Northern Ireland by Road
" Well done on the great performance of the Northern Ireland campaign. I have been following the performance closely on Google Analytics. I was particularly pleased with the social media results you were able to drive, not only increasing our fan base but also driving qualified traffic to the site."
Caroline Brunel
Manager, Nordic Region at Tourism Ireland
Brief
- Promote Northern Ireland as a desirable travel destination and drive quality traffic to www.ireland.com from the Nordic region
- Theme — Discover Northern Ireland by road
- Encourage visitors to enrol in a competition for a chance to win a free trip to Ireland
- Collect opt-in data from the competition
Strategy
Time was of the essence as the campaign had a limited window to attract visitors to the site and receive competition entries before the due date.
We knew our strategy had to do more than just getting people to consider Ireland for their next getaway. It was about changing people’s perception that there’s more to Ireland than the major cities. It’s about discovering the beautiful island by road. And what’s more we even had a beautiful itinerary to entice visitors to take the journey of a lifetime.
As we were targeting the 25-44 age group we knew we had to throw social media into the mix due it’s popularity with that age group as well as the fine grain targeting possible on Facebook.
As with all our pan-European campaigns we had to get to work straight away translating our clever ad copies into four languages and setting up highly targeted campaigns on Facebook.
Email was our second choice as it’s an excellent channel to drive high volume of targeted visitors in a short space of time. Our research also led us to believe that the Nordic markets were highly responsive to emails. We also love email because it allowed us to showcase the road trip proposition with a beautifully designed creative.
Display advertising gave us the ability to target people on the most visited sites in those markets. We handpicked the most appropriate sites within travel, news and lifestyle categories and grabbed our target audience’ attention through highly engaging flash banner ads in IAB compliant sizes that further drove home the concept of discovering Ireland by road.
Results
45 000 website visits generated in under 30 days
2500 new Facebook fans
2.65 average page visits per session