Creating a spellbinding connection
In a digital landscape where tourism marketing messages often vanish amid a sea of competing posts, Ghosts & Gravestones faced a unique challenge. As a leading tourism brand specializing in eerie and captivating tours across five historic cities — Boston, Key West, San Diego, Savannah, and St. Augustine — the company aimed to tackle a pressing issue: how to make their message stand out during their busiest season and, more importantly, connect with their audience with tourism advertising that would convert engagement into sales.
Ghosts & Gravestones’ targets thrill-seekers, history buffs, and Halloween enthusiasts. These people are drawn to the unique and spine-tingling experiences the brand offers, which made it imperative for us at BlackDog Advertising to find fun, creative ways to help Ghosts & Gravestones stand out to capture and maintain their attention during their busiest season.
Summoning engagement through active participation
The goal for BlackDog Advertising was to create new and exciting tourism marketing assets for Ghosts & Gravestones, to engage with digital consumers by creating opportunities for active participation with things like social media contests and online trivia contests.
- The spook-tacular social media Surge
BlackDog Advertising’s first aim was to establish a robust and spine-tingling social media presence for Ghosts & Gravestones. This not only translated into higher engagement rates but also significantly increased campaign views, ensuring that the brand’s tourism advertising reached a broader audience during their busiest season.
- Unearthing year-round success: Capitalizing on Halloween buzz
Our next tourism marketing goal was to truly captivate the target audience, keeping former, current, and potential guests engaged year-round. BlackDog Advertising recognized that during the Halloween season, the interest in ghost tours reached its peak. Leveraging this surge in curiosity, we aimed to convert short-term interest into long-term loyalty, ultimately boosting year-round sales for Ghosts & Gravestones.
- The perils of unengaging content
BlackDog Advertising understands that many digital campaigns fall short of captivating their intended audience. When this happens, potential customers slip through the cracks, and the opportunity for engagement is lost forever. Hence, our focus was not just on increasing views but on creating tourism advertising content that would genuinely resonate with the target audience, ensuring that they remained captivated and eager to explore Ghosts & Gravestones’ unique offerings.
A game to raise all spirits
We decided to implement an organic tourism advertising strategy filled with lots of Halloween fun, and to do that, we dared our followers to test their knowledge of all things haunted. By designing captivating quizzes, interactive social media contests, and spine-chilling online trivia contests, we not only fostered a sense of excitement but also created a unique and immersive experience that drew our audience deeper into the world of Ghosts & Gravestones.
BlackDog Advertising dug up some spine-tingling ghost questions, and over the course of 25 days, we successfully executed a series of haunted online trivia contests on Facebook, one for each of the ghost tour company’s five cities. Fully integrated into the social media platform via Facebook’s apps tab, the online trivia contest invited followers to answer one haunted trivia question per day for a chance at winning two ghost tour tickets to be used on Halloween night.
Upon answering the questions, participants received real-time feedback, letting them know whether or not their answers were correct. They were reminded to return the following day for their next question and were also encouraged to share the contest with their “ghosties” — aka besties.
Crunching the numbers
BlackDog Advertising’s social media contest proved to be a smashing success, generating an impressive reach of 160,000 views over its duration. This outcome showcases the effectiveness of engaging digital consumers with tourism marketing tactics that are interactive and knowledge-based. Notably, the overall engagement rate achieved during the social media contest surpassed previous Halloween Facebook campaigns by a staggering 100%.
The high engagement rate sparked by the online trivia contests not only resulted in increased views but also indicated a deeper level of audience immersion. Participants were not merely passive viewers; they actively engaged with the content, contributing to a more meaningful and memorable brand experience.
Going from ghouls to goals
In tourism marketing, it’s not enough to simply be seen. Your brand must be felt, heard, and remembered. Ghosts & Gravestones, with the aid of BlackDog Advertising, achieved this feat by turning a target audience’s interest into boundless engagement. It’s a tale where effective tourism advertising created active participation through online trivia contests and social media contests, captivating experiences, and a brand that now haunts the memories of its audience long after the Halloween season fades into history.
