Goals: Clearly state your marketing goals. What did you strive to achieve using this piece or program?
Although Savannah is a popular year-round destination, visitation during January-March is typically lower, with mid-week travel and bookings especially sluggish. Using additional funds available during the final quarter of 2021, we wanted to craft an actionable campaign to help generate travel during those first slow months of 2022.
What we didn’t want, however, was to go the traditional advertising route with a campaign that would play it safe. This effort needed to make a significant impact for our local hotels and partners, so we knew we had to come up with a highly strategic plan to deliver our message through laser-sharp targeting in our designated top markets: New York City, Boston, Washington DC/Baltimore, Chicago and Toronto.
The result was a first-of-its-kind campaign built on targeting tactics that – to our knowledge – have never been done by any destination, regardless of size or budget. Our media objectives were:
1. AWARENESS: FILLING THE FUNNEL – We needed to build demand through media that would keep Savannah top-of-mind as an ideal destination for holiday, winter and spring vacations.
2. ENGAGEMENT: STARTING THEIR JOURNEY – Once we had their attention, we would need to show consumers why Savannah is right for them through personalized content that would turn lookers into bookers.
3. VISITATION: GETTING FEET ON THE GROUND – Measure success through actual visitation and spending by analyzing log files, third-party tools and visitation lift in targeted markets.
To determine success, we used all technology available to measure campaign effectiveness through media engagement, bookings and mobile location data. For example, working across partners and platforms can make tracking pixels a challenge, so we also would layer in the use of platform-specific solutions like Adara Impact, Adara Connected TV Log Ingestion, YouTube Google My Business Store Visits and Google Ads Data Hub to create a more holistic picture of our results.
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)
Going into this campaign, we knew our “first of its kind” approach could go one of two ways – either missing the mark but providing key learning for next time, or delivering even stronger results than we ever thought possible. We’re thrilled to report it was the latter.
For a campaign that lasted just over 45 days, it delivered:
• 88,999,886 impressions and 52,842 clicks
• 6,281,701 completed video views from 7,032,384 starts, resulting in a remarkable 89.3% completion rate
• 53,571 sessions on the campaign website, leading to 59,407 pageviews and 37,874 direct links to the booking site
And not only that, it also delivered true measurable spending in Savannah:
• 80,386 hotel searches resulted in 1,795 travelers making 952 bookings for an estimated 2,057 room nights
• 25,452 flight searches resulted in 2,363 travelers making 1,543 bookings for approximately 6,516 nights
• Purchases tracked through Visa Insights show the campaign generated 3,960 transactions in Savannah, resulting in $241,951.11 in sales
• What’s more, 639 or those 818 purchasers were identified as being new to the market and had not made purchases in Savannah previously
All told, this campaign resulted in a remarkable 1,056% Return on Ad Spend.
Budget: Please include total budget vs. total actual cost. How much revenue has the piece or campaign generated and how does this compare to your goal? What was the return on investment?
The cost of all media to generate such phenomenal results and insights from our groundbreaking Incremental Winter Campaign? Only $395,000.
As an added bonus, the campaign’s performance also provided valuable new insights to help craft future campaigns to further maximize our marketing dollars.
For example, one of the largest takeaways we learned is that Florida (not a priority market before and not part of this campaign) proved to be a very fruitful new market based on Visa spending reports. Insights from Basis also showed a Disney-heavy influence among those who engaged in our campaign. Together, these two findings indicate that not only those who live in Orlando – but perhaps others just visiting there – are prime targets for Visit Savannah messaging. As a result, we are now running campaigns in this newly tapped market.
Entry Title
2022 Incremental Winter Campaign