Frankenmuth Spring Shoulder Season Campaign
THE SCOPE
For the first time in the history of the organization, the Frankenmuth Convention and Visitor Bureau decided to adjust its marketing budget to highlight a shoulder season promotion to drive consumers to the town when additional business is needed in the months of March and April.
We developed a Spring Break themed campaign highlighting opportunities for those within a three-hour drive or less of Frankenmuth. The consumers targeted may not have the additional time or resources to travel a long distance for their spring break activities. The program featured one main comprehensive landing page, and additional content pages centered around indoor waterparks and pools at two of the destination’s anchor hotel properties, along with family-related activities that can be enjoyed during the springtime.
THE STRATEGY
The campaign had several goals:
- Create overall awareness of Frankenmuth as a potential spring break location
- Website traffic to the main landing page and informational content/blog pages
- Travel guide requests
- Email acquisition for future communication through the organization’s monthlynewsletterThe campaign featured the following elements: Facebook and Instagram click ads to target geo markets, YouTube video ads overlayed in the same target markets, and Facebook Lead Generation Ads to aquire consumer email addresses.
Impressions
Website Sessions
%
Click-through-rate
Travel Guide Requests
YouTube Video Views
THE RESULTS
- 3,654,481 total impressions from the Facebook and YouTube Ad Networks and 75,851 total link clicks.
- 61,188 website sessions from all the ad campaigns
- The Facebook and Instagram Click Ads generated a CTR of 4.75% which is 210% above the global Facebook CTR average of 1.53% per Nanigans.com (Jan. 2019)
- The Facebook and Instagram Click ads generated a CPC of .15 which is 220% below the global Facebook CPC of .48 per Nanigans.com (Jan. 2019)
- The Lead Generation ads generated a 6.22% CTR, 7,017 new email addresses and a cost per new email/lead of .85.
- The campaign generated 712 travel guide requests, with the most coming from the Chicago DMA – one of the organization’s highly sought-after markets.
- The YouTube ads generated 227,480 total views at .02/view and had an average interaction rate of 44.5%
- The year over year website traffic for the six-week campaign period was up 48% in total sessions and new user session were up 59%.
- The Book A Room link that connects to the website’s meta reservation engine received 13,403 clicks during the campaign period
The campaign’s target drive market DMA’s had the following increases in website traffic, year over year:
Indianapolis – 423%
Chicago – 308%
Cincinnati – 231%
Fort Wayne – 238%
Cleveland/Akron – 197%
Columbus – 165%
Grand Rapids/Kalamazoo/Battle Creek – 71%
These impressive results were driven by advanced targeting technics that leveraged the data available from the Facebook website pixel and the machine learning capabilities from the application.
Throughout the campaign, we utilized custom and lookalike audiences built from specific engagement on key website URL pages and those engaging in previous content related to water parks and family fun. These audiences gave us the opportunity to present the Frankenmuth product to multiple new consumers with personas that mirror those who frequently visit the destination.
“With the help of Two Six Digital, we saw a 59% increase in website traffic year over year. This is usually a typical slow traffic period for us. The number of new visitors to the site as well as conversions reached throughout the campaign neared numbers that we typically see during peak summer months. Unique visitors to the Book a Room page almost doubled each month during the campaign. We were really ecstatic about the results the campaign produced.”
This campaign was honored to receive both an eTSY award at the eTourism Summit for the Best Content Marketing Program in 2019 as well as a Silver Adrian Award from the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association.
