400% increase in website traffic targeting meeting planners.

Brief

The Switzerland Convention & Incentive Bureau (SCIB) is a national, non-profit-making organisation representing the leading conference destinations, national event organisers and transport companies. The industry within which they operate is commonly known as MICE, which stands for Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Events.

SCIB’s strategy focuses on the acquisition of multi-day events held by foreign companies and international associations. Their success is measured by the number of overnight stays (OS) generated by foreign business visitors to Switzerland.

SCIB turned to Digital Dialog to help them attract professional meeting planners and incentive companies to their website and further enhance Switzerland’s image as the perfect meeting and incentives destination. The slow economic recovery in the UK combined with the perception of Switzerland being an expensive destination was resulting in a reduction in the number of enquiries and RFPs that SCIB was receiving. 

Strategy

We began by gaining a thorough understanding of the MICE industry, diving into comprehensive reports and statistics detailing what motivated people to host events and incentive programmes abroad. We also dove deep into understanding our target audience and the factors that influenced their decision-making – the different job roles, levels of seniority, their sources of information, resources they consumed and the industry related sites they visited. 

Through our discussions with the client we understood that the typical value of hosting a meeting abroad could run into several thousand pounds and the typical timeframe from initial research to booking a venue could be anywhere between 2 to 6 months. As these were going to be decisions of a lengthy nature that would involve a larger pool of decision makers we knew we had to bring visitors to the site more often so we could reinforce the value proposition that Switzerland offered for their meetings abroad. Retargeting was the answer.

However an analysis of SCIB’s website revealed that the number of monthly visitors to SCIB’s site was quite low. This meant we needed to first work on increasing the visits if we were to get more enquiries coming in.

Having agreed on a ‘grow visitors and retarget’ strategy we then began analysing the most visited pages of the website and derived insights as to what information people were consuming and most importantly what should be promoted to them to make Switzerland stand out as the perfect choice for meetings and incentives programmes abroad. The Venue finder, destinations, special offers, Why Switzerland, and the contact sections of the site were identified as the main landing areas to promote in addition to the home page. Within these sections of the site, we further curated content that would most appeal to the target audience – short videos, popular meeting venues and unique incentive ideas.

scib logo

The creative aspect of the campaign focused on three main themes.

  • Elevating the meeting experience with Switzerland’s beauty
  • Being spoiled for choice with meeting destinations and venues in Switzerland and
  • Unforgettable and unique reward and incentive experiences in Switzerland’.

The growth phase of the campaign focused on reaching out to audience on LinkedIn where we targeted meeting planners and incentives agencies through compelling adverts that generated new visits to SCIB’s website. The retargeting campaign kicked off soon after with visually stunning flash creative served to all site visitors wherever they visited across the web. Our rigorous monitoring and optimisation of the campaign combined with a whitelist and blacklist option ensured that ads were only being served on brand safe websites.

Results

30

30% increase in enquiries immediately after campaign completion

227

227% uplift in direct visits to the website

11

11% uplift in traffic through organic search results