Travel Brands That Are Doing Social Right: How we utilized Social Media to Drive Visitation to the OBX
Our travel & tourism client, Visit the Outer Banks of North Carolina (OBX) came to us looking for a partner who could leverage social media to drive visitation to the destination during the off-season. We worked with them to create a comprehensive paid social media strategy that utilized different social media targeting, ad units and optimizations.
In the spirit of testing and learning, we tried many
different tactics to drive conversions of their travel guide and sign ups for
their newsletter. We focused on those two lower-funnel actions because they
indicate a user’s intent to travel to the destination and to stay connected
with the OBX via their inbox.
We developed our strategy by first looking at our audience
and planning how we would target them. We created social personas, built by
visitor data. With extensive research into the target’s psychographics and
behavior trends, we were able to identify where our visitors engaged and
interact on social.
After finding that they were engaging on Facebook and
Instagram, we used dual-placement ads and optimized the ads towards the more
efficient channel. Along with dual-placements, we utilized the Facebook pixel
and retargeted visitors. With the Pixel data, we also created lookalike
audiences to convert more users who behaved similarly. In just 2018 alone, we
created over 429 ad sets with varying targets.
Additionally, we tested different creative concepts for our conversion ads and ultimately found that user-generated content (UGC) was the most effective at converting users to download or sign up for the newsletter.
With our refined targeting, daily optimization and top creative, we
successfully increased intent to visit the Outer Banks, year-round.
In 2018 alone, we generated a:
· 106% increase in newsletter
sign-ups
· 19% increase in overall intent to
visit actions Y-o-Y
· 17% increase in site traffic
Y-o-Y
By being nimble and testing new paid media tactics, we were able to
find the most efficient way to drive conversions and ultimately double our
conversions from the previous year.
If curious how we’ve successfully used social media to drive conversions for other travel destinations or other industries, check out our case study page here.
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The post Travel Brands That Are Doing Social Right: How we utilized Social Media to Drive Visitation to the OBX appeared first on Ignite Social Media Agency.