Sugar-white sand. Emerald-green water. Great weather. At first glance, Destin, Ft. Walton Beach and Okaloosa Island have the same essential attributes as their neighboring towns on the Gulf of Mexico. Our goal was to establish a believable point of differentiation between these communities.
For the competition, the beach is everything. For the Emerald Coast, it's just the beginning. We created the call to action: "Let's Go #EmeraldCoasting to get that point across. "Emerald Coasting" is 24-miles of sugar-white sand beaches – but it's also world-class fishing and golf, water sports, unique shopping, dolphin-cruises, marine shows, museums, nightlife and much more. The campaign achieved this through the hashtag which provided a multi-platform social strategy to drive engagement, consolidate conversations, and encourage the sharing of family vacation memories. It also showed our target market, heavy users of social media that "we hear them."
Positioning the Emerald Coast as a distinct, unique, family destination led to an increase in overall tax revenue for the area. In July, the county reached its highest bed tax collection in the history of the county, and then surpassed it in August. #EmeraldCoasting was seen over 3.8 million times from April through July 2014. Consumers mentioned the Emerald Coast on Facebook over 220,000 times during this period – a 22% increase from 2013. More than 1,300 photos have been posted to Instagram using #EmeraldCoasting.
Through social listening tools, Sprout Social and Radian 6, we knew that the Emerald Coast already had a high volume of mentions across many platforms but few cohesive conversations. Amongst the mentions, countdowns to vacations and photos from recent trips were most common. Knowing photography is the strongest asset to enticing prospective visitors, we knew that launching an Instagram presence was essential.
At launch, Instagram activity was integrated with other online properties including emeraldcoasting.com and all other social pages. This visibility of Instagram stories garnered highly engaged followers to Emerald Coast's new profile.
To encourage early adopters of #EmeraldCoasting, the campaign looked to broadcast ads and earned media.Television spots defined #EmeraldCoasting with creative that shows the spectrum of local activities and the context the hashtag in posts. Prioritizing online publications, media relations populated the hashtag with published articles from visiting travel writers and mommy bloggers.
Once momentum was built, #EmeraldCoasting not only united online users' into one conversation, but also allowed them to opt-in their content for the Emerald Coast to rebroadcast. Spotlighting user-generated photos created both an incentive for the community share under the hashtag and a standard of quality for contributions influenced by example.
Community-sourcing assets made the content creation process more efficient, allowing more time for community management and to foster deeper conversations. Deeper, more meaningful dialogue paired with social listening tools generated insight for ongoing optimization of the campaign, tailored to the real-time interests of our community.
