County CVB
Taking on a County CVB requires a sensitive nature since politics can sometimes play a role in content strategy and planning. Going into working with this County CVB I knew they already had a strong presence on Facebook, but there was so much potential and a whole other audience to access on Instagram. One major goal of mine was to help build up their Instagram profile when I stepped into my position working with them in January of 2020.
During the time that I worked with this client from 2020 to 2022, we felt the impact of COVID-19 in our social media numbers. Since this client's income is driven by tourism and the Hotel Occupancy Tax (HOT), we had our video budget cut since early 2020 due to budget restraints from the client's end. That being said, even with the social media budget cut I still was able to positively impact County CVB #1's social accounts during my time working with them.
Audience Growth
As you can see in the graphic above we increased in our audience across all platforms and overall had a 76.1% increase. The spike in growth between the months of March-May 2021 is due to a Facebook post on March 18 going viral and receiving close to 1.5 million impressions causing an increase across the board in our social numbers during those months.
Instagram Growth
In the above graphics, you can see the growth in the Instagram impressions by 106.2%, and engagements by 132.8%. Since this county had a lot of outdoor activities to offer during COVID-19 our audience continued to turn to us for things to do and as an escape from quarantine. After building a larger audience during quarantine we were able to use that momentum to further our brand on Instagram.
Content Planning
Using social rhythms to show off different aspects of our client we made sure to dip into leisure, adventure & outdoors, film, and events. Whenever choosing photos to post I would look for images that were:
Aesthetically Pleasing
Colorful
Clear and sharp
Inviting
Seasonal
Social Story Campaign
One of the ways I helped to grow Instagram is by creating an Instagram highlight of all the events going on in the city every month. I made to sure incorporate the brand colors and aspects of the logo within the stories, along with making sure to include relevant information so our audience can easily be able to send the event to other users. I also made sure to tag businesses that were hosting the event to make sure we were building relationships with the businesses in our community to grow our reach even more. In every story, I would also add and hide hashtags so that we were having maximum reach there as well. I also made social stories & highlights promoting birding and information about the state parks within the county.
Facebook Ads Campaign
With this specific client, we had monthly ad campaigns changing every month along with a separate monthly video ad campaign as well. For the monthly ad campaigns, they were driven by post engagement since we wanted to make sure every single one of our Facebook posts reached its maximum audience possible daily. I also would implement the use of the “Add Button” to help promote and drive website traffic from our posts whenever possible. This budget was slightly cut during early 2020 due to COVID-19 and hadn't returned back to what it once was. The monthly video campaign we ran ended a couple of months after I started working with this client in early 2020 since they had to cut this part from their budget after being impacted by COVID-19. This video campaign was a series of evergreen, short videos highlighting different categories within our county we chose to promote such as the outdoors, camping, shopping markets, and car shows. We would interchange them monthly or bi-monthly so that we weren't oversaturating their audience.
Website Traffic
Even with our social budgets and Google Ad Words being cut since early 2020, according to Google Analytics we increased in New Users by 61%, we increased in Pageviews by 29%, and Sessions by 49%. Our social traffic increased to 26.9% due to the success of the Facebook account and our organic search increased by 59.2%. The way we were able to maintain our website traffic during this is due to:
More use of the "Add Button" within Meta's Facebook Ads Manager to help promote and drive website traffic with the ad campaigns still running
The link.in bio feature on Instagram being implemented
Organic searching of our CVB
Consistent use of quarterly email newsletter campaigns
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