Earlier this year, Endless Vacation Rentals found itself with 200,000 accommodations to let in 100 countries — and next to zero name recognition here in the U.S. Founded in 2007, the company is part of Wyndham Worldwide and has been booking vacation rentals and house exchanges in Europe for more than 40 years.
“We strategized how to put our name out there and get people talking about us without spending huge dollars,” says Jessica Kornacki, marketing vice president for Endless Vacation Rentals. “We put our heads together and decided that social media fit our needs.”
ONLINE EVERYWHERE
Working with digital marketing agency iProspect, EVR came up with a highly integrated campaign that played out over Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and specialty Web sites.
The “Turn Your Luck Around” contest solicited players’ hard-luck vacation stories with the promise that one entrant would be drawn from the submission pile and given a $2,500 voucher for a week’s stay for four in an EVR property and a $2,000 Visa gift card. Stories were submitted at a microsite, YourFatChance.com, where finalists would be chosen by a panel of judges, then put out to a popular vote that would help choose a winning entry.
And for an extra bang, they opted to launch the campaign on March 17, 2009, by fielding street teams at New York’s St. Patrick’s Day parade — on the assumption grown adults dressed as pink fairy-godparent hippos would draw plenty of attention in a sea of green.
SEARCH SUPPORT
The EVR and iProspect teams didn’t rely solely on viral spread to draw contestants to the YourFatChance.com site, but fielded a pay-per-click (PPC) search ad campaign with a list of keywords that combined “parade” and other narrow keyword terms with broader phrases, including “sweepstakes” and “contest.”
But the campaign was designed to be driven by grassroots involvement and user content, Kornacki says. “We looked at this campaign as a benchmark test that would let us establish what works and how it can best be done. We didn’t spend much marketing budget — less than $1,000, on press releases and the small PPC campaign.”
In brand-awareness terms, that maiden U.S. marketing effort was a success. The YourFatChance.com site got more than 800 hard-luck holiday entries, and thanks in part to an e-mail blast announcing both the 25 finalists and an instant-win game at the voting site, the final round garnered more than 15,000 votes before the winner was chosen in mid-July.
The site also racked up 8,000 e-mail opt-ins for future messaging and 100,000 unique visits during the four months of the campaign. Overall traffic to the Endless Vacations Web site also rose by 32% during the campaign, with branded PPC click traffic up 239%.
Now EVR and iProspect are doing it again, with a new contest asking for the funniest LOL vacation anecdotes by April 2, 2010.
The winged hippo is back too, and with a twist. Tickle him, and visitors add a vote to a separate charitable interactive challenge; at the 100,000-tickle mark, a deserving family chosen by the Wishes by Wyndham charity will win an EVR vacation trip of their choosing.
“It’s a season of giving, so this time around, we wanted to let people give a vacation to someone besides themselves,” Kornacki says.
DID YOU KNOW?
Users in Control
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77% of the YouTube, Twitter and Facebook listings brought up in brand searches are content produced by someone other than the brand.
(Source: 360i, “The State of Search”, November 2009)
Got a Web tip to share? Contact Brian Quinton at brian.quinton@penton.com
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