Challenge:
Tourism Calgary is the official destination marketing organization for the tourism industry in Calgary. Their goal is to raise awareness within regional and long-haul travel audiences, so that Tourism Calgary can ultimately become one of the top desired destinations in Canada. They also need to maximize efficiency across brand and partner-based campaigns, while creating a seamless customer experience.
Strategy:
We began by improving the measurement strategy by assigning specific KPIs at each stage of the tourism funnel. This allowed us to focus on moving users through the tourism funnel and ultimately generating desired conversions.
We then developed a holistic strategy which provided media planning for all brand and partner buy-in programs simultaneously. This allowed us to develop a media program tailored to travelers' purchase journey and identified cross-program marketing opportunities and media efficiencies across stakeholders. The user's position in the journey influenced the channels, targeting, and content served for each campaign.
Each partner investment tier in Tourism Calgary’s program had predetermined content strategies and audiences, so Vovia created flexible media plan templates for each tier. This approach allowed Tourism Calgary to set expectations quickly and easily with partners on what their investment would entail, making it more likely that partners would participate. Partners could invest at any time throughout the year using the templates, saving partners planning time and budget.
Planning all the campaigns holistically also allowed us to identify cross-program opportunities. For example, engaged audiences from the brand campaign were used as remarketing audiences for relevant partner campaigns, where specific offers could be promoted to encourage increased spending. If there were overlaps in targeting/messages, we ensured that only one ad set was showing to that audience to avoid competing with oneself. The integrated strategy provided audience efficiencies - audiences built at the brand level could be leveraged within partner executions, and strong performing partner audiences could be leveraged across partners from similar industries.
Result:
The result was a 53% increase in partner leads year over year. This was accomplished while also supporting more partner campaigns than in any past year - 56 different partners and 26 custom executed partner plans.
