Experience Fayetteville, AR

Company Bio

Experience Fayetteville is the official page and account for the Fayetteville Arkansas Visitors Bureau. Experience Fayetteville promotes all aspects of travel and tourism to Fayetteville, offering visitors information about attractions and events from art and music, outdoor experiences, food and drink options, and more. 

Overview

  • Industry: Travel and Tourism
  • Location: Fayetteville, AR

Overview

The Ask

ESM was tasked with developing a Summer 2021 advertising campaign and media strategy to increase the number of travelers visiting during the summer months who are within a 5-hour driving distance.

Experience Fayetteville  specifically wanted to include new and emerging media channels to activate videos used for pre-roll and television, and expand beyond their key visitor demographics of families, empty nesters and solo travelers, to reach more potential visitors. 

The Challenge

The general challenge for this campaign was to boost tourism and improve the local economy due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because of this, our strategy was inclusive of channels and tactics to reach audiences in the most effective ways. Furthermore, the campaign strategy and channel plan was supported by market research and data based on current trends in the tourism market, and changes due to pandemic, as well as behavioral data and media-usage profiles (inclusive of patterns and ways our target audiences currently consume media). 

Why it Worked

The Approach

Our approach to this campaign began with analyzing Fayetteville’s previous digital marketing efforts in search of possible new ways to maximize budget and reach more viable, potential visitors. From here, we also analyzed target audiences from previous campaigns in order to inform our audience strategy. Because Fayetteville wanted to expand their audience through this campaign, we chose to implement interest targeting to reach key visitor demographics of families, empty nesters and solo travelers, and expand to more niche and specific audiences categories including theater buffs, cycling and outdoor enthusiasts, craft beer lovers, etc. 

The Solution

After defining our audience, we developed a channel plan to reach each of these audience categories. We also considered geography in this strategy prioritizing  AR statewide and surrounding geos within a 5 hour driving distance, leaning into popular areas such as Dallas/Fort Worth and Kansas City. 

In order to drive visitors, both familiar and new, we needed to reach our audiences throughout each stage of the user journey – awareness, consideration, engagement and conversion. We accomplished this goal by activating on the following channels:

  • YouTube, streaming radio and podcasts video and audio spots to drive brand awareness 
  • Display, pre-roll video to drive clicks and website traffic
  • Facebook and Instagram to boost engagement, conversations, website traffic, phone calls, and click-through conversions for the visitors guide or other trackable links.

Results

Campaign Results

The Summer 2021 campaign was a three month campaign, that launched from April – June, right before peak summer travel months. The campaign was overly successful regarding metrics, and surpassed all estimated KPIs we set prior to launch. Additionally, we were able to reach over 2.4M users in a 3 month time span, while keeping total frequencies relatively low so that we were not oversaturating the markets and our target audiences. Additionally, this campaign’s success is shown through the total number of both view-through and click-through rates. High totals of view-through conversions correlates to high volumes of users resonating with the ad, and desiring to learn more by returning to the website at a later time, while high click-through rates prove that our ads were engaging and encouraged users to take action.

7.8

Impressions

1.6

Video Completions

1.5

Conversions

1.2

Social Media Engagements