Our critical challenge is to raise awareness of the Wild Atlantic Way internationally. We leveraged an iconic brand, Porsche, to create awareness and influence connected consumers to spread our content and ensure the Wild Atlantic Way makes waves online. It’s a new approach for the brand that will continue in 2016.
The solution
We leveraged our multi-platform social program that combines content distribution with on-going data performance and community management to create long-term, content-driven relevance in the target audiences’ social feed and flow.
Clearly, central to this plan is our content. In order to drive increases in visitor numbers and tourism revenues, we need content that provides reach, scale and inspiration to fuel the growing momentum that we have been building for the Wild Atlantic Way brand internationally. We worked with the Porsche Club of Ireland, leveraging a global iconic brand, to raise the profile of the route and give an evolved consumer an understanding of what it is.
Design
We have two psychographic segments for the Wild Atlantic Way: the Culturally Curious and Great Escapers. Both are tech-savvy and range in age from 25 to their late 50s. Our key target markets were the US, the UK, France and Germany. Crucially, social and peer endorsed content is hugely influential in their decision making process. We ensured our Porsche video and content series spoke to these audiences and we baked third party endorsement into it.
However, content is more than just a video that delivers a million views. Content is a programme for your brand that influences at every stage of the purchasing journey across multiple channels. A content programme should be delivering hundreds of millions of impressions and millions of engagements for it to have any chance of successfully achieving your marketing objectives and ultimately solve your business challenges. For that reason, we never produce content in isolation for the Wild Atlantic Way – it has to work as part of a wider content web to deliver the awareness and influence among this evolved tourist consumer.
We designed our Porsche series to deliver awareness and engagements over a longer timeframe. We produced this film to deliver broad awareness and presented this with an accompanying article. In conjunction with the main film, we also produced four edits of selected drivers and presented their story and their experience on the WAW. This was further supported with our photography and audience content curation on more visual social platforms. We also created specific edits of the longer form videos to suit channel roles.
This meant we leveraged the entire social eco-system to create hero Porsche video content and supported it in multiple formats that would enable WAW to spread organically. The Porsche programme evolves continually and is supported through conversation and community management. Such content is built to be used and repurposed over a three-year cycle, ensuring ROI is central to our model.
The pace of change means our solution requires baked-in agility to respond at speed to content that is high performing and less so. An example of this can be outlined in how we maximised the Porsche series – developing supporting editorial to enhance and support video assets and curating third party content to amplify awareness across a wider social space. This support continues – we have already written six driving articles to be shared in Q1 2016 that will again point to the Porsche video to ensure we continue to drive the performance of a key brand asset.
Innovation/Data Innovation
Social is not a silo – nor is it static – data is critical in optimising content and conversational performance.
How we monitor and explore engagement and interaction is critical to the programme’s ongoing innovation. WAW social engagement lives and breathes joined-up integration across social platforms. We deploy strategic social listening across measurement and management platforms Radian 6 and Falcon Social as well as integrating the data through a bespoke dashboard that enables us to track, measure and learn. We applied this both before and after creating our Porsche content. Before hand, we studied the data and learned that consumers were apprehensive about how remote and inaccessible the WAW is. We also knew that although some had heard of the Wild Atlantic Way, they did not yet understand that it is a coastal touring route. This allowed us to craft the Porsche content piece to highlight how accessible the route is, even for vintage Porsches. Once we had posted our content to our social channels, we monitored all interactions with it. We monitored its organic performance closely to determine the optimum point to apply paid media to take it from trending video to content at scale with reach and engagement.
Results
Through our Porsche content series we have achieved almost 3,000,000 impressions and 450,000 views across our channels over the last two months with our UK campaign. The content we created for the Porsche campaign will be used in different markets and by Fáilte Ireland trade partners over the coming months, so this figure will only increase. On average, the audience is spending 1 minute 52 seconds watching the content, an enormous achievement for a brand that had zero profile at the start of 2014.
The Porsche is a key content piece that will continue to contribute to the overall performance of the Wild Atlantic Way programme.
