Client
Switzerland Tourism (ST), the country’s national tourist board, works to promote Swiss regions and Switzerland as whole to its target markets. Headquartered in Zurich, ST works closely with regional and city tourist boards to highlight the uniquely Swiss cultural and natural attractions to both business and leisure travellers.
Brief
Switzerland is a high quality, expensive and luxury destination. The UK market is a key market for Switzerland to attract both leisure and business travellers; Switzerland Tourism has identified its target audience as affluent people over 35 with a taste for the high life.
Known mainly as a winter destination, Switzerland is popular for its ski resorts, the most popular being St Moritz, which is where the British royals go for skiing. However, Switzerland faces tough competition from other cheaper European ski destinations that appeal to the mass market. To differentiate the Swiss slopes from their competitors, Switzerland Tourism wish to highlight their long tradition as a luxury winter destination.
Swiss cities also face tough competition from other popular continental city break locations. Their reputation abroad is mundane, staid, business-like. ST wishes to elevate Switzerland from solely a business destination positioning Swiss cities as gems of art, culture and gastronomy.
Strategy and Successes
Digital Dialog has been working with Switzerland Tourism since 2012, developing numerous marketing campaigns aimed at different sectors of leisure and business travellers. In every campaign, the key aim is one of the following:
1. Position Switzerland as the place to go for the best and most luxurious winter breaks
2. Promote Swiss travel year-round and especially out of the winter season
3. Encourage tourists to explore further than the pistes and main cities
4. Cement Switzerland as a premier MICE destination
To promote Switzerland as a top MICE destination, Digital Dialog have focused numerous campaigns aimed at meeting planners, conference directors and exhibitions and incentives professionals.
From combined offline and geo-targeted digital campaigns showcasing beautiful mountain vistas, to catching interest using Twitter competitions to promote Swiss city breaks, to selecting key influencers to drive natural high-quality engagement across social media, Digital Dialog draws on the entire digital marketing toolbox to exceed campaign expectations.
Some objectives successfully achieved for Switzerland Tourism include:
Brand Awareness
Winter sports holidays from September to January, Lakes & Mountains holidays in summer, a Grand Tour campaign to promote Swiss driving holidays
Content Marketing
Our influencer marketing campaigns carefully selected 6-8 social media influencers to Switzerland, generating both high quality content as well as much publicity on social media.
Social Media engagement across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter
Engaged an audience of over a million. Over 50k new followers generated from UK
MICE Promotion
Campaigns targeted at meeting planners and conference directors has succeeded in positioning Switzerland as a MICE destination
Promotion of supporting mobile applications
Digital Dialog promoted ST’s Swiss Mag iPad App and Make My Switzerland App, getting them to top rankings on the iOS and Android app stores.
Campaigns
Winter Campaigns
Winter in Switzerland brings a wide variety of offerings for ST to promote. Ski in-ski out hotels and ski resorts, city getaways, MICE locations… Switzerland Tourism focuses on communicating the beauty of the locations and the diversity of its winter resorts to set it apart from its mainstream European counterparts such as France and Austria. Digital Dialog also have drawn on Switzerland’s long history of winter activities to cement it as a traditional, classic destination.
To effectively raise awareness in such a segmented target market, Digital Dialog have developed several multichannel campaigns to generate high quality web-traffic. Facebook ads, Email and Programmatic Display were aimed at potential leads with in an interest in travel.
Swiss Cities Campaign
With Switzerland considered by many to be, first and foremost, a winter destination, Switzerland Tourism is always keen to encourage travellers to experience the country outside of the busy ski season. Swiss cities make excellent destinations for short breaks and longer visits in the summer months but few are aware of their beauty and cultural richness.
Digital Dialog has crafted several campaigns to help position Swiss cities as a year-round destination among UK travellers in the 35-65 age range, specifically those who have shown interest in city breaks, culture and exploring Europe. Our campaigns have inspired people to explore exciting new destinations in a country that offers so much more than pristine pistes and mountain villages.
Influencer Campaigns
Influencers were shortlisted using their areas of focus; skiing and snowboarding to influence winter tourism, foodie and luxury/lifestyle for the city of Zurich, and outdoor/adventure activities for the city of Bern. From here, they were further assessed for relevance, resonance and reach. The resulting campaign was highly engaging with over 100 pieces of original content created.
“Escape the Routine” campaign
One of Switzerland Tourism’s successful offline campaigns involved the publication of a series of slogans including ‘Alight Here’ and ‘Escape the Commute’ on London’s iconic Routemaster buses. By geo-targeting the supporting digital campaign to London tube stations on the selected bus routes, Digital Dialog were able to drive home the message with higher recall value as part of an integrated campaign.
Make My Switzerland
Make My Switzerland is an app that gives you the insider's view into things to see and do in Switzerland. Digital Dialog was asked to increase its popularity and boost downloads, pull in users with a competition to win back their holiday, and promote special offers. A campaign involving social media, mobile advertising and online PR was launched, with over 500 bloggers and influencers enlisted to spread the word. The results were spectacular. The app shot up from 396 to 65 in the iTunes rankings.
