W

LAKE WANAKA

MULTI-CHANNEL DIGITAL STRATEGY

Inseason Campaign

OVERVIEW


Lake Wanaka Tourism is the tourist operator for beautiful Wanaka in New Zealand’s south island. The region boasts amazing scenery, outdoor adventure, food & wine and incredible ski resorts. Wired was tasked with developing an integrated media strategy, with the constraints of a small budget, aimed at strengthening brand love and consideration for travel to Lake Wanaka.

The core objectives were: 

  • Increase brand awareness by showcasing Wanaka as the best snow holiday destination in NZ
  • Increase quality, relevant traffic to the Wanaka Skiing & Snowboarding landing page
  • Increase the Australian-based database

 

PROCESS

Wired developed a comprehensive, socially-led media strategy to guide the consumer down the marketing funnel, building on awareness from the Pre-Season campaign that finished a few weeks before.

The activity used a phased 9-week approach, across Paid Search, Social, YouTube and Outbrain.

Our strategy:

Our targeting strategy included prospecting with FB interests in snow, travel, NZ, etc, remarketing from website visitors, social engagers, customer data, retargeting from video viewers (previous campaigns and In-season activity), shared audiences from Monster Children and Wanaka resorts (ie. Treble Cone), cross-channel audiences (ie. Outbrain blog readers) and lookalikes from top audiences.

Our creative media strategy incorporated vertical video (4:5 ratio) and A/B testing two ads per audience. 

Our comms strategy sparked conversations across all three phases, and our team effectively managed all comms to further the hype around Wanaka.

THE SOLUTION

One month of brand awareness activity was implemented across all channels. Successfully capturing highly engaged audiences using vertical video, and using broad keywords for search. We also introduced a countdown on social, tapping into the hype of the mountain’s opening day, encouraging users to book that ‘dream trip’. 

 

In the second phase we then utilised lead gen activity, with a collaborative competition with Monster Children, giving away ‘the ultimate Wanaka snow experience. We also instigated sharing audiences with Monster Children, to further amplify the campaign, and cross-promote into phase three. On search, we optimised all of our campaigns, pausing underperforming keywords and creative. 

 

Finally in phase 3, the objective was to drive direct response. Quality audiences and leads were generated through phase two and three, and now it was time to have a stronger CTA. Our activity featured a variety of vertical videos and static images showcasing well-loved features of Wanaka. Quality UGC was utilised, including content from pro-riders like Jossi Wells. Lastly, we utilised learnings from our Pre-Season campaign and amplified similar content to what had worked well previously, driving quality traffic to the site.

Digital Channels

Full Service Digital Campaign

Paid Social Advertising

From ideation to execution

Paid Search & YouTube Advertising

Full, end to end solution

Community
Management

Brand Engagement Support

The Results

Incredible Improvements In All Areas

New users to site

24% Uplift

Actions on site

87% Increase

Snow-related pages

22% Increase

Increased leads

6.8k

Referrals to ski partner pages

208% Increase

Tourism spend from Australian visitors

22% YoY Increase