Goals: Clearly state your marketing goals. What did you strive to achieve using this piece or program?
When was the last time you found yourself standing in one place, watching the landscape pass you by?
In Newfoundland and Labrador (NL), at the most easterly edge of North America, a spectacle of 10,000-year-old cathedrals of ice come to visit every spring and summer, hugging our coves, inlets, and bays on their slow journey south. There’s little wonder that the area just off the coast is known as Iceberg Alley.
But imagine making the trek all the way here, then not knowing where to find them. With more than 18,000 miles of coastline to explore, it’s like searching for a needle in a haystack – of the glacial variety. Icebergs move and melt; they are surprisingly elusive. So there’s a chance that travellers will return home disappointed. How could we stack the deck in their favour?
To enhance the traveller experience so that they see icebergs, we had to get IcebergFinder.com – the world’s premier online destination for all things iceberg – on their radar. And how better to accomplish this than with a team of local social media influencers / photographers chasing down these giants for us, and posting the images in real-time?
Chosen for their relevant fan base in primary social media channels, along with their ability to create high-quality nature-based imagery, the Iceberg Finders captured and shared content that fuelled a campaign designed to increase awareness of IcebergFinder.com and foster traveller / industry engagement.
Results: Which of your original goals did you achieve and how? How did you measure the effectiveness of the piece or campaign? Entrants should provide quantifiable results of their tactics or campaigns. (for example, click through rates or ad equivalency)
To build awareness of IcebergFinder.com and increase travellers’ engagement on the site while on the ground here in NL, we executed a local influencer campaign where six photographers created and shared icy content, encouraging the use of #IcebergsNL. Iceberg images were captured around every nook and cranny of the province and posted to IcebergFinder.com and social channels such as Facebook and Instagram. Weekly eNews ‘alerts’ promoted the fruits of their labour and highlighted the number of frosty giants meandering along our shores.
The campaign accomplished all of its objectives… and then some:
- Sessions to the site increased a walloping 76%.
- Each of the Iceberg Finders creatively overdelivered, as posts on Facebook and Instagram tallied a quarter of a million engagements in a short season.
- Pageviews skyrocketed to more than 8.2 million, while session duration increased 29%.
- The site garnered more than 233,000 audience interactions, more than 1,500 photo uploads, and 7,500 photo gallery views.
- And perhaps most importantly, the number of operator referrals generated from IcebergFinder.com surpassed the previous year, increasing 187% and reaching more than 14,000 referrals.
Entry Title
Chasing Giants – Iceberg Finders
Division
Public Relations - Influencer Marketing