Namibia is a great tourist destination, and it is for this reason that Solimar international designed and implemented Namibia Tourism Board’s “Share My Namibia” campaign. This campaign had three main objectives it aimed at achieving, which are:
1. Raise awareness of Namibia’s diverse cultural experiences and market it as an exciting travel destination.
2. Significantly grow Namibia tourism board’s online community among high-value audiences.
3. Provide more and better content about Namibia and use incentive to get the audience to start planning on travelling to Namibia.
To meet these objectives, the campaign made the use of pictures and videos of Namibia’s beautiful landscapes and diverse wildlife to give potential tourists a better clue of what they were missing out on and what to expect once they visit Namibia. It relied more on stories from twelve Namibians telling about their places of living, which happened to be great tourism destinations themselves to give readers a detailed and a true explanation of Namibia’s beauty from the horse’s mouth. Each of the twelve destinations was assigned a landing page and complemented with images to inspire the readers further.
To get more traffic to the site, a social platform highlighting the site was required. Solimar international thus designed a Facebook app that used National Geographic’s GeoStories to highlight the twelve destinations and provide a gateway to their landing pages where interested readers would get more detailed information about the destinations.
Traffic was basically generated by inviting the readers to enter an irresistible sweepstakes after viewing the content on the Facebook app where they would create a dream itinerary of 3 of the 12 destinations highlighted by the locals. The sweepstake was tempting enough, but the catch however was that the users had to like Namibia’s Endless Horizons Facebook page to enter the sweepstakes, making the page’s community grow with every sweepstake entered.
Furthermore, the users were required to give their email addresses when entering the sweepstake, making it possible for Solimar international and Namibia’s Tourism Board to carry out email marketing in the future to keep the users visiting the market to find out what’s new.
To further make people more aware of the campaign, Solimar international customized the Facebook app to suit 62 companies that are involved in the tourism and travel field like tour operators and that have strong and big online communities and gave them to post on their sites. That way everybody stood to gain as NTB’s online audience exceeded 14 million and the companies and organizations got opportunities to partner with the NTB.
Each page was designed to be CTA-rich to attract the users more increasing their chances of booking a Namibia holiday, with each completed activity and call-to-action clicked being viewed as potential leads.
At the end of it, a total of 1893 high value leads were generated through the campaign. Furthermore, unique codes were used to track the sweepstake entries with each of the 62 partners being given a list of the entries made from their customized Facebook apps and the rest Namibia Travel Specialists for follow up.
The email addresses gotten from the sweepstake entries triggered automatic emails to them and the open rate was 39% while the click through rate was 6%, which is higher than the industry standards.