Increasing Visitor Awareness and Occupancy Rates

Photo credit: Tamra Jaeger

About Tourism Kamloops

Tourism Kamloops is a not-for-profit destination marketing organization with the goal of increasing tourism revenues through the delivery of innovative, bold, results-based marketing strategies. Their mission is to “partner with stakeholders as the leader for strategic development support and planning through implementing innovative technological marketing strategies to promote Kamloops as a valued tourism destination.”

In Kamloops, real places and rough edges are embraced as a sign of memories well-made and adventures well played. Whether you’ve got fun between your legs on your bike, shred powdery snow on skis, or hike and taste wine at new heights, Kamloops has what you crave.

Client Challenge

Tourism Kamloops wanted to increase overall awareness and put Kamloops as a top destination for visitors planning their next trip. Further, they were looking to hold reasonable website activity and occupancy levels despite the global Covid-19 pandemic. Finally, they needed support in increasing occupancy rates with more website activity during off-season times.

Our Digital Marketing Strategy

In order to address our client’s challenges to increase awareness and make Kamloops a top destination for travellers, our digital marketing strategy included:

Expanding Paid Search for Free

We enrolled Tourism Kamloops in a Google Grants Account gifting non-profit organizations to spend up to $10,000 USD a month. We used it to promote seasonal outdoor activities for all seasons, events as well as local businesses.

Display and Video Advertising

We expanded their marketing efforts to new channels and utilized a combination of custom-made audiences, in-market segments, website visitors audiences and similar segments coupled with beautiful pictures and videos to draw attention and raise awareness to specific programs.

Hyper-Targeted Audiences

During the Covid-19 pandemic, we created 52 search campaigns, 48 display campaigns, 28 video campaigns to break down topics and use hyper-relevant and refined targeting strategies to increase relevancy and performance of each individual campaign.

Results

+36%

increase in website users

+118%

increase in paid conversions (search & display)

+164%

increase in video views

These stats compare the Covid-19 pandemic period of 2020/2021 to 2018/2019. The results are very strong on their own but even more impressive considering the Covid-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions during this period of time.

Videos Campaigns

Our video campaigns reach increased by 20% and the view rate increased by 119% while the Cost Per View decreased by 44%. This is due to the relevancy of the content and the focused targeting strategies.

Search Conversions

Creating over 50 targeted campaigns allowed us to increase our overall conversions by 26% and conversion rate by 24%.

Display Results

Creating hyper-relevant campaigns and target audiences allowed us to increase our clicks by 568% and reduce the cost per conversion by 79%.

Testimonial

The 1UP Digital Marketing team was able to help Tourism Kamloops stay top of mind as a safe travel destination during a rapidly evolving global pandemic. With hands-on support, Tourism Kamloops saw an increase in overall awareness and total users to our website, and in turn, traffic direct to our partners’ websites. Tourism Kamloops is confident that Kamloops will be a destination of choice as travel resumes thanks to the support from the 1UP team.

Jordan Fraser, Digital Marketing Specialist, Tourism Kamloops