Cultural Alliance – Tourism Campaign

What started as a collaboration between York County Cultural Alliance and GRIT to create a strategy that could be used to apply for grant funding to shine a spotlight on York County’s rich tourism offerings and drive visitation, came to fruition as an integrated leisure marketing campaign fully funded by resulting grant dollars.

The “For the Curious” campaign was the first of its kind built around the county’s new “have it made here” brand, leveraging video and audience-specific storytelling to showcase the dynamic cultural experiences around the region. The premise invites users across key demographic segments (young couples, families and empty nesters) to recognize themselves in one (or more) of the travel personalities who can find inspiration during a York County cultural exploration journey.

GRIT supported the Cultural Alliance in building the campaign from the ground-up. To begin, we embarked on an effort to collect and inventory video from cultural stakeholders around the community. These videos were ultimately used to build the campaign’s cornerstone video series which is customized for each priority audience sector. In addition to the video, bringing the campaign to life included:

• Creation of a microsite with a custom travel personality online quiz, connected to a result-based automated email series.
• Crafting experience-based blogs to showcase the diversity of experiences available.
• Collaboration with the Cultural Alliance and Explore York teams to build and brand a corresponding mobile cultural pass application.
• Related asset creation across mediums and channels such as window clings, posters, billboards, digital ads and more.

Audience-specific, video-led digital ads serve as the primary out-of-market advertising strategy with a focus on targeting potential overnight cultural tourists from the Baltimore, MD and Washington, D.C. regions. The campaign, which is currently underway, is showing strong early performance:

• Ads consistently lead to pass signups and e-mail lead generation via the on-page quiz.
• Blogs direct readers to partner websites and receive high engagement across social channels.
• Video view rates and clickthrough rates are high across advertising channels.

GRIT is continuing to optimize the ad strategy as data is received to support overall campaign goals.