DESTINATION CANADA:
GLOBAL DIGITAL MEDIA

Destination Canada: Uncover B2B Opportunities and Insights

Together with The Engine, Iceland and SEM International, Advant Technology was commissioned to implement a full digital media planning and buying strategy on behalf of Destination Canada. In total over $12m of media was spent across 11 markets including the UK, Australia, China, Germany and France.

THE PLAN

• Full paid media schedule
• Digital strategy
• Global digital media planning
• PPC Google Ads
• Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube
• Native – Outbrain, Taboola
• Programmatic display and video
• Unruly, Teads
• Deep content partnerships that included hundreds of individual landing pages with publishers such as: Die Zeit, The Guardian, Mailonline, National Geographic, Great British Chefs and many more

CHALLENGE

Destination Canada was looking to raise awareness of Canada as a travel destination and increase passenger arrivals. They needed our help to get a really good understanding of the typical user journey of visitors who could consider Canada for their next holiday. They also needed to get a better idea of where in the purchase funnel it would be most efficient to engage with these potential visitors.

SOLUTION

We inspired consumers through the power of video and amazing storytelling, we moved users through the purchase funnel towards consideration. We broke down the user funnel into several stages, each having its own strategy, you can read more about these phases and the approach we recommended below:

DREAMING PHASE

“Predestined” brand and consideration level activity: this means that this part of the campaign had only one objective: raise brand awareness, make relevant audiences consider Canada as a tourist destination by inspiring content and highly visual creative execution.

In order to give funding partners peace of mind, we applied appropriate brand uplift measurement to give us an optimisation facility as well as tangible brand metrics that can create a benchmark for future “Dreaming phase” campaigns.

EXECUTION OVERVIEW

• YouTube
• TrueView with Brand Lift and Brand Research
• Instagram Video/Instagram Stories + Facebook Canvas + Holdout Group Lift Study
• Programmatic Video + Vizu
• Programmatic Display on Select Travel publishers PMP + Vizu
• Programmatic Display on wider audience + Rich Media + Vizu

KPI

5 – 10% brand uplift

DEVICE

The largest share of content discovery takes place on mobile devices, this is where “content snacking” and heavy video consumption takes place. This is a global trend and in the majority of DC target markets, it is entirely applicable. Therefore, we recommended putting extra emphasis on executing this part of the campaign on mobile devices.

CONSIDERATION + PLANNING PHASE

Following the brand level activity we saw an increased level of search activity for Canada related information and content: as we know that the next step in the users’ mind will be to conduct research and to gather additional input before making an investment or purchase decision.

This means wide reach, long-tail Canada and hiking etc travel-related capture in Search Engines to “scoop up” users considering/planning their next destination. At this stage, we focused on driving users to appropriate content pages (how-to, saving tips, recommendation on comparison etc.)

This allowed us to guide the user and create a riverbed, a flow of customers going to the single trade partner that will get prospects into Canada!

The SOLE PURPOSE of this activity was to provide valuable and useful information for our prospects. (the long-term benefits of providing this information is that this will be evergreen content and with proper SEO considerations it can ease the reliance on publisher content investment year on year).

EXECUTION OVERVIEW

• 60% pull marketing in PPC (travel & Canada related queries driven to Keep Exploring (useful content in alignment with search terms)
• 40% push marketing in Promoted content in native/programmatic native and paid social with content boost only

From a tactical execution point of view, we provided and established a strategically laid down tracking infrastructure which will give us the ability to:

• create Remarketing Lists for Search Ads for users having watched/interacted with TrueView Videos in the Dreaming phase
• create Custom Audience lists for Facebook/Instagram Video watchers for various parts of the video (25, 50 or full completion) or Custom Audience lists who interacted with Facebook Canvas creative
• create DoubleClick Audience Lists for users having watched our programmatic video in the Dreaming phase, which then can be used for following up with programmatic native messaging, pushing the consideration content in front of our “primed” audience

KPI

Cost per landing
Cost per CTA click

DEVICE

Heavy mobile focus as that is where the majority of research activity takes place.

DECISION PHASE

This is the part where we proposed a fundamentally different approach in order to truly provide value for provinces and the Government of Canada.

EXECUTION OVERVIEW

Highly relevant and laser-targeted audiences and increased campaign efficiency:
1. BC Warm Lead Audience group (searched for BC destination airport on trade partner site once)
2. BC Hot Lead Audience group (searched for BC destination airport on trade partner twice or more)
3. BC Freshly converted (remove from retargeting pool and activate cooldown)

Programmatic Display – Dynamic Retargeting
PPC: Search Remarketing
Paid Social: Facebook Remarketing, potentially dynamic remarketing

KPI

CPA of 450 CAD or less