Challenge
Belfast is in many holiday makers’ minds, still a place associated with conflicts from the past. If Tourism Ireland was to grow the tourism industry in Belfast it would have to instantly create more positive associations around the city. It identified the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, and the fact that Belfast was the birthplace of the iconic ship, as the perfect opportunity to encourage people to visit.
As it could only invest a modest budget of $190k, the success of its communications would depend on how well it could link Belfast to the Titanic. Getting its core audience of culture seekers and sight seers to associate Belfast with the Titanic instead of conflict would increase the likelihood of them considering Belfast as a holiday destination.
Insight
While the Titanic is interesting from an engineering and historical perspective, it’s the stories of the ship, the voyage and its passengers that have truly captured the world’s imagination. In the build up to the anniversary, Tourism Ireland created a suite of video content that told various aspects of the Belfast Titanic story.
It then created a media ecosystem that combined search, social and micro-targeting strategies to maximise the effectiveness of this content with its limited budget. To start, it focused on re-energising the 25 million Facebook fans of theTitanicfilm by micro-targeting different stories across different phases of the campaign. Finally, it used behavioural targeting on YouTube to serve content to users who were searching for and had previously looked at Titanic related content.
Solution
The focal point of its Facebook presence and the unique value that it offered to 15,000 fans was the live-streaming of the opening of the Titanic visitor centre on Tourism Ireland’s page.
As well as ensuring that the site was configured to maximise natural search performance, the PPC and SEO were also monitored and optimised on a daily basis. By the time of the actual anniversary the Titanic Stories site was in a top five position in all of its key markets for the core Titanic search terms.
On YouTube, the brand focused its budget on skippable pre-rolls and sponsored links around relevant Titanic keywords to ensure it captured the interest created by the anniversary and the 3D re-release of the film.
Results
One million unique users visited the Titanic Stories site.
After being exposed to the campaign, research tracked a 76% increase in the number of site visitors who would consider visiting Belfast and Northern Ireland.