THE CHALLENGE
In 2019, we successfully partnered with Visit England to deliver a campaign centred around the idea of taking short breaks in the UK, called “Microgaps”, and promoting domestic experiences and destinations to our UK audiences. The campaign, delivered through a strong media display strategy, produced extremely positive results.
This led us to pitch and win a new 2020 partnership turning the 2019 key results into precious insights able to guide us to further promote the Microgap initiative through a new creative approach, a bespoke competition and a unique influencer marketing activation.
Our 2020 partnership with Visit England was centered on further developing the domestic #mymicrogap campaign for year.
Targeting UK millennials the 2020 activation set out to:
Raise education and awareness around the Microgap concept
Encourage our audience to book and live Microgap experiences in the UK
Help drive incremental overnight domestic stays through our e-commerce platform
THE STRATEGY
Visit England’s microgapping strategy promotes 4 core pillars (Go Wild, Learn More, Give Back and Switch Off).
Our consolidated audience of ‘Free and Easy Mini Breakers’ UK millennials represented the perfect match for the campaign.
Starting from the pillars we have decided to segment our audience further into four group categories: Explorers, Culture Seekers, Relax and Wellness, Charity and Change. This was the start of our #mymicrogap2020 campaign.
We strongly believe that people listen to people, this is why we decided to combine two voices to promote the concept of Micro Gapping: the reliable voice of lastminute.com, spoken through strong creativity and display activity, and some of our travel influencers - the millennials’ voice.
We decided to create the following:
A bespoke microsite with four dedicated landing pages for each core pillar: Go Wild, Switch Off, Learn More and Give Back;
Display activations on LMN’s owned and operated channels and off-network audience extension to maximise reach and awareness of the campaign;
UGC social competition on Instagram asking the target audience to recommend their favourite UK Microgap spots around the country;
10 day Influencer marketing activation to produce new content whilst enjoying some of the experiences and destinations promoted on the pages.
1. INFLUENCER MARKETING:
We have identified the top cities where our UK audiences, experiences and products are based and chose 4 destinations and experiences following the clients pillars: Go Wild - Scotland Switch Off - South Wales Learn More - Belfast Give Back - Cornwall.
Then we planned a 10 day trip in all these locations with some of our travel influencers, selected especially for this campaign.
We managed the entire activation, travelling with them and planning for them to experience some of the key microgapping activities promoted on our pages. The influencers created a lot of content and distributed it to their Instagram communities highlighting the experience.
2. MULTICHANNEL EXPERIENCE:
We enhanced the campaign with curated traffic drivers (activation banners and social competition) to the bespoke microsite.
THE EXECUTION
Custom page on lastminute.com, co-branded with Visit England and created via our own ContentHub solution. Enriched by bespoke editorials, exclusive promo offers and live feed of curated contents from our influencers. The microsite shows the 4 core pillars with a brief description of the experiences, together with lm offers for hotels in the UK cities related to the experiences.
Exclusive, original content produced on field by the influencers and repurposed throughout lastminute.com network and beyond. Created to work across: Instagram posts, video, stories, high impact display, native media placements, social media paid promotions and ATL campaign.
We invited people living in the UK to share a photo of their favourite UK Microgap location or experience on their Instagram accounts tagging @lastminute_com and inserting the dedicated hashtag #Winmymicrogap. They could win a £1000 voucher to spend towards the perfect Microgap holiday.
THE RESULTS
In less than a week this campaign generated incredibile results. Below a division on how we can analyse the insights: