Change …

The global pandemic had severely impacted tourism and destination marketing, resulting in low visibility and awareness. St David’s Day in March was a key opportunity to promote Wales again, building on previous campaigns in UK and Germany, while raising the profile in less exposed markets like Italy and France.

We had a couple of challenges; firstly, St David’s Day lacks the awareness and reputation of St Patrick’s Day or Burns Night and secondly, a unique physical challenge: how to paint a positive picture of Welsh culture when events, festivals and restaurants weren’t able to run based on Covid restrictions?

Made Simple

Rather than focusing on physical culture we created a purely digital programme of entertainment, building a variety of assets for each market. With reach, awareness, and engagement at the forefront we focussed on promoting organic content to increase our presence beyond the natural reach and find new audiences. A broad variety of content was produced and shared across multiple Wales channels, with language variants for each market. We were showcasing the talent and variety of Wales, with multiple music genres, performances, workshops, tutorials and informative content to suit a wide variety of tastes and interests.

Our main deliverables comprised three principal facets. Firstly, the creation of a ‘Main Film’ and supporting content toolkit. Secondly, a focused series of digital content drops, encompassing a series of pre-recorded stories showcasing Wales at its finest. Thirdly, a ‘St David’s Day Takeover’, combining live broadcasting and scheduled posting of inspiring content across social media as the events over the St David’s Day weekend unfolded.

Targeting focused on a set of interest-based triggers, such as existing Wales fans and travel lovers. We leveraged lookalike audiences to find people with a high propensity to engage with the content, based on existing fan behaviour. From here, we then tapped into specific interests relating to the content (e.g. yoga, music, etc.).

Content played out across core social channels, with the key objective to drive awareness and engagement ‘in platform’. The Wales.com Facebook and Twitter accounts acted as a central hub for the paid social campaign, allowing for the most efficient activation across all markets. All-language content was distributed via Wales.com’s Facebook and Instagram, while Twitter was used to promote content in English, German and French.

Further reach was gained by leveraging Wales’ international office accounts, partners such as Wales Arts International, diaspora societies including New York Welsh, and influencers and celebrities like Matthew Rhys.

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