What do you think of when you hear the word co-op? Perhaps a farmer-owned health food store or a housing association. When the Verdin team hears co-op, we think of savvy advertising plans that leverage marketing dollars exponentially.
Many of our clients have some kind of cooperative, or co-op, arrangement with their partner organizations. If you are a Tourism Business Districts (TBIDs), for example, you can gather smaller cities together to create a larger destination that is marketed. Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) and Property and Business Improvement Districts (PBIDs) market a group of businesses to a larger area.
As a BID marketing and advertising agency, one of the biggest challenges we’ve seen our clients face is alignment in their common advertising goals. Partners often have similar target clients and target locations. Additionally, many individual partners advertise as if they were not part of a larger group, hoping for the best. Some advertise cooperatively, but fear their individual message is diminished within the larger group.
The Verdin team wanted to create a unique solution to these problems for client Ventura County Coast, a regional lodging association. This destination includes four cities: Camarillo, Oxnard, Ventura and Port Hueneme. Tourism leaders from each city knew digital advertising was the best way to reach their potential visitors. But they inadvertently ended up competing with each other and driving up rates by bidding for the same targets with concurrent advertising campaigns.
Early in 2020, Verdin designed a test cooperative campaign using our in-house digital buying platform. Instead of having each city compete and run ads to the same target consumer, we created a co-op. Each city created their own 15-second videos and Verdin scheduled them to run in rotation, not head to head. In this case, we had 10 creative videos that were served in equal rotation to all potential consumers in our target markets.
Verdin carefully monitored the co-op, which delivered the following dramatic results:
- Cities reached more unique potential visitors at a lower overall cost
- Cities were able to reach a larger geographical area than their individual campaigns
- Because the collective budget was four times the individual budgets, the campaign scaled well, reaching more users with improved frequency
- Because each individual video ad took consumers to a designated landing page, new users from the campaign were easily identified.
- Total click-thru rates and total clicks improved by more than 50 percent for all cities
- Video views to completion grew 20 percent over the previous period
- Cities were so pleased with the results, they all renewed for a second campaign, with several increasing their buy-in budgets
- All cities intend on participating in a third campaign beginning in February.
Are you interested in a customized co-op for your BID? Contact Media Strategist & Certified DSP Specialist Lisa Campolmi at [email protected].