THE SCOPE
The Traverse City Uncorked promotion celebrates the premiere grape-growing area in Northwest Michigan to celebrate Michigan Wine Month. This Uncorked campaign was designed to create additional exposure for the region’s wineries and lodging properties along with increasing visitation during a shoulder season period for the destination.
In past years, the program was done with a paper trail of printed passports, coupons, and maps. In 2021, Traverse City tourism decided to develop a digital passport through the Bandwango platform that was more cost-effective and environmentally friendly. It also created a touchless experience for the visitor that coincides with travel industry trends during the pandemic.
The promotional program included several specific goals:
- Build awareness of the “TC Uncorked” event & Traverse City as a wine destination to new and existing audiences in multiple geographic areas
- Drive engaged traffic to a customized TC Uncorked landing page
- Motivate users to download, and sign-up for the TC Uncorked mobile passport and visit multiple wineries
- Encourage users to research lodging packages related to the event and book overnight stays
THE STRATEGY
TwoSix Digital conducted a promotional campaign for the program that began on April 19, 2021, and ended on May 28, 2021, on the Facebook and Instagram ad networks. The campaign featured the following tactics:
- An introduction of the event to new users and expanded audiences
- Leverage A/B test results to determine which landing page resulted in the most app downloads
- Utilized quality core source data from Traverse City Tourism like past program participants from previous years, users that visited the website landing pages that featured winery and vineyard related content, and those consumers who engaged in wine-related lodging specials
- Developed new audiences with online data sharing through Traverse City Tourism’s relationship with the Traverse Wine Coast – the area’s winery promotional organization.
The website retargeting tactics were done nationwide, so we would not exclude those outside the designated geographic regions who visited the website directly through other promotions or organic search queries. The primary geographic targets were driven market states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois. We also excluded users within 50 miles of Traverse City to encourage travel and visitation.
Impressions
Total Link Clicks
Website Page Views
Passport Downloads
Passport Check-In’s
Avg. Time On Page
THE RESULTS
The first ad flight that was focused on “Scenic Fall Drives” set a very high bar with 42,816 impressions, 3,213 total clicks, a 7.50% unique clickthrough rate with a cost per click of .14.
Based on the adjustment in targeting and leveraging the machine learning capabilities of Facebook, each additional ad flight gained more impressions, clicks and click-throughs than the one that proceeded it. Flight two was focused on the “10 Ways to Unplug”received 51,999 impressions, 3,968 total clicks and had a CTR of 7.63%. Following this, the “Holiday Kickoff” content grew even more at 69,115 impressions, 7,920 total clicks and a CTR of 11.46%. Lastly, “10 Reasons to Visit Shipshewana” garnered 87,061 impressions, 7,949, and a CTR of 9.13%.
Not only were the ad results exceptional, but it also produced a very high quality website visitor. Through Google Analytics analysis, we learned that the click throughs produced 14,667 page views, 13,606 unique pageviews and each user spent an average time on site of 2:34. The lengthy average time on page demonstrated that we were successful in builidng an audience that wanted to learn more about Shipshewana, Indiana.
All of this success was obtained with a minimal net ad spend of $1,800. When compared to global avaerages, via the Nanigans.com Facebook Report of Q3 2018, the campaign achieved the following results:
- A CTR of 5.76%, 450% better than the global average of 1.28%
- A CPM of $7.17, 208% less than the global average of $14.93
- A CPC of .12, 940% less than the global average of $1.17