Uncover the Story

Place marketing with a twist

Arch Creative were challenged to find a visual solution to selling Leicester and Leicestershire’s disparate tourism offer through the framework of local stories. It needed to be bold to stand out in the marketplace and yet authentic to an area that was not widely known for its tourism. It needed to work equally well with a small restaurant as a major multicultural city. Given also that there were issues around the perception of the quality of the tourism offer, the solution also needed to change hearts and minds.

Uncover the story branding in multiple colours

Research from visitors and non-visitors was shared from the Tourism Growth Plan to highlight the challenge. This was the destination’s first marketing campaign so there was no prior learning to benefit from. The campaign needed to run for 12-18 months to help the client gain traction and build engagement with local businesses, so it needed longevity. The design solution also needed to be clearly understood by businesses and a toolkit for partners was commissioned incorporating brand guidelines.

King Richard III holding his crown on statue on a poster

Design Solution

The creative design solution was to convey the quality of the tourism offer using a strong ‘hero’ image that supported the associated story. The cryptic ‘teaser’ sentence, positioned consistently over the image to intrigue the reader, resembles a tabloid headline and can be equally playful as sensational.

Its graphic style of bold underlined capitals is reflected in the angular campaign logo that features a speech bubble to support campaign identification. The benefit of the solution is that it can be incredibly flexible and applied to any image of any product. This graphic solution has been applied to a variety of media from videos, walking trails, visitor itineraries and paid social advertising.

Implementation

Once the toolkit of assets and brand guidelines had been produced, the concept was presented to tourism businesses to identify strong campaign stories. Sample visuals demonstrated how stories would be presented as well as the function of the teaser. The approach was bottom up rather than top down, using the toolkit with partners to create the campaign product. The first 20 businesses with campaign stories joined a workshop to create their product, supported throughout by the design agency to evaluate response and invite feedback.

47 stories were launched on a campaign microsite on 21 July 2021. The high quality visuals, full of intriguing teasers, hinted at fascinating backstories and a wealth of great attractions and places waiting to be uncovered. Four different formats of each visual were created to be used across a variety of platforms. These bundles of assets were shared to promote the campaign, alongside media guidelines and best practice examples. Given limited marketing resources, the campaign needed its partners to help with reach and to capitalize on their customers and followers.

Audience Segmentation

Soon the campaign visuals were appearing on the home pages of district tourism websites or the social media feeds of businesses. Making the campaign both local and individual, as well as sub-regional, helped with buy-in and support for the wider campaign. Campaign video assets were created, based on the stories, that utilised the same design formula of the visuals.

The campaign had three target audiences, linked to the Tourism Growth Plan. Stories were selected for their appeal to different audience segments and used on appropriate social media platforms – heritage stories on Facebook or outdoor pursuits with bragging rights on Instagram. Social edits of the video assets were also tailored to different social media platforms.

Results

The campaign has doubled visitors to the Visit Leicester website, with the Uncover the Story microsite seeing an average 13,000 views per week in July and August (an increase of 174% on May and June). The paid social campaign was seen by over 500,000 individuals and resulted in 18,373 visits to our website from 16 July to 31 August, spending on average 2 minutes per page. Of those, 7,400 (40%) clicked through to an attraction site, (these high value referrals are more likely to enquire/book).

During this period 80% of visitors to the website came from outside of Leicester with high engagement coming from London, Birmingham, Coventry and Nottingham. This demonstrates the campaign has been successful in communicating a quality tourism product and engaging new users outside of the County.

Leicester City Council are currently engaged in a national PR campaign to promote Uncover the Story, working with national publications, freelance travel writers and influencers/bloggers to secure editorial coverage for campaign stories and wider destination messages. The campaign visual identity is being adapted to create trails and itineraries for target markets and an industry workshop is scheduled to further increase business engagement.

The campaign was selected as a case study for the City Nation Place UK national conference in London as an exemplar of best practice in creating a strong digital place brand. After speaking at the conference the client were approached to include Uncover the Story as a case study in a new book about place marketing.

The campaign has been successful in getting the attention of national media with articles already published by the Sunday Times Ireland, Daily Mail and lots more planned for the New Year including a major feature in BRITAIN the official glossy magazine published by Visit Britain.

Uncover the story on a bus stop poster
King Richard III statue on an outdoor poster

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