National State Tourism Directors Mercury Awards > Integrated Marketing and Messaging Campaign: State Marketing Budget More Than $10 Million

Southern Utah 2020-2021 Renaissance to Normalcy

About This Entry:

Along with most travel and tourism boards around the world, the Utah Office of Tourism’s (UOT) planned campaigns were put on hold in early 2020 while the world desperately sought solutions to the coronavirus pandemic.

Rather than have our marketing efforts go completely dark, the UOT quickly developed a strategic plan guided by key performance indicators that spoke to the moment and outlined the path for all communications, paid media, social, public relations and website content.

This plan guided the development of a new campaign specifically designed to be adaptable to ever-changing conditions. Included were three sets of creative messaging ranging from brand awareness with no call to action to welcoming visitors back to travel responsibly. Media placements were selected to allow adjustments, pausing, and changes in messaging by market.

Objectives:
1) Use inspirational and hopeful messaging to reframe the conversation around COVID-19 and stimulate economic growth through strategic media.

2) Demonstrate empathy and active support for travel planners and dreamers across UOT’s communications channels and trade partners using inspirational content and timely resources that attract and build an audience of highly motivated travelers.

3) Convert share of social conversation to messages and actions that support Utah communities, promote wellness and build local business while continuing to cultivate future travel.

4) Mitigate the economic loss for the tourism industry in Utah and set up the destination for a strong recovery.

5) Promote well-prepared visitation.

We focused on drive markets and greatly expanded our normal drive-market range from neighboring states to include anything within a 1-2 day drive. In COVID times, even Texas became a drive market.

We knew we needed to both keep in touch with our core audiences to maintain brand awareness — as well as reach those who could travel now. This knowledge led us to the decision to include an in-state audience for the first time. Ultimately, all of our audiences shared one common mindset: being “Travelers-In-Waiting” longing for a time when it was safe to get out and explore again.

Campaign Strategy:

In March 2020, we only had advertising live on TripAdvisor and Expedia for those actively seeking travel information. Shortly thereafter Connected TV launched our “Small but Mighty” spots, which prompted brand awareness without a call to action to travel. In the summer of 2020, Utah’s Governor’s Office of Economic Development rolled out a grant program for local businesses with funding for companies that offered discounts for consumers to stimulate economic spending. The UOT partnered with TravelZoo to create promotion opportunities for tourism companies offering “Shop In Utah” Grant Discounts. The UOT paid for all the marketing with TravelZoo. The partners only needed to provide information on their discounts.

During the lockdown, we were able to retain a strong interest in Utah by staying active on social media, launching a new hashtag #UtahFromHome. This initiative encouraged travelers and residents to keep Utah top of mind and in a positive light during stressful times. It also enabled us to crowdsource user-generated content to repurpose through UOT’s digital channels and UOT’s public relations adapted the idea into a virtual online education series called Utah U, including hosted tastings and orientations with top-tier journalists that were among the first of their kind in the nation.

Further, we realized there could be negative impacts from hosting in-market trips for influencers + ambassadors, so we shifted to predominantly virtual social collaborations from April 2020 to Feb. 2021 and emphasized some level of Forever Mighty® responsible travel messaging. Highlights include an Instagram live conversation with @CarolineGleich and @DiversityInAdventure discussing responsible and safe recreation and Instagram Feed Q&A with @travisburkephotography covering preparedness and safety advice. Later paid and organic content included themes of responsible safe travel, road trips, and a call to support local businesses.

Planning travel during a pandemic proposed a new challenge, and questions we have not faced previously were now common for everyone considering a trip. Questions ranged from what is open, what is different, and will I be able to travel safely? We knew we needed to help our travelers find this information and visitutah.com/plan-your-trip/responsible-travel was born.

Results:

The total campaign budget of $5.9M was entirely used. In Adara, we tracked $144.9M in estimated hotel revenue, an increase of 18.6% over the 2019 campaign. SMARI tells us the advertising influenced about 920,000 Utah trips and $1.3 billion in visitor spending creating an ROI of $252:$1. This ROI is lower than 2019, although SMARI commented that the results were surprisingly good and should be considered a huge success.

March–September 2020 our website saw a YOY increase in site visits of 29%, and visitutah.com/plan-your-trip/responsible-travel was our most-visited page seeing more than 320,000 unique page views. The support local landing page, which highlighted Shop in Utah travel deals, received 11,000 pageviews, and searches for Utah on TravelZoo.com were up 123% YOY while comparable destinations were seeing decreases of 25% in searches during the same time period.

Social media drove over 20M impressions and saw YOY growth in all our KPIs:
Impressions +33%
Video Views +50%
Engagements +58%
Clicks +109%

We also monitored hotel searches on Expedia.com against several competitors during the pandemic and Utah frequently led. According to Adara, Utah hotel ADRs recovered to be only 4% less than pre-pandemic rates for April–Oct 2020. As reported by Expedia, Utah experienced an overall increase in ADR of 5% YOY during the time period of January 2020–June 2021 while the rest of the country saw an average decrease of 3%. This indicates that our decision to stay live with our Renaissance campaign led Utah to a faster and stronger recovery to normalcy.

Most importantly, the successes of 2020 enabled us to return to our core mission of elevating life in Utah through responsible tourism stewardship in 2021. We are now able to return to focusing on quality visitation and not simply quantity. So far in 2021, Adara has tracked an 18% growth in ADR from 2019. Also, ad-exposed travelers’ ADR is 36% higher and stays are 17% longer than those not exposed to our advertising. We are thrilled to be inviting our travelers to do their part to help keep Utah Forever Mighty® through responsible travel practices!

Why This Is A Finalist: 

A very unique approach that included unique vertical partners to highly segmented audiences.

Even with some of the creative stating it is time to stay home and be patient due to the pandemic, still appealed to upcoming travel. It was well done.

They did a great job of pivoting messaging during times when normal engagements opportunities were not available.