The challenge

Water 2 Wine (W2W) was a campaign designed to specifically increase international visitors by targeting hosts of VFR, who reside in either Manly or Bondi. Usually Leonards would develop a media schedule, based around how to target certain demographics – narrowing the audience to assume less wastage and pin-pointing areas and personas that will best lead to conversions. This time, we needed to look at market saturation.

The objectives for this campaign were to:

• Increase visitation by 9%, or an incremental 2,000 overnight visitors
• Increase international visitors to Mudgee Visitor Information Centre by 5%, or 100 visitors
• Increase unique website visitors during campaign term (15K+ per month)

The solution

In order to achieve market saturation, this campaign could not rely on a single platform to deliver the Mudgee Region W2W campaign – we needed to deliver high impact within the community, be visually engaging and create talkability, whilst focusing the campaign towards clear objectives which needed to be met. Due to budget restrictions, it was clear that we would not be able to achieve this by targeting both areas, and a decision was made to consolidate budgets and focus on one area.

Intensive research was carried out by Leonards into the population of both catchment areas, using a mixture of resources including Profile.id (demographic resource centre) and Destination NSW document ‘NSW VFR Host Research’.

From here it was Leonards recommendation that we proceed to target the Manly/Northern Beaches area only for the following reasons:

32% of Manly residents were born overseas. The population of Manly is larger than Bondi and Bondi Junction combined – giving us more opportunity.

Manly and Northern Beaches residents more closely aligned with target audience of previous campaigns, with average age of 38 and 32% having children making it more likely for family from overseas to come and visit.

By narrowing our audience geographically in order to focus budget – this in turn narrowed our reach. The time in market also posed a problem; we needed to be active in the three month run up to Christmas – a key period for family visitors. Achieving cut through and maintaining throughout the three months of summer, a highly competitive period, we needed to be particularly clever with our channel selection – ensuring each element worked together to engage our audience and build impact.

The results

When the campaign wrapped up, we were able to measure our results against the objectives that were originally set from the start. The results were as follows:

• Increase visitation by 9%, or an incremental 2,000 overnight visitors
  We were able to achieve 3,975 overnight visitors – an increase of 10.5% was  achieved + exceeded KPI by 99%
• Increase international visitors to Mudgee Visitor Information Centre by 5%, or 100 visitors
  We encouraged 223 incremental international visitors to the ViC which exceeded the KPI by 123%
• Increase unique website visitors during campaign term (15K+ per month)
  We successfully achieved an average of 15,571 website visitors per month
  – exceeding the KPI set by 4%*

(*Digital spend represented a relatively small percentage of the campaign budget accounting for the pleasing, but smaller exceeding of this KPI compared to other objectives).