Goals: Clearly state your marketing goals. What did you strive to achieve using this piece or program?
The experience of taking a family road trip is a timeless classic, with days spent on the road together exploring each family member’s bucket-list activities and locations. But for as often as the family pup tails the humans along these adventures, they rarely have any input. Until recently.
As part of its summer campaign to support the Billings Great American Road Trip, the team at Visit Billings decided to let Rick – the family pet – take the wheel.
Rick had been introduced as the furry companion of a family vacationing in Billings during the prior summer’s campaign, observing all the splendor of new locations through the eyes of a dog (think of lakes as giant watering bowls, for example). And by keenly noting everything one can enjoy road tripping through Billings, Rick became an expert.
So, Visit Billings put Rick in the driver’s seat to help achieve the destination’s summer visitation and awareness goals:
• Generate increased visitation to Billings during the spring and summer months.
• Increase awareness for Billings as an ideal spring and summer travel destination.
• Drive traffic to the Visit Billings website and engage with content on the site to encourage conversion/booking.
The campaign was based solely on travel advice on the best of Billings from Rick, “the peoples’ pet,” and delivered to would-be visitors through social media, video and website content, such as RickTok videos, #RicksTips social units and online road trip itineraries.
Rick understood that not everyone would want to explore Billings the same way as he does so he enlisted the help of some animal friends from ZooMontana to diversify itineraries.
Visitors were able to select some of their favorite activities through an online quiz, and based on their responses, they would get a different itinerary. In addition to Rick’s suggestions, visitors could follow the lead of Pabu the red panda (a friends getaway), Bert the bison (solo trip) or Winston the sloth (romantic getaway)
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)
The campaign was successful in achieving campaign goals for visitation, awareness and content engagement as follows:
Increased Visitation
Hotel occupancy data revealed that the campaign was successful in driving visitation to Billings throughout the campaign period.
Visitation to Billings increased over the same period from the previous year based on the following:
• Hotel occupancy rate increased 5.35%
• Average daily revenue for hotels increased 12.9%
• Revenue per available hotel room increased 17.1%
Increased Awareness
The efficacy of increasing awareness of Billings as an ideal spring/summer destination was measured by paid media performance, web traffic, and website engagement and conversion.
Paid media performance:
• 426,278 Impressions
• 44,322 Clicks (avg. CPC of $1.35 and overall CTR of 10.4%)
Web traffic (versus the same period last year):
• Total traffic increased by 75.16%
• Bounce rate decreased by 4.11%
• Average session duration increased by 6.13%
Engagement and conversion:
• Generated 543 non-page view conversions (e-newsletter signups, visitor guide downloads, and visitor guide conversions) at a $110 CPA
• Drove 40,999 page view conversions, at an average cost of $1.46 per page view:
• 30,831 campaign landing page views
• 10,168 event page views
Return on Investment: How much revenue has the piece or campaign generated and how does this compare to your goal? What was the return on investment?
More than 2.6 million people visit Billings annually, spending $621 million every year. Tourism supports more than 10,000 jobs locally in the Billings’ area. As visitation to Billings increased over the same period from the previous year based on occupancy, ADR and RevPar percentage increases, Billings can anticipate that spending to increase at retailers, restaurants and bars, gas stations, and lodging businesses, to name a few. Non-resident travel supports nearly 67,000 jobs in Montana and lowers the tax burden on every Montana household an average of $866/year.
Entry Title
Visit Billings - Approved by Dogs for Humans
Division
Integrated Campaign - Business to Consumer