Family Travel Influencer Campaign

Photo credit: TravelWithBender.com

Project

With the purpose of encouraging millennials to plan RV trips, H|DM was charged by GoRVing.com to develop a short-term social media campaign that would engage millennials.

Planning

H|DM’s idea was to send one millennial influencer on a seven-day road trip in an RV and have them cover their experience on social media.

Without sales data from the RV rental partner and KOA to create outcome objectives, H|DM recommended the campaign be implemented and later evaluated utilizing process and output related objectives.  Despite these not being the most effective measure of a campaign, there was no budget for primary research to establish a baseline to measure change in behavior or awareness of RV travel amongst millennials.

Objectives established were:

1. Within April 2016, receive significant social content views of Facebook and Twitter content of 500,000 or greater
2. Within April 2016, reach a minimum audience of 250,000 millennial family travelers with RV related social content on Facebook and Twitter
3. Within April 2016, establish a viral coefficient (number of new customers our current customers are bringing to our brand as part of the campaign) of at least 1.5

Implementation

The campaign was scheduled to begin April 2016 to generate content prior to the summer travel season and allow time for millennial family travelers to book an RV and campground.

H|DM selected Erin Bender and her family as the influencer.  Erin’s blog, TravelwithBender.com, is a high-quality blog with 115,000+ unique monthly visitors (UMV).  Her social reach on Facebook and Twitter are strong with 19,334+ fans and 26,900+ followers.  A native Australian who whisked her family of four away and has been traveling since May 2012, Erin is an expert on road trips after a one-year road trip across America.  Not only did this make the content valuable to domestic millennials but also to any international audiences who wanted to read about the quintessential American road trip.

Excitement from having a well-established and respected millennial family influencer allowed H|DM to work with GoRVing and secure the RV rental sponsorship and participation from KOA.  It was important to have these national brands all working with the influencer to help elevate the total impact of this social media campaign on a tight budget.  Erin communicated with these brands via social media before, during and after the road trip.

Due to proximity and availability of four KOA locations, the campaign was designed around stops in Las Vegas, NV; Kingman, AZ; Williams, AZ; Monument Valley, UT; Hurricane, UT; and other stops in between to experience attractions such as Zion National Park, Horseshoe Bend, Monument Valley, Antelope Canyon, and the Grand Canyon.  This provided great opportunities for interesting videos and captivating photos that helped drive engagement with content posted.

Evaluation

H|DM used social listening monitors to capture data that could help evaluate the success of the objectives that resulted from the research phase of the campaign.

Objective 1 Result: H|DM generated 651,586 Twitter and Facebook views which exceeded the 500,000-minimum established in Objective 1 by 30.3%

Objective 2 Result: H|DM reached 377,610 potential travelers via Twitter and 19,922 via Facebook, exceeding the minimum audience size of 250,000 established in Objective 2 by 37.1%

Objective 3 Result: The viral coefficient at the end of April 2016 was 3.1 indicating that the content was “extremely viral” on the social listening software’s scale of virility.  This number means that every current RV enthusiast following our social channels brought each exposed 3.1 of their followers to RVing via their engagement with our content.