If a picture is worth a thousand words, the Canadian Tourism Commission’s latest social marketing program was worth 139,000.
Earlier this summer, the CTC enlisted four Instagram influencers from the U.S. to embark on and document a week-long journey exploring Yukon’s dramatic mountain vistas and crystal clear lakes under endless blue skies.
The photos captured during the trek – 139 in all – were shared across the CTC’s various social media platforms including a re-skinned Tumblr page, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter using the Explore Canada hashtag.
Kate Duffy, manager of social media at the Canadian Tourism Commission, says Instagram was the ideal channel for the organization’s marketing strategy.
“We really want to convey the experiences that are available in Canada through advocates,” she says.
Duffy says the CTC’s social media efforts are steadily increasing as the organization focuses on producing shareable content to capture “brand buzz in Canada as opposed to paying for it through the traditional paid channels.”
The CTC supported the effort through responsive posts on Facebook and promoted tweets.
“We found more and more this year we’re putting a bit of budget against boosting our content with paid media to help attract new audiences into what we’re doing,” says Duffy.
Duffy says the CTC is hoping to one-day recruit influencers from markets like Brazil to travel a different region of Canada for the second phase of the campaign.
“The cool thing about photos is that it doesn’t matter what language a person is speaking,” says Duffy. “We can repurpose that content across all of our visual platforms.”
• Number of photos posted by the group: 139
• Combined number of likes for all 4 Instagrammers: 733,468
• ExploreCanada Instagram likes: 23,000
• Total likes for the program: 756,468
• Average number of likes per photo: 5,223
• New followers to @ExploreCanada Instagram account: 3,000
• Tumblr web views: 7,000
