Partner power: Travel Oregon uses co-operative campaigns to drive conversions
Co-operative campaigns on Facebook have generated over 300,000 fans for Travel Oregon over the past two years. One of its most recent successful campaigns generated over a million dollars in visitor spend. EyeforTravel hears about some recent success stories and where this tourism destination organisation is headed with social media.
At Travel Oregon, social media falls under the umbrella of the ‘Integrated Marketing’ team that oversees all channels such as the website, travel guides and content. The organisation also works with a social agency to manage some aspects of community management. To date, its biggest success has come from co-operative marketing efforts on Facebook, which the tourism destination agency has undertaken with partners around the state. According to Mo Sherifdeen, Director Digital Brand Strategy & Publishing at Travel Oregon these co-op campaigns have generated over 310,000 fans for Travel Oregon and our partners over the past two years. Let’s take a look at an example.
Adventurecation: A Facebook case study
In 2012 Travel Oregon launched the Oregon Adventurecation campaign with the aim of generating a social buzz online around Oregon’s great outdoors and unique regions as well as measurable offline visitor spend. Travel Oregon, along with ten partners representing Oregon regions, were provided with customised, interactive Facebook tabs, each highlighting their most-loved outdoor activities. Then an ‘Oregon Bucket List’ Facebook application was developed which allowed users to boast about their outdoor accomplishments by showing them how they stacked-up against Facebook friends and other users.The app provided inspiration for planning and sharing Oregon vacations by showing users which of their Facebook friends had ready tackled these activities. It also revealed who had these adventures on their bucket lists.Each week a campaign partner hosted a sweepstakes, giving fans from around the country the opportunity win one of 11 ultimate Oregon adventures. The campaign was supported by a total of 11 interactive tabs, 11 weekly sweepstakes, the Oregon Bucket List application and an extensive ad buy - all exclusively on Facebook.
…and the results
A post campaign survey found that Adventurecation had directly generated $1,070,169 in visitor spend. This number was calculated and validated using only the number of sweeps’ entrants who ‘were motivated to travel to Oregon’ as a result of the campaign and the most recent visitor spend averages from state economic impact research.Interest-based and geographically targeted Facebook ads help drive large numbers large of high quality fans to each Facebook page. These ads provided a nearly $17-to-$1 return on media spend when considering the revenue generated from this campaign.As a result of the ad buy, sweepstakes, virality of the organic content and sharable features of the application, participating Facebook pages experienced an average growth of 179% and 150,000 new fans.
As social media use matures, Travel Oregon is “mindful and actively learning about not only how our travellers use social media platforms and how they use them as they move through the vacation planning cycle”. In other words, how they use them for research, planning, booking, during the experience and post trip. As a result, the organisation’s content strategy for each channel is tailored to fit how travellers use it through the travel life cycle. This also means that every time it produces content - such as a feature story for example – Travel Oregon thinks about how it can be broken up so that its relevant parts might be used across different platforms.
Moves in a maturing market
“As the platforms mature, we approach campaigns and marketing efforts with the goal of integrating efforts (and outreach) across channels,” he says. That also means integrating databases and ensuring that our customer databases are cross-linked with our social/email efforts.
New platforms
While Facebook has clearly been a success for Travel Oregon, over the past six months, the organisation has started engaging travellers on Pinterest and Instagram. “We use Pinterest to reach out to potential travellers in the ‘dream/planning’ stages of their travel cycle and the content inspires travel to Oregon through images of regions, places and itineraries,” explains Sherifdeen. In addition, ambassadors and other travel partners collaborate by pinning content. On Instagram the strategy is to curate “amazing photos of Oregon from travellers on the ground”. This is achieved by encouraging people to tag their scenic Oregon photos with #traveloregon. “We pick the best from this tag and repost to our own account with a photo credit,” he says. In just three months, the organisation has had more than 1,700 photos tagged #traveloregon on Instagram.
Measuring engagement and conversions
This is something Travel Oregon is continuing to evaluate and fine tune. “Part of the art of relationship building on social channels is to balance between keeping our audience ‘entertained’ and ‘engaged’ versus asking them to take specific action,” says Sherifdeen. Part of that is providing consistent content that is enjoyable and illuminating and will keep Oregon top of mind. Only once you’ve built that trust can expect conversions. “We’ve found that specific campaigns designed to drive conversions are highly successful, with a majority of those folks who engage going further down the channel such as signing up for our email communications.”
To hear more insights from Travel Oregon join us in San Francisco for Social Media and Mobile Strategies 2013 on March 18-19