Destinations Council Destiny Awards > Printed Collateral Materials

Cabarrus County, N.C. Destination and Motorsports Guide

About This Entry:

Our Story: The Cabarrus County, NC Destination and Motorsports Guide is an essential travel resource for visitors to the county—helping them to navigate through the many places to play, stay, eat, shop and race in Cabarrus County.

Crafting, printing and distributing these annual guides is a true labor of love because we see the tremendous value it provides to our visitors and potential visitors. Therefore, each year we evaluate our content and distribution strategy to identify ways to improve the user experience and increase utilization of the guide. From enhancing the look and feel to researching and writing new feature stories about the newest hotspots in town and upcoming events, we treat each guide as a new opportunity to increase awareness about what a unique destination Cabarrus County, NC truly is.

Objective: For the 2018-2019 guide, our goal is to increase engagement and utilization of the destination guide, so we came up with an idea that uses technology and paper to complement each other. The idea - use Augmented Reality to take the reader beyond the printed pages, allowing them to get to know the people on the guide covers before they even step foot in the county, providing access to exclusive videos and content.

Target Audience/ Condition: In addition to distribution through our local and in-state partners, we distribute to direct requests received via a form fill on our website as a result of our targeted paid media efforts. We also use them as collateral for PR outreach to reporters and influencers in specific drive markets that align with our paid media efforts, and the states and cities from which the highest concentration of visitors originate.

Campaign Strategy:

Creative Steps: First we needed the idea that would enhance this year’s guide over previous years. After brainstorming with our agency and reviewing data on the hottest tech trends and taking notice of the billion-dollar demand for Augmented Reality entertainment, we knew that was the direction we wanted to go. And our latest destination guide is a true evolution of past guides in more ways than one. The current look and feel resembles a magazine, not only in size, but in content and design as well.

Integrating Augmented Reality into the guide was something we had never done. This required developing a custom app programmed to deliver an augmented reality experience, photographing four different covers and filming and editing over 30 different videos, in addition to writing, designing and printing the guide.

Partners: Our agency partner managed the development and execution of the Augmented Reality components, using local photographers, videographers and editors. Content was curated and written by our in-house destination experts.

Methodology: Four covers will be released throughout the year highlighting groups of "People of Cabarrus" who aid visitors in making memories—we call them the Thrill Seekers, Foodies, Creators and Tastemakers.

Analytics were built into the app, allowing us to track downloads, usage and time in app. To activate the Augmented Reality, users just need to follow these three easy steps below. The first is to download the free Visit Cabarrus app on iTunes or Google Play. Next is to hover the device over the faces of each person pictured on the front and inside cover of the destination guide. The last step is to follow the prompts on screen for an all-new, enhanced experience.

Results:

Results: The destination guide launched about a month ago to help kick-off National Travel and Tourism Week with a budget of $12,500 per cover, which was inclusive of the AR production.

In this short amount of time, we are seeing steady growth in daily active users. For example, there was a 66.7 percent increase in daily active users this week compared to last week. Time in app continues to increase, averaging 1:01 min per user, which allows each user to view to completion multiple videos within a single session.

The app has also been responsible for driving traffic to the website. This referral traffic is achieving a 12 percent lower bounce rate compared to the overall average site bounce rate for the same time-frame indicating the user is highly engaged with our brand and finding valuable information on our website to continue their trip planning cycle.

We've also secured free media coverage with two outlets. Our plan is to heavily promote the guide and AR app in the new fiscal year through earned, owned and paid media opportunities to increase adoption, utilization and help increase awareness and drive site traffic to visitcabarrus.com.

Why This Is A Finalist: 

The campaign focused on Cabarrus County locals and highlighted four distinct personas. This was an interesting way to structure the visitor guide and was a nice departure from the traditional member listings. Cabarrus County tied the visitor guide to a digital app, which the judges found impressive. They engaged users to view print through app, in addition to having a nice printed piece. Cabarrus County saw a 66 percent increase in views, which is an impressive indicator that the digital visitor guide integration is successful. They had great metrics about app usage as tied to the visitor guide.