The primary objectives for the #BeVacationReady campaign included:
creating awareness for the no-hassle travel experience of staying with Wyndham Vacation Rentals
creating conversation around the availability and convenience of Wyndham Vacation Rentals when compared with more standard lodging options, and
doing so with a relatively modest budget which had to include all campaign costs.
The target demographic for the campaign was females aged 30-55, with families, in the United States. To reach them where they were already consuming content, we identified niche influencers who had built credibility and trust with their predominantly female audiences who fit the targeted age range; and then tapped into their objective voices to leverage this trust for the Wyndham Vacation Rental brand.
Over summer, families often become stressed by vacation-planning, something that can impact the enjoyment of family time and days without school. This campaign was charged with showing people how to #BeVacationReady with tips, itineraries and stories highlighting how to reduce vacation stress while working vacation rentals into the conversation.
We had to do all of this with a relatively modest $30K budget, inclusive of all content creation, agency costs, influencer costs, AND a paid media plan.
Strategy and Implementation
To create awareness of and conversation about Wyndham Vacation Rentals' stress-free and convenient offerings, we identified a group of primary social influencers whose audiences matched the Wyndham Vacation Rentals target demographic. Additional influencer selection criteria included a proven track-record for producing beautiful, organic content in the lifestyle, family and travel categories.
These talented content creators were charged with creating real-time social shares during trips to Wyndham rental properties, followed by unique blog posts recapping their trips. These blog posts were promoted further by social shares.
Utilizing these talented content creators:
ensured the relevance of the key messages,
leveraged the trust they had built with their engaged audiences,
offered unique points of view that resulted in a variety of story-lines that anyone within the target audience could relate to
generated a significant community response
provided content that could be syndicated by secondary influencers
Our content marketing approach saw the promotion of this primary content across both primary and secondary influencer networks while a paid media plan amplified the best performing influencer content during a key travel month.
To get this valuable content in front of the most receptive and targeted audience, we utilized sophisticated audience targeting techniques including building a custom audience of everyone who had engaged with campaign content, and then generating a lookalike audience around those most engaged. More standard audience targeting techniques including targeting based on interests, behaviors, and demographics were also employed.
The #BeVacationReady campaign was supported by a campaign microsite that the influencers helped promote. This site provided information on how to stress less and actually enjoy the vacation-planning experience - with itineraries, tips and holiday deals.
The ingenious part of this campaign? The ability to get beautiful, inspirational content proven to generate appropriate engagement in front of a highly targeted and receptive audience by applying paid media, optimized daily, to the posts directly within the primary and secondary influencers' own social channels - not on the brand-owned channels. This strategy ensured that the content reached the most targeted, most receptive audience possible.
Results
The #BeVacationReady influencer campaign for Wyndham Vacation Rentals was extremely successful. Facebook indicators showed that the average recall rate across all ad sets featuring the influencer content was 20% above benchmark. The ad recall rate for the ad set utilizing the highly targeted lookalike audience was 36% better than the campaign's overall average and a whopping 63% better than Facebook's average benchmark.
In addition, the lookalike audience built off people who had engaged organically was 50% more efficient than audiences developed using more standard interest, behavior and demographic targeting techniques.
It's important to note that the $30K campaign budget included a lot more than a simple media buy. It also covered:
all agency and influencer fees,
the cost of content production including original photography and video,
AND a paid media plan including syndication.
All the content developed during this campaign was immediately available to the brand to repurpose on their own social channels and website.
The #BeVacationReady campaign wrapped with the following results:
8.9 million impressions (181% above goal)
A digital media value equivalency of 3x (premium digital display ads delivering an equivalent number of impressions would have cost $63.5K more)
75,800 engagements
1.6 million minutes spent engaging
177 pieces of content with a unique content value of $22.1K, nearly the cost of the campaign!
