The Wrightsville Beach Marketing Advisory Committee celebrated several 2013-14 fiscal year end successes during its Aug. 12 meeting.
Shawn Braden, Wilmington Beaches and Convention Visitors Bureau vice president of marketing, reported Wrightsville Beach finished the fiscal year up 5.24 percent.
“This is the third consecutive fiscal year we’ve achieved ROT benchmarks,” Braden said. “With weather, with Arthur, you name it. We were really excited about that.”
Braden also brought up two major accolades Wrightsville Beach had received in the past year. National Geographic voted Wrightsville Beach one of America’s Best Beach Towns and USA Today listed the Blockade Runner Beach Resort in its 10 Best: Beach resort kids’ clubs.
Braden highlighted several ways her organization advertised the accolades, including posting the news to various social media platforms as well as the Town of Wrightsville Beach website. She said she would continue to pursue instate media outlets to receive additional coverage about both accolades.
Braden explained how Leah Knepper, French West Vaughan account director, used various forms of social media to promote newsworthy information about the town.
“Anytime we have breaking news, she’s using Twitter, so if we get accolades she immediately posts those,” Braden said.
Because Knepper could not attend the meeting in person, the committee contacted her by phone to learn how to take full advantage of the advertising potential of social media. The committee members inquired about promoted posts, a Facebook feature that allows businesses to pay a fee to have their post seen by more users.
“We look for posts that are trending upward, with lots of people are talking about it and interacting with it,” Knepper explained. “The way Facebook algorithms work, if we have a post that’s trending upwards, we put an additional budget behind it to exponentially increase the number of people that see it.”
The committee members decided to address the issue of promoted posts, and specifically how to budget them, in more depth at the next meeting.
During the second half of the meeting, Scott Scaggs and Natalie Perkins of Clean Design presented a new advertising campaign, which will run in various digital and print publications in the coming year.
A North Carolina Division of Tourism focus group study revealed specific reasons people are less likely to travel to towns like Wrightsville Beach, including a colder climate and lack of kid-friendly activities.
Based on that information, Clean Design pitched two concepts, communicating the message of “vibrant and alive” as a brand platform. One set of ads emphasized the fun activities in the area while the other set focused on quality time with family and friends. Both concepts utilized photographs of the Wrightsville Beach community to capture attention.
“Visually is definitely the best way to get across this idea of engaging activities,” Scaggs said, “and we get an emotional response from an image.”
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