Following the easing of UK lockdowns during the summer, Goat partnered with Virgin Experience Days to remind the nation that there is no time like the present to book trips and explore new activities with yourself and your loved ones.
The Objective
The past 18 months or so had been particularly trying for the holiday and experiences sector, but with the news that the UK was relaxing all lockdown restrictions in July, Virgin Experience Days saw this as the perfect time to partner with influencers to promote an array of activities available on their website.
In a two-pronged approach, we looked to partner with influencers across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, sending creators to a range of experiences available on the Virgin Experience Days website. Influencers generated content from their personal adventures, delivering immersive and engaging content that sat on their platforms. To maximize the reach of the campaign and enable influencer content to hit specific target audiences outside their own following, our paid media team set about repurposing and seeding out influencer content through paid media channels. The aim was to strategically target experience seekers through paid ads, with carefully curated influencer content, to push targeted audiences down the marketing funnel to ultimately purchase an experience package through the Virgin Experience Days website.
What We Delivered
Over a six-week campaign period, running across July and August, we partnered with eight influencers to deliver six Instagram Posts and Reels, one YouTube video and one TikTok video on organic influencer channels. Based on top-performing content, which was very closely tracked and monitored throughout the campaign, specific organic influencer content was selected and optimized for paid channels. In total, we delivered 6.7M impressions, 1.7M video views, 51,600 clicks through to the Virgin Experience Days website, resulting in close to 900 sales across experience packages.
The Campaign
The dedicated team for Virgin Experience Days split the six-week campaign term in half, with organic influencer content going live at the start of July, leading up to July 19th, dubbed ‘freedom day’ in the UK. This enabled us to tap into a societal trend of excitement as restrictions were being eased, and delivering audiences with experience packages to fully enjoy the UK’s newfound freedom post-pandemic. This was then followed up by a three-week paid amplification using that same content, A/B testing different creatives and messaging, looking to drive traffic and ultimately sales.
Goat worked closely with the Virgin Experience Days team to select experiences to send our influencers to, looking to execute across a variety of activities to appeal to different audience interests. Such activities included spa days, eating out and driving experiences, to name a few.
Once our influencers went live with their content, our in-house paid media team took that content and created bespoke paid ads looking to target potentially interested purchasers through Facebook and Instagram paid channels, creating audiences from previous purchase data provided by Virgin Experience Days, as well as building lookalike audiences off the back of these, optimizing throughout, ultimately driving close to 900 experience sales.
The Influencers
The team at Goat hand-selected influencers that not only had strong ties to each experience but had audience demographics that had a strong overlap with previous purchase data – provided by Virgin Experience Days. The team also ensured each influencer would provide value to the campaign by analyzing past campaign data of those creators we had previously worked with. For those creators that were newly outreached to, the team conducted thorough screening to validate each creator’s deeper metrics, to accurately predict delivery on the campaign.
We were then able to book all of our experiences well in advance and brief the venue operators to show additional hospitality to our attending influencers which encouraged the best possible content to be produced – which was reflected in the results delivered.
What Is Next?
After analyzing the data from our summer campaign with the Virgin Experience Days team, we’ve been able to identify audience groups, experiences and influencers that would be of focus in future campaigns, as we look to reactivate and continue to optimize heading into the ‘gifting season’ in November and December.
