B&T Awards – Best Regional Media Campaign
THE BRIEF
Newcastle, the second largest City in New South Wales, is diverse in its mix of culture and striking landscapes. It’s a compact city, small enough to walk around but large enough to lose yourself in. It offers visitors golden beaches and nature reserves, a vibrant cafe culture with exceptional eateries, and a buzzing after-dark scene.
Newcastle’s long-standing image among holiday makers was that of a blue collar, coal mining town. Our mission? To change that, positioning Newcastle as a vibrant offbeat destination, a unique adventure and a culture boost, just a short drive away from home.
Awaken Media was given the opportunity to deliver a launch media strategy that would showcase Newcastle as anything but boring.
We would place the destination on the map for holiday makers, and those seeking a unique weekend getaway beyond the average coastal escape.
How would we do this? Awaken’s approach was to create a media strategy that would support Visit Newcastle’s destination brand platform ‘Seek Off Beat’. Seek Off Beat would act as a quirky call to action, targeting people at each touch point of their travel-planning journey, from inspiration to booking.
Each piece of content was strategically developed for media placement and encouraged visitors to discover Newcastle’s eclectic side; looking beyond their existing perceptions of the city and discovering a colourful destination with an offbeat flavour.
In addition, New Annual – an arts festival targeted at driving local and regional visitation to the city – would be used as an added draw to the city.
Why would they choose Newcastle? World-class surf breaks, mountain-biking trails, kite-surfing beaches and paragliding points, nature reserves, mangroves and wetlands, a vibrant cafe culture, excellent eateries, plus a buzzing music and festival scene. The media strategy used the ‘Seek off Beat’ platform as a springboard to highlight all of these selling points. We would shine a light on the City’s cosmopolitan mix of culture, heritage and adventure on offer, encouraging people to step into this compact city that’s small enough to walk around but big enough to lose yourself.
Where would our success be measured? With an increase of unique users to the Visit Newcastle website by a target of 150% compared to non-campaign periods, with visitors coming from our key target markets.
Who would we target? Our key demographic (and most likely to visit) was identified as families and young couples aged 25-44 residing in regional hubs within 4hr driving distance.
KEY COMMUNICATION OBJECTIVES
Our task was to increase awareness of Newcastle and position it as a leisure tourism destination, while increasing website visitation to visitnewcastle.com.au
The campaign was split into two key paid media objectives: awareness and consideration. ‘Awareness’ brought focus to Newcastle as a destination city, stimulating interest in our target audience, while ‘consideration’ was designed to drive action, prompting families and young couples aged 25-44, residing within 4hr driving distance of Newcastle to land on the Visit Newcastle website and engage with content for more than 30 seconds.
Our media mix consisted of outdoor bus sides (colourful, supersized Seek Off Beat imagery on 14 public buses in key regions). This was supported by digital radio buy across the ARN network music and podcast streaming, plus video buys across YouTube. To unpack the experience of visiting Newcastle as a short trip, we partnered with trusted lifestyle publications, Pedestrian TV and Broadsheet, creating recommendations of the best places to visit within the city. To drive traffic to the website, our strategy ran media across Meta and Taboola, directing browsers to specific content articles from visitnewcastle.com.au’s blog.
SUCCESS MEASURES
Our media campaign contributed to changing the public perception of Newcastle from industrial town to a hub of culture, heritage and adventure. Our goal was to contribute to the increase of visits to the Visit Newcastle website by a target of 150% compared to non-campaign periods. These visits would look to come from our key target markets, identified as families and young couples aged 25-44, residing within 4hr driving distance of Newcastle. Finally, supporting the promotion of the New Annual festival, continuing to create intrigue in Newcastle as a travel destination.
City of Newcastle received the 2023 award of Top Tourism Town in New South Wales by Business NSW. An incredible achievement, aided by the marketing campaign’s efforts and strategic media strategy.
In addition to this, we achieved the following impressive results:
Our media strategy contributed to an increase in website traffic compared to non-campaign periods by 162%, beating the campaign target by 12%.
THANK YOU