City of Newcastle
Visit Newcastle is a dedicated and award-winning website created by the City of Newcastle, aimed at fostering tourism and showcasing Newcastle and all it has to offer. The tourism sector plays a vital role in Newcastle’s economy, having experienced significant growth during the past 10 years. In 2019 the visitor economy contributed $945m in economic output and supported 4,920 jobs.
The brief
The Creative Collective was engaged to run a social media advertising campaign across Facebook and Instagram to ensure Newcastle’s social and economic recovery in a post COVID-19 environment. Aims of the campaign included:
- To increase awareness within target markets of the tourism assets and bookable products that Newcastle offers.
- To increase awareness of Newcastle as a traveler destination in line with the Council’s 5 key experience pillars.
- To demonstrate support for the Newcastle tourism industry.
- Increase visitation to the Visit Newcastle website from key target markets.
Approach
The Creative Collective developed and executed strategic campaign delivered across two phases, with each phase running for 4 weeks:
Phase 1: ‘Who Knew?: this campaign acted as a teaser to pique interest and raise awareness of what Newcastle had to offer, targeting the two target markets: regional NSW and Sydney. As no prior data on which market had traditionally performed better in digital campaigns was available, gaining an understanding of which of the target markets were more interested in the offering in a post COVID environment was also explored in this phase, so each of these regions was broken down into further regions (10 sub groups).
Phase 2: ‘Are You Ready?: built on the learnings from Phase 1, and leveraged the client’s engaging assets. In this phase, we gained insights into which aspects of what Newcastle has to offer were more of interest to the various target markets, serving up the different themed assets (arts & culture, aqua & active, outdoors, culinary, coastal or bars) to those that had existing interests in these themes.
Impact
Phase 1: ‘Who Knew? (4 week duration)
- 1.4m impressions
- Reached 659,000 people
- Increased website visitation by 60% to the month prior, increased page views by 73%
- Increased social media traffic to the website by 252% in the period (7,140 users in the month of November 2021)
Phase 2: ‘Are You Ready? (4 week duration)
- Over 1m impressions
- Reached 217,322 people
- Generated 10,317 landing page views
- Achieved an average $1.45 Cost-Per-Result
- Achieved 20,740 total link clicks, 27,058 all clicks and 15,720 unique link clicks
- 2.68% Click-Through Rate (very high!)
- $0.55 Cost-Per-Click (very low!)
Total investment: $4,760 + GST (plus $30,000 ad spend)