Adventure travel is anything but perfect. At a time when images are often filtered online to present a particular image and social media delivers a glamourized version of real-life events, G Adventures wanted to share the reality of travelling. These are the messy and unpredictable situations that leave their mark on travellers, and are often the most memorable part of the travel experience; the stories that are brought home and shared.
The goal was to raise the profile of adventure travel for G Adventures globally. The solution? "Adventure is Unfiltered" – a socially-driven brand campaign designed to connect emotionally with 18-30-year-old females and ignite their sense of adventure. We were looking for raw, real experiences, so leveraging UGC was an essential tactic to gather untouched imagery and video. "Forget Perfect. Adventure is Unfiltered."
Approach
Over a two-month period, the Adventure is Unfiltered campaign ran in two phases with the aim to entertain our target demographic through a series of real-life UGC/rough videos, photos, and actual traveller stories.
Methodology
Phase One: Early May, three weeks: Seed the idea and create awareness around #adventureunfiltered.
Our channel strategy was simple:
• To be where the target audience was and to use a distinctive voice and tone.
• To distribute a series of short videos – both to new audiences and to our communities – through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, eDM, and the G Adventures Blog to drive traffic to our dedicated landing page (https://www.gadventures.com/adventure-is-unfiltered/).
• To elicit online engagement and buzz around a travel memory or desire to travel through comments, likes, and shares.
Main assets: dedicated landing page, Adventure is Unfiltered 90-second hero video, three 15-second, ten six-second YouTube pre-roll videos, and 21 "unfiltered" photos that we collected from our tour leaders and internal community.
Phase Two: Late June, five weeks: #adventureunfiltered contest.
We asked our target consumers (including those who engaged with us in phase one) to share their "unfiltered" travel photo or video for a chance to win a trip of their choice valued up to $12,000.00 USD.
Entries were taken via use of the #adventureunfiltered on Instagram and Twitter as well as through a direct upload option on our landing page where a gallery of all submissions and 90-second manifesto video were housed.
The aim was to incentivize our target demographic to participate and engage through a compelling experience which would drive social and database traffic to our website for data capture.
Adventure is Unfiltered was our first campaign which focused purely on raising brand awareness. These results are fantastic as they show growth and propensity for a new audience to engage with G Adventures and small group adventure travel.
Entry Results
Contest entry rate for direct uploads (proportion of visits to landing page): 22%
Visits to landing page: 76,000 (+660% up from our goal)
Contest entries: 27,000 (+163% up from our goal)
Blog CTR to contest landing page (from Adventure Unfiltered blog articles): 3.6%
Homepage CTR to contest landing page: 6%
Email CTOR for Newsletter: 23%
Social Results
YouTube (phase one): 746,000 impressions, at a CPM of $15.00 lead to an 86% view-through rate for mostly six-second videos.
FB & Instagram impressions (phases one and two): 9.7 million
Engagement average (phases one and two): 26%
Cost per link click (phase two): $0.61
Targeting: Was a mix of our most engaged prospects, and lookalike audiences of those prospects, too.
This contest returned successful results from social media with a 32% increase in impressions (phase one) and a 5.6% increase in engagement rate (phase two) compared to a recent and fairly similar campaign.
