CASE STUDY

Visit Essex

How PLMR Genesis partnered with Visit Essex to redefine perceptions, boost tourism, and engage local communities through tailored digital campaigns that delivered impressive results
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Client

Visit Essex

Sector

Events, Leisure & Tourism

Services provided

Digital Marketing

Graphic Design

Frinton

The Situation

Visit Essex, the official tourism board for the Essex region, sought to address two key challenges: 

  1. Boosting Tourism: Position Essex as a premier domestic travel destination by capitalising on staycation trends and highlighting its diverse offerings—food and drink, heritage, family activities, and the great outdoors. 
  2. Engaging Locals: Reconnect Essex residents with their county post-lockdown, inspiring pride and local exploration while supporting local businesses. 

The campaigns aimed to counter outdated perceptions of Essex, drive website traffic, and encourage social media engagement, all while leveraging critical seasonal timings to maximise impact. 

What we did

PLMR Genesis implemented several data-driven, creatively-led campaigns across various platforms: 

Tourism Campaigns 

  • “Make It Essex”: To overcome outdated perceptions of Essex, we highlighted the counties diverse tourism offerings to inspire overnight stays from visitors across England. Targeting young professionals, families, and empty nesters, we focused on five key themes: food and drink, history and heritage, wellbeing, family activities, and the great outdoors. The campaign took a phased approach with April and May being critical booking months for summer holidays. 
  • “This Is Essex”: This brand awareness digital campaign took an omnichannel approach using Meta, Google Display, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok and Spotify to reach as many North and North-East Londoners as possible. The campaign consisted of five sub-campaigns on each platform; Live, Work, Invest, Study, and Visit with both ad messaging and creatives being tailored to not just the sub-campaign theme but also the platform and the target audience. This is Essex aimed to change perceptions of the county and encourage North to North-East Londoners to reconsider relocating, based on lifestyle, family, business, tourism and professional USPs.  
  • “Food and Drink”: Promoted Essex as a foodie haven to Essex residents and N/NE/NW Londoners through an omnichannel approach on Meta and Google Display. It highlighted Essex-specific experiences such as coastal seafood and locally sources produce via tailored messaging and creatives including carousels, GIFs, and still images to engage the food tourism audiences. 
  • “Secret Essex”: To encourage millennials living in London to follow the Visit Essex Instagram account to discover #SecretEssex, an Instagram-only advertising campaign was launched. Focusing on seasonal trends and consumer habits across winter, spring and summer, the ads featured three seasonally themed videos which encouraged users to follow Visit Essex on Instagram, as well as still-image ads promoting each of the blog posts that were published on the Visit Essex website every fortnight. As part of the focus to increase visitor numbers, we also held a competition with various prizes including overnight stays and day experiences. 

Local Engagement Campaigns 

  • “Live Local, Love Local”: The Live Local Love Local campaign aimed to inspire Essex residents to rediscover and take pride in the attractions and experiences available in their own county. By targeting locals, the campaign sought to increase awareness of both well-known and hidden gems in Essex, reminding residents of places they may not have visited recently and encouraging them to explore their doorstep. The campaign leveraged digital platforms, primarily Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Google Display, to engage local audiences through tailored content and a phased approach. The strategy included seasonal theme highlighting specific activities and attractions relevant to the time of year and targeted messaging designed to resonate with local residents. 
  • “Big Weekend”: The Big Weekend campaign aimed to engage Essex residents by offering them the chance to win free tickets to various tourism and hospitality experiences across the county. By showcasing local attractions and businesses, the campaign sought to inspire residents to explore Essex, fostering a deeper connection with their community and its offerings. The core objective was to maximise awareness among local audiences and drive traffic to the Big Weekend website within a focused three-week period. 
Essex Pub

The Result

Across all the campaigns we partnered with Visit Essex on, we saw an extraordinary level of results. The campaigns generated over 30 million impressions, 530,508 clicks and 11,523 new social media followers.

Tourism Highlights 

  • “Make It Essex”: The staycation campaign successfully delivered significant engagement across four key platforms: Meta, Google Display, YouTube, and TikTok. The campaign achieved 13.16 million impressions and 255,147 clicks. 
  • “This Is Essex”: The campaign produced an impressive performance in terms of awareness, audience consideration and engagement. Throughout the six weeks it was live, across all six platforms, the ads were seen by over 4.67 million people and over 71,000 people clicked through to the ‘This is Essex’ landing pages. The videos were watched more than 2.06 million times and Twitter and Facebook gained more than 1,800 new followers. 
  • “Food and Drink”: The ads generated more than 3.3M impressions and 30,499 clicks to the Food and Drink area of the website. The campaign also delivered 48,326 post engagements on Meta. 
  • “Secret Essex”: The Instagram-only Secret Essex campaign has generated over 2.5 million impressions, a reach of over 500,000, with more than 17,000 link clicks, and 3,019 new Instagram followers. The campaign saw incredible user engagement with a total of 152,210 post engagements and 18,754 users watching the videos from start to finish. 

Local Engagement Highlights 

  • “Live Local, Love Local”: The campaign delivered strong results across its digital platforms, achieving over 3.4 million impressions and 90,754 clicks. Social media engagement was particularly successful, with the campaign driving 3,043 new Facebook page likes and 3,661 new Instagram followers, further growing the Visit Essex online community. 
  • “Big Weekend”: The first Big Weekend campaign that ran in 2023 saw over 2 million impressions and over 32,000 clicks through to the Essex Big Weekend website with 7,683 people entering the ballot. Results for the 2024 campaign saw continued success with 1,322,283 impressions, 34,608 clicks and 9,514 ballot entries. 

By combining creative storytelling, precise targeting, and performance-driven adjustments, PLMR Genesis helped Visit Essex foster regional pride, attract tourists, and position Essex as a leading destination. 

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