Only in Oxfordshire
Campaign Overview
Experience Oxfordshire is a destination management organization responsible for promoting leisure, business, and cultural tourism in Oxfordshire. To increase awareness of the organization and attract more visitors to the region, they partnered with Digital Dialog to develop a comprehensive digital marketing campaign to inspire predominantly local and domestic audiences to visit the county for leisure and recreation and to assist the recovery of the county’s visitor economy as the sector re-emerges from Covid-19.
The campaign builds on the desire to discover what’s on the doorstep encouraging people to travel outside their local areas, to spend time as a couple, with friends and family and the renewed interest in experiential travel – doing new things together.
The primary objective was to increase website traffic, boost conversions for Oxfordshire’s various local partners, drive social engagement and increase overall brand awareness.
Our Approach
To support Oxfordshire’s campaign objectives, our overall strategy was built around focusing only on channels that would work best with a view to generating most conversions. These consisted of bookable itineraries, experiences, accommodation and activities and also driving and tracking traffic to external partner sites via button clicks or redirects from the Experience Oxfordshire website.
A successful customer booking journey requires multiple touch points, taking the user from awareness to consideration and finally to booking stage. Therefore a strong audience targeting and segmentation strategy was vital to maximise bookings. We leveraged cross platform re-targeting, so visitors could be targeted across more than one channel and taken deeper into the consideration and booking phase. Reaching the same audience on multiple channels and devices gave the campaign a wide exposure and created a compelling scenario for the re-targeted visitor to consider the proposition.
We chose Facebook, Instagram, programmatic display, native and paid search as the main channels to generate website visits, social engagement and to generating conversions all whilst staying cost efficient. A flexible media plan allowed us to adjust the budgets throughout the campaign to achieve the best combination of quality and price for all traffic to the landing pages.
On Facebook and Instagram, we used a wide selection of placements such as newsfeeds, stories, Instant articles and reels to fulfil the traffic and conversion goals. In addition to single image and video based ad formats, we designed compelling carousel ads to showcase the variety of activities and experiences on offer.
Programmatic display and native ads helped serve HTML5 and image based ads to a highly targeted audience on 3rd party websites and apps, which expanded the campaign's visibility beyond search and social media. Ads were displayed on specially curated websites related to city breaks, outdoor activities, attractions, tours and travel themed placements. Targeting included 3rd party audience segments specifically looking for short city breaks, staycations and interest based audiences such as those interested in attractions, sightseeing, English countryside and related themes.
For the paid search aspect our research indicated that we could easily bid on highly relevant and cost effective keywords to promote the landing pages for those actively searching for short getaways in England. Keywords included 'things to do in Oxford', 'Days out in Oxford' and many others that were more closely aligned with bookable activities on the landing pages.
As the campaign approached the Christmas period, the messaging, imagery and landing pages all adopted a festive theme to resonate with the audience and to boost visits to the region over the Christmas and New Year.
Results
The Only in Oxfordshire campaign reached an audience size of over 4 million within a 2 hour driving distance of Oxfordshire with almost 10 million ad impressions served, over 100,000 web visits and garnered almost half a million video views of the campaign’s main video assets.
Social media engagement was high and the website traffic provided tremendous exposure for Oxfordshire’s partners via redirected traffic and valuable leads and conversions directly on partner websites.
103,000 - Website visits
500,000 - Video Views
4,000,000 - Audience Reach
10,000,000 - Ad Impressions
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