Goals: Clearly state your marketing goals. What did you strive to achieve using this piece or program?
The goal was to create a versatile, multiyear, omni-channel campaign that differentiated Door County’s communities by bringing awareness to the many different experiences and feelings while sustainably managing visitors to the destination. We turned Door County’s messaging into an aspirational and inspirational brand lifestyle experience with the “Feelings'' campaign. Door County offers unique emotional experiences, and while the exact feelings are unique for everyone, it is clear Door County elicits a strong positive reaction for visitors. We captured this essence with a clean, minimal aesthetic that successfully reached audiences with powerfully minimal creative using definitions of feelings, such as “awe”, “enchanted”, and “serene”.
Across paid search, programmatic display via Google, Meta, connected TV, out-of-home, and geofencing (MobileFuse), our efforts were geared toward driving brand awareness in the growth markets of St. Louis and Denver, as well as keeping consistent visitation from the high-performing core markets of Green Bay/Appleton, Milwaukee, Madison, and Chicago. The ‘Feelings’ campaign transcended more than leisure travel too. A few other main drivers of this campaign were driving summer workforce recruitment, sustainable travel, and pushing Door County top-of-mind for corporate retreats, family reunions, or small group meetings.
We added QR codes in many instances to drive stronger calls to actions, inviting people to scan to learn more, as well as giving us an additional layer of data to measure performance.
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)
Our omni-channel approach has continued to yield fantastic results! From a brand awareness perspective, we looked directly at YOY increases in visitation to the Door County website, increased referral clicks from paid search efforts, view rates on videos, and CTR across paid social and geofencing efforts as key performance indicators. We utilized Epsilon for visitor attribution, allowing us to track ad-exposed users to Door County and gave us visibility into spending patterns once here.
Paid Search:
“Discover” was the top performing ad group with over 100k clicks and a CTR of 21.87%
“Experience” ad group was second top performing by clicks with 57k and an average CTR of 25.38%.
“Events” ad group also performed strongly with a 35.57% CTR. All ad groups in this campaign had CTRs of 8% and higher.
The combination of these ad groups contributed to Search being the second highest traffic driver to the Door County website.
Video:
Our Google video distribution campaign for winter, spring and summer had a cumulative view rate of 59%. The :30 Summer video had the highest overall view rate with 68% resonating strongly with outdoor enthusiasts.
For Meta video distribution, we had :15 second video cuts for Spring and a :30 video cut for Summer. The overall average video view thru rate was 43% garnering nearly 1M completed views for the full length video, and getting 1.6M page engagements for Door County.
Social:
Meta Remarketing campaign performed strong with over 897k impressions delivered to the Door County remarketing audience and 42k clicks to the Door County website.
Below are top “Feelings” performers -
The enhanced Summer Carousel received 10k link clicks with 260k page engagements.
“Tranquil” single image ad had 6.7k link clicks and 8,800 page engagements.
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?
Outside of the key performance indicators that gave us a glimpse into the vitality of our brand awareness efforts (seen in the ‘Results’ section), we really wanted to partner with a company that allowed us to really show ROI and visitor attribution. Welcome, Epsilon! Through our partnership with Epsilon, we’ve been able to track ad-exposed users into Door County and then get a view into their spending patterns. From our efforts we’ve seen:
974 - Total Visitors
$287K - Total Visitor Spend
3.2K - Total Transactions Tracked
$295 - Average Messaged Yield Per Visitor
9:1 - Return on Ad Spend
Epsilon is only able to track, on average, about 60% of in-person non-cash transactions, which means these are very conservative numbers. Also a WIN! Because this was the first time Door County has partnered with Epsilon, we’re going to use these numbers as a baseline for a future campaign and for apples to apples comparison.
Entry Title
Destination Door County - “Feelings” Campaign
Division
Advertising - Brand Campaign