When it comes to planning travel, consumers want the inside scoop and often look to recommendations from family and friends, or third parties.  In fall of 2019 Tourism Kamloops capitalized on this movement by launching a content marketing campaign titled, ‘Meet the Locals’, featuring third-party storytelling.

Tourism Kamloops worked with passionate, local content creators to bring the Kamloops story to life and share these stories with potential visitors.

Objectives

  • Drive destination awareness
  • Increase content engagement
  • Inspire travel to Kamloops

Campaign Tactics

The campaign content contained a mix of organic and promoted posts and was supported through blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Google Display.

 

Blogs

The Meet the Locals Blogs were viewed over 10,880 times. Blogs were written in a photo essay format featuring interviews, mobile-optimized images and video.

 

 

Video

Videos were viewed over 113,000 times while featuring in depth narrative from local experts and captivating scenery including sounds of nature. Long form videos of approximately 2 minutes in length were shared across YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Some posts were organic and some were promoted. Shorter 15 second versions were served as ads in Instagram Stories.

      

Facebook & Instagram 

Facebook and Instagram promoted posts received over 5.9 million impressions and content was engaged with over 60,000 times.

 
      

 

Google Display

Responsive display ads resulted in just over 8.5 million impressions and 7,400 website visits.

Targeting

This campaign was mainly targeted to BC residents with a focus on the lower mainland and a smaller portion of the budget was allocated to Alberta residents. Both interest targeting and retargeting were used to deliver content to potential travelers based on their online behaviours.

Overall Results

In total, the campaign delivered over 14 million impressions and resulted in 148,800 website visits. At Crowdriff’s 2019 SEE Conference in Toronto, Tourism Kamloops was won an award for Best Visual Storytelling for the Meet the Locals campaign. To date, six stories have been released and 2020 campaigns will also feature this content approach.