State of Connecticut Office of Tourism

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Insights

For too many within our target audiences, Connecticut was seen as a “drive-through” state, not a drive-to destination. Many potential visitors only ever experienced Connecticut from the interstates connecting New York and Boston. Not surprisingly then, research across proximity states revealed that many had literally had no mental images of what Connecticut offered — and no tangible reasons to plan a visit.

Ideas

Our goal was to replace this mental fog with lots of specific, authentic reasons to visit Connecticut. Working closely with the Office of Tourism team and industry partners across the state, we created a highly integrated campaign that brought to life the dynamic blend of eperiences Connecticut offers: the historic and the contemporary, the natural and the cultural, the relaxing and the active.

We even turned Connecticut’s “compact” size (70 miles x 110 miles) into a key benefit. Not only were all these experiences just a short trip from our primary target audiences in neighboring New York and Massachusetts, they were so close to each other. So we leveraged visual and verbal dichotomies to promote these richer, multi-layered experiences, so close to each other, so close to you.

Impact

For six years, we helped the Office of Tourism maximize its declining budget to drive increased visitation to Connecticut. Just a few of the key KPIs we used to measure success:.

  • Completely redesigned the state’s official tourism website and increased web traffic by nearly 250%
  • Launched/maintained a highly successful content marketing program that now drives more than half of the state’s 7 million website visits a year
  • Revamped the PR outreach to include specific destinations, securing coverage for more than 1,000 tourism partners per year
  • Proved that the state’s integrated marketing program drove up to 6x incremental lift on actual arrivals to the state