CASE STUDY: TOURISM JASPER

Case Study:

Tourism Jasper

Promoting Tourism through SocialTourism Jasper turns fleeting interactions with travelers over social media into engaging stories that promote travel to Jasper, Alberta, drive referral traffic to shareholders, and build a community of ambassadors.

inspirational customer-generated stories

through the Instagram hashtag #MyJasper

increase in social referrals to their website

year over year

increase in shareholder referral from social

media year over year

12,000 185% 211%#

Tourism JasperTourism Jasper is the destination marketing organization that promotes travel to Jasper, Alberta, Canada. They provide information on travel, accommodation, dining, and recreation opportunities throughout Jasper and its national park.

What They Did Tourists increasingly want to hear opinions and real stories from other travelers. Recognizing this, Tourism Jasper has strategically organized social and digital media to support online communities of travelers. They share user-generated content across social media and their website, which acts as an online hub to support conversations around Jasper National Park and Jasper’s many offerings. The organization can then connect, build trusting relationships with travelers, and increase referrals to their shareholders that support business growth.

CASE STUDY: TOURISM JASPER

To encourage visitors to share their stories and experiences in these channels, Tourism Jasper used Hootsuite to launch an ongoing campaign that would build a community around the hashtag, #MyJasper.

How They Did ItWithin weeks of promoting the #MyJasper campaign on their owned channels, Tourism Jasper received hundreds of Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook photos and anecdotes, each telling its own story of a traveler’s experience.

With effective listening in Hootsuite, Tourism Jasper sources, categorizes, and shares much of the user-generated content on their own channels. Using Hootsuite’s geo-location and geo-targeting functions, they can either source conversations in the area or share regional-specific content to users nearby. They also set up keyword and hashtag search streams to catch messages about their brand, campaigns, and the industry in general. Going one step further, the IconoSquare for Instagram integration in Hootsuite sources location-based photographs, which allows Tourism Jasper to find images from travelers who didn’t tag #MyJasper. They can then notify these contributors of the campaign and seek their participation for future posts.

The organization can then jump into conversations to engage and suggest extra places to see, stay, or activities to do, which helps them meet their mandate of increasing shareholder referrals to improve their sales. For example, if a customer is interested in learning more about skiing options in Jasper, the organization can refer the customer by @mentioning a shareholder directly.

“The Iconosquare app allows us to source relevant tags such as #JasperNationalPark or #Jasper and encourage those fans to re-tag their photos with #MyJasper so that other travelers can find and engage with them. We noticed an immediate spike in traffic and have grown from 0 to well over 10,000 photos tagged with #MyJasper in just over 1 year!”Kyle Harms, Digital Marketing Specialist, Tourism Jasper

CASE STUDY: TOURISM JASPER

The ResultsBecause of great branding and community management with Hootsuite, thousands of travelers–whether in the planning, traveling, or post trip phase–know where to turn to source or share stories, tips, and photos on Jasper. Today, #MyJasper has cultivated a highly engaged community that drives awareness back to Jasper’s many offerings and encourages travel and sharing.

With over two million visitors annually, it’s essential for Tourism Jasper to have a savvy social media strategy.

In 2013 alone, they drove 573,000 Facebook traffic referrals, up 186% year over year and 749,000 Twitter traffic referrals, up 183.7% year over year. Tourism Jasper continues to grow, seeing a 272% increase in engagement in continued quarterly growth.

Hootsuite helps them turn social media interactions into meaningful relationships by sourcing customer stories and getting them in front of the right audience, at the right time.

“A woman tweeted #MyJasper, asking if we could send her a picture of a local mountain. After we responded with an image, soon after the woman tweeted back a photo of her son’s nursery where she’d painted the mountain, to remind her of the place that is near to her heart and share it with her son. Now an advocate for life, she plans to visit with her son one day, to show him the mountain in real life.”Kyle Harms, Digital Marketing Specialist, Tourism Jasper