Visit Southport – Destination Marketing Campaign
Destination marketing campaign for Sefton Council to drive more visitors to Southport.
Southport is a seaside town on Sefton’s coast and a popular visitor destination. Our client’s objectives for the 2022 campaign were to encourage people to visit and, development and promotion (both trade and consumer) of the visitor economy. In addition, our client wanted to engage with younger audiences. it is important to engage with domestic tourists.
To help our client deliver their objectives, we provided market research and campaign planning, following by full delivery of their 2022 campaigns, under the theme 10 Steps to Love Southport.
Our multi-channel marketing campaign included print advertising (local and national press), digital advertising (mainly Google PPC, and Social Ads), out of home (OOH) advertising, broadcast advertising (radio), and content marketing through social media, email marketing, the website, and the printed annual Visitor Guide.
We used friendly hand drawn doodle illustrations, conversational style messaging, experiential imagery, animated content, and video to give the campaign a positive, uplifting, and motivating tone. Our colour palette was warm, bright and inviting in order to appeal to our six customer profiles.
We have been the retained Creative Marketing Agency for Sefton Council since 2019.
Impact
Our campaign achieved a 5-year high performance and outperformed industry standards across all metrics. Over 10.5 million people visited Southport in 2022 and 8 million people engaged with our campaign online. Performance highlights included: google searches for our destination up by 42%, 100,000 people engaged with digital posts within 24 hours of go live, click through conversion of 14% on social media and 10% on email marketing, audience growth of 543%, and 300% increase in customers enquiries. The change in focus of campaign content also saw a 2000% increase in audience engagement.
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