Digital Marketing Best Practice: ‘Retargeting Marketing’

HSMAI’s 2019 Adrian Awards competition will open on June 25 — honoring creativity and innovation in hospitality advertising, digital marketing, and public relations. Take some inspiration from one of last year’s Platinum winners: VISIT PHILADELPHIA, whose “Retargeting Marketing” campaign was honored in the Digital Marketing/Digital Campaign/Geo-Targeted Campaign category. (View all of last year’s Adrian-winning submissions here.)

BACKGROUND: VISIT PHILADELPHIA works to build Philadelphia’s economy and image through destination marketing. The focus is on engaging with leisure travelers who are interested in visiting the city for fun. Through a matched $75,000 investment from the Pennsylvania Convention Center (PCC), VISIT PHILADELPHIA developed a new retargeting marketing pilot program focused on engagement. The program utilized new technology to pinpoint interests, geofence specific areas, retarget device IDs, and access new data sources to engage with visitors.

MARKETING GOALS: The initial goal was to connect with potential PCC visitors and encourage them to attend events. Additionally, there was a need to engage with the visitors while they were in the city, encourage them to do more while they were visiting, and invite them to come back. VISIT PHILADELPHIA planned to use data sources and capabilities to target high-probability potential visitors, create messages to emphasize reasons to visit, build an audience to capture device IDs and target visitors to invite them back, and increase leisure-driven overnight hotel stays. The targeted audience was anyone whose interests aligned with PCC trade shows/events held in the Mid-Atlantic region and attendees of large citywide events.

THE CAMPAIGN: Social media and advertising teams worked to build audiences interested in activities on the PCC events calendar. Social media posts and advertisements targeted these potential attendees and invited them to trade shows; VISIT PHILADELPHIA worked with PCC to identify high-yield trade shows and the expected number of attendees to determine the size of the audience. VISIT PHILADELPHIA then engaged with visitors when they were in the city by targeting them using geofencing and encouraging them to do more in the city. The campaign also used Facebook to retarget attendees to the trade shows by capturing their device IDs and inviting them to come back and sleep over. Finally, the research team surveyed attendees of one trade show to find out what else people were doing in the city, where they were staying, and how they would rate their experiences both at the event and in Philadelphia as a whole.

RESULTS: After holding 33 trade shows/meetings, 1.6 million visitors were identified to distribute social and paid media ads to while visiting Philadelphia and 1.6 million device IDs were captured to invite visitors back. More than 20 pieces of content were created to convey the reasons to stay in Philadelphia. The project resulted in 1,265 leisure-driven overnight hotel stays. The program also marked a new partnership with PCC, which distributed content from VISIT PHILADELPHIA’s websites, encouraging them to do more outside the convention center.


Categories: Marketing, Digital, Internet & Social Media
Insight Type: Best Practices