National State Tourism Directors Mercury Awards > Niche Targeting

Utah Office of Tourism, Film & Global Branding

Affinity Marketing: ATV, Fly Fishing and Cycling

About This Entry:

The Mighty 5Ⓡ national parks and fourteen ski areas are Utah’s most iconic travel destinations. The runaway success of the Mighty 5 campaign, combined with a surge of interest in national parks across the west, has led to record visitation at Utah’s five national parks. While this increased visitation has benefited communities adjacent to the national parks, visitation during holiday weekends and peak times of day has created crowding issues within the parks.

For Utah’s tourism economy to continue its rapid rate of growth, the Utah Office of Tourism needed to draw visitation to lesser-visited, yet remarkable, destinations in other parts of the state. Being relatively new to tourism, these communities don’t have as developed a tourism infrastructure (hotels, restaurants, guide services, shopping) as the national park gateway communities. For this reason, it was unwise for us to try redirecting a national parks visitor toward one of these lesser-visited destinations. Instead, we had to find a different type of traveler.

We developed our affinity-based marketing strategy around world-class but niche opportunities in Utah, targeting specific enthusiast groups who plan their travels primarily around activities, not amenities. To reach them, we utilized carefully crafted content and digital targeting tactics to give our small campaign an outsized impact.

Our campaign goals were to raise awareness of Utah beyond beautiful red rock landscapes and The Greatest Snow on EarthⓇ and attract new types of visitors to Utah. Secondly, we wanted to plant the seed for future tourism growth in these rural communities, where there is strong potential for a tourism economy to flourish once they have more public and private sector infrastructure.

During our planning process, we selected three affinity groups, including ATV/OHV, fly-fishing and cycling (road and trail), because Utah has world-class destinations for each activity and the affinity group was large enough to market to and draw a sufficient number of visitors. With these three audiences defined, we moved quickly into our content planning phase.

Campaign Strategy:

To ensure our content spoke authentically to each of these specialized audiences, we worked closely with subject matter experts to identify the top destinations in Utah for each activity and to select writers and photographers who could speak credibly to a dedicated audience of passionate enthusiasts.

Our content strategy focused on building a content hub for each affinity group, with one leading piece of content, serving as the primary inspirational draw and related content helping to guide the traveler into information gathering and research for a future trip.

For fly-fishing, we show a father teaching his son the craft of fly fishing on the majestic Green River. This set the stage for additional content on where and when to fish in Utah with local tips on how to find the best fish on the popular Middle Provo River and other top fishing spots.

The Paiute ATV trail is among the largest networks of ATV trails in the world, allowing ATV enthusiasts to travel on scenic and ruggedly beautiful trails by day and stay in comfortable hotels each night. A package of articles tells the story of the Paiute and Arapeen ATV trails and the people who pioneered the trail systems.

The U.S. Bicycle Route System stretches across the United States, with one of the earliest designated segments crossing southern Utah. Instead of featuring an elite rider, we featured a middle-aged couple and their two young children. Their story focuses on the ways that the slower pace of bicycle travel changes a traveler’s perspective.

With a relatively small paid media budget, we distributed our content through native content placements on the PulsePoint network and on Facebook, utilizing both platforms’ targeting tools and built-in programmatic optimizations to home in on the audiences most likely to engage with our content.

Public relations efforts mirrored our content approaches through targeted outreach to media outlets and journalists specializing in our three affinity groups. The research we gathered for content generation became pitch points for our PR team as they hosted journalists and held in-market media tours.

Results:

The media buy of $420,000 was spread across approximately 16 months and concentrated between August of 2016 and May of 2017.

Through our native content vendor, PulsePoint, 223,539 users read our content with an average time on page of 2:45. In total, this resulted in 6,735 hours readers spent engaging with our articles and slideshows. More than 85% of those readers were first-time visitors to our website, confirming that we are reaching new audiences with our content and introducing them to Utah.

Beginning fall 2016, we gained the ability to track bookings from these PulsePoint placements on the Arrivalist and Adara Magellan platforms. These vendors track ad-exposed conversions either through ad-exposed devices arriving in Utah (Arrivalist) or first-party booking data from hotels and airlines (Magellan). Using these platforms, we were able to track 626 flight bookings and 302 hotel bookings on the Magellan network and 631 arrivals on the Arrivalist network within that short time-span.

On Facebook, using Facebook’s recommended awareness metrics of reach and frequency, we reached 5.3 million individuals with a frequency of 2.

One of our big public relations successes came this spring when we co-hosted a familiarization event for OHV/ATV and motorsports journalists with Kawasaki for the launch of the new Kawasaki Versys X-3000 by traveling Utah’s dirt roads and backways. The partnership resulted in nearly a dozen articles in endemic publications, highlighting the breadth and diversity of Utah’s trails for OHV enthusiasts.

Finally, tourism-related tax numbers (lodging, resort and restaurant taxes) show positive momentum with year-over-year growth in most of the counties featured in the inspirational content. We cannot attribute these gains directly to this campaign, though the affinity-based campaign was the primary marketing effort from our office for these counties. Through strong content and careful targeting, we’ve been able to start the growth engine in new tourism destinations in rural Utah and will use the lessons we’ve learned in this campaign for future, highly targeted marketing efforts.

Why This Is A Finalist: 

What a great problem to have in Utah—crowd control at the Mighty 5 and boosting lesser known/visited spots across the state. The affinity campaign was an excellent way to make the activity the hero and the destination simply the backdrop. The focus on the family, whether biking or fly fishing, was great because it makes these activities seem doable and less overwhelming. This entire campaign was targeted, succinct, and seemingly flawless. Every element was thoughtful, pragmatic, and forward-thinking. This campaign had elements that took this beyond an ad campaign that took it to a place of community growth, future tourism, and an expanded sale of the entire state and its beauty. A highlight of this campaign was how success of the campaign was established. So many campaigns rely on extrapolation and year-over-year data with a stretch as to implications between the campaign and growth. This campaign was built on realistic goals, state-of-the-art tracking systems, and delivered a solid, positive result.