamic display which customizes user messages to drive travel guide interactions. This tactic proved 72% more efficient than standard display. As an additional on-site action, we promoted Fall RoadTrippin’ Bingo across Facebook, Instagram, and display. Nearly 5,000 travelers downloaded a card from our website during the months of September and October.
In an effort to marry our digital and broadcast strategy, we placed buys on cable stations that indexed high against our target audience. Broadcast was also supplemented with both OTT and CTV to reach light TV viewers, increase overall reach/frequency and allow us to be on the largest screen in the house.
As the winter approached, the COVID-19 Scoring Model indicated that our marketing area was experiencing critical levels. We adjusted tactics, focusing on awareness and inspiration for future travel. First, we started this with incremental broadcast, online video, and paid social video encouraging Minnesota residents to continue supporting local travel and hospitality businesses. Locally we supported Winter Recreation through a combination across digital tactics to push people outside into COVID-19 safe activities. Outside the state, those same awareness vehicles helped us promote our bridge message that focused on future travel and the “Adventures that Await.” This approach kept us top of mind even though we knew interstate travel may not be possible until further down the road, setting us up for a strong spring/summer campaign.
Results:
With our focus of driving more on-site actions in the form of travel guide interactions, we saw staggering improvements year-over-year (YoY). During the lifetime of our campaign, we saw 37,021 interactions with our virtual travel guides - an increase of 103% YoY. Not only was volume high, but our conversion rate improved by 120%.
When examining the KPI of driving quality website traffic, consumers were much more engaged than in previous years. Average duration increased by 18%, pages/session increased by 11% and bounce rate improved by 12%. Additionally during September and October, during our big push, we actually saw an increase of 9% in sessions YoY - higher levels than our previous pre-pandemic Fall.
Why This Is A Finalist:
The Find Your True North campaign sparks in the viewer the idea of wanderlust, the desire to learn about a place where it could be a reprieve from what they were currently going through. I like how they were very strategic in how they targeted quality and relevant traffic. Creating highlights and videos that catered specifically to travelers with dogs (who were newly adopted) was really smart and such a great idea.
Winner Status
- Finalist