With the Australian bushfires, floods, and then COVID-19 significantly impacting the Australian tourism industry throughout 2020, the main objective of our 'Meet our Family' campaign was to help mitigate the short- and long-term severity these disasters would have on our business and visitation.
Our goal was to build authentic, meaningful, and, most importantly, long-lasting connections with a worldwide audience through captivating video content. This would ultimately have a flow-on effect to create brand ambassadors from all corners of the globe to help instill a want of visit to our Sydney based wildlife park. In essence, turn our one-person marketing and creative services team into a team of millions.
With high connection between audience and brand being our primary target of this campaign, our success was to be measured on engagement level metrics instead of impressions or reach, as these alone would not show any genuine interactions ever took place with our brand.
Our strategy was to build on our Facebook presence and engage people worldwide with our animals and brand by creating video content that provoked a sense of emotive familiarity. Not too dissimilar to replicating the same emotions one feels when reflecting on special moments in their own family’s life.
The main emphasis of the campaign was to achieve high engagement levels with our audience, as reach and impressions alone would not directly show any true connections with our brand were ever made,
We wanted people from every walk of life to feel they were part of our Animal family’s journey and organically become ambassadors for our brand. What better way to do this than make them emotionally invested in our animals, zookeepers, and their lives here at Symbio Wildlife Park.
With limited visitors, especially international, being able to be their own storytellers through sharing of own experiences for a large portion of the year, our goal was to capture authentic and positive moments in time to provide highly shareable snacks for their timelines while giving them much needed validation that happiness was still to be found in the world. Which, in our case, just happened to come in the cutest and fluffiest form.
Through a full audit of our content for the past five years, we were able to define our most successful videos' moments, sentiment, and tempo and draw on all the elements that made them go viral in the first place to use as a basis of a style-guide for our created content.
The main elements we found that made our most successful videos go viral and stand out from other animal-based content circulating on the internet were;
It was this framework and the authenticity of our videos that generated so much organic shareability. They never looked staged and always showed our animals living their best (safe) life under the care of loving Zookeepers, away from the threats of bushfires, poaching, or predators.
Our results continually exceeded all expectations throughout this campaign, with increases in video views and engagement levels by over 800% and 19 videos achieving well over a million views, respectively. Based on monitoring of Facebook engagement levels, from all accounts, we were consistently the highest organically engaged Tourism Company in the world on Facebook throughout 2020 with over 33 Million direct engagements on our content from 45 countries and have arguably shown one the highest ratios of video views to followers in the world showing a ratio of 84584:1 and engagement levels ratio to followers of 6509:1.
Metrics for the success of this campaign on our Symbio Wildlife Park Facebook Page for 2019-20 are as follows;
Such was the effectiveness of this campaign, we had many of the world's largest social sites and media agencies share multiple of our videos across their newsfeeds and traditional broadcasting, and our visitation numbers post COVID Lockdown were shown to be our busiest trading period on record, despite many of our core markets being affected due to travel and COVID regulations.
Due to our videos' success, we were also approached directly by Facebook Messenger throughout this time to help launch their new Messenger Rooms Live Feature.
What makes these results even more impressive is we are a small, family-owned, and operated zoo. Our content creation, marketing, graphic design, and communications are entirely created in-house by our one-person marketing and creative service team, and the results are entirely organic.
To view our highlight reel featuring the best of 2020, click HERE.
Below are some of the third party sharing by media agencies
Social Media:
Online:
