The Myrtle Beach Area Chamber and Convention & Visitors Bureau is introducing a new season to our Fall marketing campaign.
As fall nears, we say goodbye to everything we love about summer. Around the country, pools close, school starts back up and temperatures cool down. We’re all left wanting a little more summer. Some more relaxation. Some more fun. Some more of that good feeling that summer brings. But, what if there was a place where summer lasted a little bit longer? What if you could get some more of everything you love…at The Beach.
Welcome to Summore Season!
The campaign is designed to show that the fun of summer is not over at The Beach.
The focus of the campaign is a full-funnel approach which includes three phases: Inspire, Engage and Convert. Each phase has its own unique purpose, messaging, and individual media content. The mix of media that is included in the campaign is as follows:
Publisher/Content Partnerships
Linear & Digital TV
Programmatic Digital/Native/Mobile
Paid Social
OTAs
Paid Search
Audio
Two significant shifts were made from the summer campaign. 1) A decrease in linear and traditional investment to focus on digital and engagement focused channels and 2) A shift in linear spend to cable only to account for fall rate increases across network TV.
The campaign was also supported with additional marketing efforts that include public relations, email, and promotion via owned media channels.
Fall Audiences
The fall audiences were determined by insight gained from our Terminal data analysis done earlier in the year. The four focused groups are Beachin’ Boomers, Beach Sophisticates, Family Tides, and Beach on a Budget. Key signature behaviors for each group are below:
Beachin’ Boomers: Traditionalists and social butterflies who love to shower their loved ones with gifts and spend quality time together.
Beach Sophisticates: Buy based on quality not price and will spend more to get the brands they prefer but do want to save as much money as possible.
Family Tides: Always on the go and strive to have a high social status but go above and beyond to portray that their lives are under control. Shop around and will purchase on impulse to find the brands and products they enjoy.
Beach on a Budget: Consider themselves to be savers when they have something specific in mind that they want to purchase..
Secondary Audiences also included Families with specific needs and multi-generational family travel.
2021 Fall Markets
The fall markets have a focused effort on fly markets to increase stay and spend. In each of the markets, we looked for efficiencies in media tactics to deploy. We also continued national and regional investments where relevant. See the list of primary fall markets below:
Markets, audiences, media channels and timing vary for each campaign and are chosen based on insights from our various data sources and past performance. Of course, these campaigns and markets are all fluid and are optimized to maximize results or as conditions change.
CHANNEL HIGHLIGHTS
Following are highlights from each channel, as well as sample creative for current campaigns.
Publisher Network
September – October
The publisher network media made up 12% of the total mix for the fall campaign. The three platforms included VoxMedia, Nativo, and YouTube.
Vox’s network of premium inventory and high-impact creative units provided us the opportunity to reach and engage a high-value audience aligned with our terminal personas. We were able to utilize 1st party audience targeting and geo-targeting with the high impact units and social posts.
Nativo’s network of publisher sites allowed us to promote and distribute our owned content in an organic look and feel to drive content engagement. This includes 5 custom articles and native display.
We utilized contextually-aligned YouTube specific videos with popular creators and content verticals most relevant for our audience to establish brand awareness. Our targets included Terminal audiences, travel intent and lookalikes. Placements included pre-roll videos and display.
Linear and Digital TV
September – October
The Linear/Digital TV made up 19% of the total media mix for this campaign and included placement on local cable across 20 fly markets and Samsung + TravelDesk CTV. It included :15s and :30s TV spots that utilize the Summore Season narrative.
Audio - Pandora/Stitcher
Continuing the success that we found during the summer campaign, we utilized Pandora and Sticher’s podcast library to share the Summore message with host reads and audio spots. Placements included:
Pandora
Mobile Audio
Video
Display
Stitcher (audio clips coming soon)
Freakonomics Radio Mid Roll and Pre Roll
Atlas Obscura Pre Roll
Literally! With Rob Lowe Mid Roll
Fall Digital Banner Ads
Digital Advertising on Travel Endemics and Online Travel Agency Sites
Expedia and Tripadvisor made up the two (2) areas of exposure for this specific segment of the Fall campaign. It made up 10% of the total media mix and focused on primary and secondary markets. Placements included:
Native
Native Video
High Impact
Display
Paid Search
Paid search continued to run through the Fall campaign and was once again a full-funnel approach. It made up 8% of the total media mix for this campaign and again included Google, Bing, Google Discovery Feed, Gmail and YouTube. Similar to the Spring and Summer campaigns, the strategy is an “always on” approach, running across all main search engines for intent-based awareness and capturing “hand raisers” while maximizing impression share and optimizing for Keyphrase, Device, Engine, Match Type, Demographic, Geographic and audience performance. A breakdown of the paid search keyphrase categories can be found in the chart below:
Paid Social
Paid social was 10% of the total media mix for this campaign and was comprised of the main social sites: Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and TikTok. The incorporation of Terminal audiences to test performance against more general prospecting audiences was a main strategy of this campaign. A/B creative testing was also utilized. Other aspects of the fall paid social strategy included mobile first videos both in feed and on stories across platforms and video ads developed specifically for TikTok, using the platform’s endemic messaging and visuals. A new Facebook Instant Experience ad was also developed to provide a rich media experience and to compare performance against the Summer 2021 placement.
PUBLIC RELATIONS
From an earned media perspective, Visit Myrtle Beach will pitch how you can get “Summore Summer” at The Beach and enjoy everything you love, including. summer-like temperatures, more fun in the sun and sand, outdoor adventures, special deals, festivals and more. Visit Myrtle Beach will also welcome media influencers and journalists back to the beach through hosted trips.
Event promotion including coverage on the World Chili Championship Cookoff
Media Outreach and Pitching
Media Hostings
How Partners Can Get Involved
CVB Leisure Tourism Investment Partners can submit special packages and offers for Fall via the Partner Extranet.
Everyone is encouraged to submit their events online via the Submit Event Form.