The Wrightsville Beach Marketing Advisory Committee spent its Tuesday, July 8 meeting reviewing the 2013-14 marketing campaign results.
Clean Design’s media lead, Tom Hickey, who oversees branding and design, said 91 percent of the 154,000 generated inquiries were the product of online advertising. Hickey explained, when a potential visitor responds to a placed ad by clicking the ad or following its direction to a Wrightsville Beach tourism website, that click counts as an impression.
The top online inquiry generators for Wrightsville Beach were paid per click searches/ads placed through ValueClick, paid per click displays and Collinson Media.
E-specials were also a solid online inquiry generator, Hickey said, accounting for 7 percent of total inquiries.
Hickey said inquiries generated from print advertising took a sharp decline to 2 percent of all inquiries with Southern Living and Coastal Living accounting for most of that 2 percent.
With $263,385 spent on media ad purchases during fiscal year -2013-14, Hickey said the average cost per inquiry was $1.71. E-specials were the most efficient at 51 cents per inquiry, with online averaging $1.25 per inquiry and print at $17.61 per inquiry. The cost per inquiry for Wrightsville Beach’s television media buys cost much more than any of the other modes of advertising, Hickey said.
Marketing committee member John Andrews asked if it was possible to hear the results prior to finalizing the next year’s budget, but Wilmington and Beaches Convention and Visitors Bureau Vice President of Marketing Shawn Braden said her organization usually does not have all of the results compiled before June.
In her report on the www.visitwrightsvillebeach.com performance for the year, Braden said the website experienced 50 percent more visits than during 2012-13 and an increase in access from mobile devices of more than 100 percent.
Braden said MomentFeed, which will compile all of the social media posts mentioning Wrightsville Beach in real time onto the website, will launch soon.
French West Vaughan account director Leah Knepper said Wrightsville Beach’s social media accounts and public relations efforts have performed well during the past year.
The Wrightsville Beach tourism Facebook page added 2,000 fans since July 2013, with more than 2 million individual people viewing Wrightsville Beach content on Facebook.
Knepper also said her firm’s public relations efforts for the town generated five press releases, 12 story angle pitches to media and 73 earned media placements.
The coverage from those media placements resulted in Wrightsville Beach content displayed 115 million times, which would translate to $1.1 million in ad buys. With the marketing committee budgeting around $25,000 for public relations, Knepper said those results generated a 47 to one ratio of returns over investments.
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