Case Study: Data Proves Passion for History Drives Arrivals

The CVB Marketing Communications team uses trends and insights in their data to identify and find solutions for media and content development strategy that influences visitor arrivals. The marketing and leadership team wanted to test digital campaign strategy surrounding five lifestyle travel pillar messaging, known as “passion pillars” (arts/entertainment, history, outdoors, culinary and craft beer), that supplemented traditional brand placements (out of home, TV, print). The organization needed further understanding to how those five pillars were influencing actual arrivals, how to optimize towards best-performing pillars and gauge overall strategy influence on two key measures: lift in destination familiarity and intent to travel.

Meanwhile, media headlines of neighboring destination Williamsburg, a city with established brand equity for historic offerings, was suffering from major declines in visitation. Stakeholders wondered: has consumer interest in historic offerings waning in general? The CVB turned to several research partners to help.

First, the CVB contracted with marketing data solutions provider Arrivalist, a research vendor that anonymously measures change in the locations of network-enabled devices after a sequence of media exposures to tell marketers which messages are influencing travelers, and how many of these travelers are on the move. Effectiveness of media is used by the Arrivals Per Thousand Metric (APM). Digital ads were tagged with Arrivalist pixels and categorized by campaign name, date and passion pillar for ease of identification.

In addition to existing Arrivalist and Google Analytics data, the CVB worked with Richmond-based research firm SIR to conduct an online qualitative brand awareness and tracking study. Results were collected by comparing intent to travel in markets where the brand messaging plus passion pillar retargeting messaging existed, versus markets where only brand advertising or no advertising existed.

Measuring Success:
Out of all the five pillars, targeted travel ads to consumers interested in history saw the highest APM. History display ads also saw the second highest click through rate (0.56%) behind craft beer (0.96%). Note the History CTR of 0.56% is 460% higher than the industry CTR of 0.10%. By using data insights they acquired via Arrivalist, the CVB was able to significantly optimize towards best performing creative, increase the clickthrough and conversion rates of their ads and plan additional future content surrounding history offerings.

The SIR qualitative study also helped prove that passion pillar messaging plus brand messaging influenced intent to travel stronger that brand-only or control markets. As a result, all target markets now include both brand messaging and passion pillar messaging, which required a significant adjustment in overall media planning and buying.