Destinations Council Destiny Awards > Branding and Integrated Marketing Campaign: Destination Marketing Budget More Than $10 Million

Retarget Marketing Campaign: Year 1

About This Entry:

VISIT PHILADELPHIA builds Greater Philadelphia’s economy and image through destination marketing that increases the number of visitors, the number of nights they stay and the number of things they do. We want to communicate with leisure travelers—those who are interested in visiting Philadelphia for fun.

By building awareness of Philadelphia, we’ve had success in converting consumer trade show/meeting attendees into leisure guests by inviting them to come early, stay late and come back. But last year, we tried something new: Through a $75,000 investment from the Pennsylvania Convention Center (PCC)—which we matched—we developed a new retargeting marketing pilot program that focused on engagement. The program leveraged new technology to pinpoint interests, geofence specific areas, retarget device IDs and access new data sources to market to visitors.

This program marked an important new partnership opportunity with the PCC, which also distributed content from our websites that encouraged visitors to experience the entire region during their stay. More than 1.6 million people attended 33 PCC trade shows and meetings and nine citywide events in 2017; these people were our target audience.

By using new data sources and capabilities to target potential visitors with a high potential to visit, we hoped to build the audience, capture device IDs and invite visitors back to the city. With tight messaging to emphasize the many reasons to visit Philadelphia, we believed that we could increase leisure-driven overnight hotel stays.

Campaign Strategy:

At the outset of the campaign, we identified high-yield trade shows and meetings and their expected attendee count. This exercise helped us determine the total potential audience we’d reach.

Our social media and advertising teams worked collaboratively to build audiences interested in specific activities represented on the PCC events calendar like the Philadelphia Flower Show, Philadelphia Auto Show and Philadelphia Travel and Adventure Show. Then, through social media campaigns and online advertisements featuring content on visitphilly.com and uwishunu.com, we targeted these potential attendees, invited them to trade shows and pushed them information about regional activities.

While people were attending a trade show, we pushed them social media geofenced ads on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Snapchat. Topics covered included “Best Restaurants to Visit in Philadelphia,” “Top Things To Do Around the Convention Center,” “Top Things To Do On Your First Visit to Philadelphia,” “Top Places To Grab Breakfast Near the Convention Center” and “Top Sports Bars Near the Convention Center.”

Finally, 30 days later after the trade show, we asked attendees to visit Philadelphia again. Using a combination of social media and advertising tools such as the Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, UTM codes and device IDs, we asked them to consider taking another trip to Philadelphia by advertising new content and our Visit Philly Overnight Hotel Package.

Results:

Overall, the project drove 1,265 leisure-driven overnight hotel stays, which resulted in $252,520 in direct revenue. We crafted more than 20 pieces of content to convey all the reasons to come early, do more, come back and sleep over in Philadelphia. We even captured more than 1.6 million device IDs for future invitations to our city. In addition to the increased revenue and hotel rooms booked, the data generated from content engagement provided additional revenue to other campaigns such as the Visit Philly Overnight Hotel Package.

Due to the results of the campaign and positive feedback from the community, both parties often refer to this project as an example of the power of collaboration to help visitors discover Philadelphia. We launched a second retargeting effort in December 2018.

Why This Is A Finalist: 

Judges liked the diversity of both the people and the activities in the creative, and liked where Visit Philadelphia used the media spend for trade shows and social. The results were positive, with nearly 1,300 nights pre or post conference and more than $250,000 in revenue. The campaign showed good direct revenue numbers.