Author Archive
Wishing Goes Well for Wellington
The Bucket Fountain – it’s one of Wellington’s most iconic locations, and in October, it was the inspiration behind our campaign, the Wellington Wishing Well.
As you may have gathered by the campaign’s title, we transformed the Bucket Fountain into a magical online wishing well, granting 31 wishes in 31 days.
The Wellington Wishing Well, granting wishes since really recently.
How it worked
Every day in October, Wellingtonians and others from within New Zealand could rock up to WellingtonWishingWell.com and throw wishes into the well. These wishes could be predetermined wishes from our amazing list, or custom wishes. Such amazing predetermined wishes included a day of lawn bowls with Wellington’s most renowned bartenders – Jonny and Justin McKenzie from Cuckoo, a bespoke eight course dinner for four at Hummingbird, tickets to iconic Wellington events (Hertz Sevens, Brancott Estate World of WearableArt Awards Show, Toast Martinborough), and a bathtub of champagne at The Library.
The aim of including such wishes was to promote the Wellington businesses and events that were involved while also increasing the digital audience of Wellington through acquiring new Facebook followers as well as enewsletter subscribers.
Once a wish was ‘thrown in’, users would see the wishing well animate just like the Cuba Street version with water flowing from bucket to bucket. This was done by using HTML 5 and animated on both PC and mobile. One wish was then granted everyday in October.
Results
Overall, 61,825 wishes were made throughout the 31 days, with an average of 1,994 wishes submitted daily. 12% of all wishes came through via a mobile device, supporting our decision to have a mobile alternative.
In terms of acquisition, a staggering 21,301 users were acquired at a cost per acquisition (CPA) rate of $0.97 – so you could say our wish came true too! Broken down, the 21,301 users were acquired across different channels; 14,750 new Facebook likes, 3,980 new KNOW Wellington subscribers, 2,523 new New Zealand subscribers and 48 new Aussie subscribers, and takes PWT’s overall Digital audience to over 200,000.
14,750 new Facebook likes acquired overall, 2,500 of which were in the first 24 hours.
In terms of visits, 77,960 people visited WellingtonWishingWell.com, with 49% coming from outside of Wellington. And in a nod to the strength of social media sharing call-to-actions, the campaign, which was only targeted at a domestic audience, received visits from 63 different countries, with English speaking countries making up the majority of these.
Wondering what digital campaign we’ll come up with next? Well Christmas is just around the corner…stay tuned!
The Wondrous Wellington Advent Calendar
By Helen Player
While Christmas seems like forever ago, we’re still reaping the rewards from our little gem that was the 2011 Wondrous Wellington Advent Calendar (test site URL).
Like its chocolate relative, our advent calendar was full of goodness for Wellingtonians, the involved Wellington businesses and Positively Wellington Tourism’s key performance indicators (KPIs); in the form of increased KNOW eNews subscribers and increased Downtown visitation.
When the advent calendar was first launched in 2010 it was a huge success. The second time around in 2011 however, blasted the main KPI by 790% year on year. Please note: this is an outrageous statistic.
And while you may assume this was due to increased advertising spend or site traffic, it was in fact due to a few simple digital integrations that changed the behaviour of visitors once they were on site.
Spot the Difference
To prove just how similar the two campaigns were, indulge us, and see if you can spot any major differences in the below two creatives?
2010
2011
No obvious, smack you in the face changes, right? And trust me, it wasn’t as easy as changing the background colour from blue to cream.
How it worked
For both campaigns, each day users could open a new door, behind which was a voucher from a Wellington business with offers such as 2 for 1 coffees, cheap movie tickets and other generous treats.
In 2010, users were directed to WellingtonNZ.com to download their voucher. This proved very successful in terms of increasing the number of visits to our site.
In 2011 however, users were emailed the voucher, which required them to enter their email address, and provided us an opportunity to ask if they’d like to also sign up to receive our KNOW Wellington eNews. This was a ‘ticked by default’ box, and it turned out that not many users un-ticked it, leaving us with a 70% KNOW eNews sign up rate. So we forfeited the WellingtonNZ.com traffic in favour of a long -term benefit, that was more user friendly and helped exceed our KPIs.
Other seemingly small but enormously effective changes included making the share functions more prominent and accessible through each step of the calendar. This translated into over 6,000 Facebook Likes and over 600 mentions on Twitter, all helping to spread the advent calendar to over 105 different countries.
Results
Overall, the campaign had 154,594 visits from 61,572 unique visitors. While the majority of visits were from Wellington (110,225) or other New Zealand destinations (34,589), surprisingly there were a further 6% of visits (9,780) from 104 other countries. From a tourism perspective this is a significant reach.
In terms of redemptions, a total of 56,178 vouchers were emailed to users, with an average of 7% redeemed for offers in stores.
One of the main objectives was to drive traffic to Downtown Wellington. We can include all the fancy digital tricks we like, but if the offer isn’t good, it’s not going to get people in and redeem their voucher. This is where the generous Wellington businesses came in (thanks guys!). Some offers worked much better than others, with the lead offer having a redemption rate of 14%. We’ll take this into account for upcoming campaigns, however, it’s still important to have a range of offers to cater to many tastes. We had awesome, positive feedback from the involved businesses who saw it as a success from their end too.
Did you see or use the Advent Calendar? Leave us a comment, we’d love to hear what you think.
Facebook, the ever-changing machine
By Helen Player
Facebook, they keep us guessing and keep changing the game on us. This time however, I’m actually pretty excited about their recent changes, and the possibilities they lead to for brands.
The Absolutely Positively Wellington Facebook Page
Timeline
If you have a Facebook branded page and haven’t seen the Timeline changes yet, take note because Facebook actually forced you to change on April 1st. Before you run off and check your page, here’s a few things Facebook have changed, and a few ways to make your page a whole bunch of awesomeness.
Imagery
Just like your personal profile, branded pages now have a cover image that allows you to visually express your brand more than a profile pic does. Smart brands are also using this imagery to draw the eye down to the Like button, because we’re all after more Likes, right?
Facebook have a bunch of rules that unfortunately mean we’re not allowed to have a big arrow in the brightest pantone drawing attention down to the Like button, but there are other ways to do this. Compare these two examples: Coca Cola (good) vs. Telecom (not as good).
Pinned and Starred Posts
Facebook now allows you to pin your most important posts to the top of your wall for seven days. This means you can hit all visitors to your wall with specific messages, photos or campaigns without these getting lost. Similar to this is the Starred Post, which doubles the width of a particular post, therefore doubling its visibility.
Welcome tabs
While you can’t force ‘non-likers’ to land on a specific landing tab anymore (such as your Welcome Tab), you can still send all of your Facebook ads and external traffic to these, so your tabs have not lost any of their importance.
Check out our new Welcome tab, which with one key call to action to Like our page, we’re betting will increase our ‘visit to like’ conversion rate; this is gold for us in the online space. Note: To view what a ‘non-liker’ experiences, unlike us, check out our Welcome to Wellington tab, then quickly like us again.
After inspiration for your Timeline?
Here’s a few of my favourites that I’ve come across:
- Wellington NZ (am kind of kidding, but seriously, we’re expecting big things from our changes, and I’m confident they’ll deliver).
- Coca Cola
- Livestrong
- Fanta
Have you seen others that have impressed? Let us know about them in the comments below, and also how you’ve changed your Facebook page.
