For FY2017/18, we refreshed our digital marketing strategy for Visit Wales, putting social at the heart of our planning to drive increased consideration of Wales as a holiday destination by tapping into the ‘Social Proof’ trend of travel inspiration.

Our social media campaign objectives were: to increase meaningful engagement and brand consideration through visual and emotionally impactful social creative. We needed this campaign to engage through audience travel trigger points and solidify the relationship with practical reasons to visit Wales. This would ladder up to the core business objective – get more people from the UK to visit Wales.

We introduced new KPIs beyond traffic and email leads, looking at engagement per paid social channel. This meant activating our Total Social strategy, working across paid social media channels and paid organic social media community content.

Our core objective was to increase meaningful engagement and positive brand consideration.

Here’s how we surpassed our KPIs:

1. Our work drove over 4.6 million meaningful engagements at a CPE of £0.04 – 384% over forecast
2. Our organic content boosting and paid ads increased the social following of Visit Wales’ Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest pages by over 68.8K at a CPL of £2.52 – 7% over forecast
3. Our social campaign increased the Visit Wales CRM database by over 107K new users at a CPL of £0.84 – 152% over forecast. And it drove an additional 495.7K unique users to the Visit Wales website at a CPU of £0.95

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BACKGROUND

We’ve been working with the Welsh Government for over 8 years. We run all of their digital marketing activity, and in 2018 we wanted to refresh our social strategy to align our paid social activity with their organic social activity, implanting our Total Social product to generate consideration of Wales.

Our social media campaign objectives were: to increase meaningful engagement and brand consideration through visual and emotionally impactful social creative. We needed this campaign to engage through audience travel trigger points and solidify the relationship with practical reasons to visit Wales. This would ladder up to the core business objective – get more people from the UK to visit Wales.

Our core KPIs:

1. 382k unique visitors to visitwales.com
2. 101k leads (email or social follow)

We introduced new KPIs beyond traffic and email leads, looking at engagement per paid social channel. This meant activating our Total Social strategy, working across paid social media channels and paid organic social media community content.

STRATEGY

From our insight into what was driving perception of travel destinations, we knew social was important to get right in 2018. So, we rejuvenated the strategy and implemented our Total Social approach. This uses on-the-fly analysis to boost best-performing organic Facebook posts to look-a-like audiences, layered onto traditional paid social buying. We also used influencer marketing to both increase effectiveness targeted at specific audiences, and to create content for our own platforms.

Structured around the audience pillars – ‘Switch Off, Opt Out’, ‘Exhilarating Experiences’ and ‘Coastal Culture’ – we ran social campaign segments for each sequentially over the summer

period. We focused activity across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and ran test and learn campaigns across Pinterest and Snapchat (a first for Visit Wales).

We built the audience framework into our core social platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. This allowed us to target users by their initial interest and behaviour, and show them different creative based on their engagement with previous content. We boosted top-performing organic Facebook posts – drawing from our paid campaign learnings – and led engaged audience groups back to our paid campaigns. This increased brand recognition among our target audiences.

We used Pinterest ads for all three audiences after seeing great engagement and traffic from our Switch-off, Opt-Out campaign, and tailored keyword targeting for each based on high volume relevant searches, learnings from PPC activity and input from the team at Pinterest. We also used Snap Ads for our Coastal Cultures audience, promoting a giveaway.

Creative
Across all four channels, we crafted fit-for-purpose ad creative with copy that tapped into each audience pillar’s travel trigger (escape, express yourself etc.), using brand images from overarching Epic Shores messaging and unique content from our influencer marketing campaign.

For Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, we made animated GIFs with stunning imagery for each audience pillar. Pinterest leveraged desirable images that drive high volumes of engagement, and for Snapchat we used raw, ephemeral content. Each ad led to a unique Visit Wales landing page that hosted inspiring content and practical reasons to visit Wales.

RESULTS

Our core objective was to increase meaningful engagement and positive brand consideration. Here’s how we surpassed our KPIs:

• Our work drove over 4.6 million meaningful engagements at a CPE of £0.04 – 384% over forecast
• Our organic content boosting and paid ads increased the social following of Visit Wales’ Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest pages by over 68.8K at a CPL of £2.52 – 7% over forecast
• Our social campaign increased the Visit Wales CRM database by over 107K new users at a CPL of £0.84 – 152% over forecast. And it drove an additional 495.7K unique users to the Visit Wales website at a CPU of £0.95

Paid social campaign highlights:

1. Visit Wales’ Instagram followers surpassed 100K, supported by our paid ads
2. Pinterest ad engagement rate was 7% (vs. industry average 2-5%) with a 0.5% CTR
3. Facebook ads drove over 100K new email leads
4. Snapchat drove 50K unique users to the Visit Wales website

Our paid social campaign drove huge impact for the brand by engaging newly targeted users and increasing social and email leads, then solidifying this connection by driving users to longer-form content on site (with the ultimate aim of making the decision to visit Wales easy and accessible). This contributed to a 21.1% increase YOY for trips to Wales, compared with a 4.2% increase in trips to the UK as a whole.

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"iCrossing delivered a first-class campaign to excite and engage our target audiences in London and the South East to think about contemporary Wales. Highlighting accessibility and a variety of Welsh products with inspiring new Wales Brand creatives delivered through innovative digital formats. The campaign exceeded our objectives and expectations! "

Samantha Diamond, Head of Tourism Marketing, Visit Wales