Visit Essex - Integrated Marketing Campaign with TV Ad

We started working with the Visit Essex team in the summer of 2021, with the specific brief of driving tourism from London, to the space and fresh air awaiting in the 350 miles of coastline and countryside of Essex. 
 
The pandemic was causing many people to panic about booking staycations, and the beaches of the South West coast were filling up at an alarming rate.  
 
The unexpected sights, sounds and freedom that Essex had to offer, such a short distance from the big smoke, was the perfect antidote to this, and our aim was to show people that Essex was more than a daytrip destination.

The campaign was born of the need to ‘break away from the crowds’ and the creative was simple – using images of unexpected, yet unmistakable (to those in the know) Essex, to inspire and intrigue.

Our key themes led us to focus on three audience types, families, pre-nesters and empty nesters, giving us the ability to show a range of locations, activities and motivations to each audience group.  We started with an impactful outdoor campaign, to show off the beauty of the imagery, hitting prime sites in London.

We backed this up with targeted digital executions, so that we could understand what was motivating our audiences.  The objective of this campaign was to drive traffic from people outside of the county in the awareness/consideration phase of their planning journey. To do this we used a combination of several different platforms including Google Search, Display, Facebook & Instagram.

The digital campaign is ongoing, and set to step up a gear as we move into spring, and supporting a TV campaign on Sky.

Filming as many locations as possible, to show the sheer breadth of options, to such a wide audience was no mean feat. Luckily you’re guaranteed* sunshine in Essex, so we were able to capture stunning footage. Our production partners, Transmission, worked long days to capture sunrises over castles, and sunsets at sea, resulting in a simply breath-taking 2.5 minute hero film, and 3 TV commercials. 

The commercial airs in the spring and is part of a second burst of digital activity to encourage those spring/summer breaks.
 

To date, compared to the previous year’s results overall sessions were up 68.31% with new users up 62.62%. Google Search contributed 19,317 sessions, 16852 new users, FB/Instagram 6601 sessions, 6213 sessions and Google Display retargeting 660 session, 643 new users.