Successful River of Light Campaign Sees Massive Number Boost for VisitLiverpool.com.
From 1 – 9 November Liverpool Waterfront was taken over by 11 illuminating installations and staged the largest Titanium Fireworks display in the country as part of 2019’s River of Light Festival. 2019 saw the most ambitious programme to date with installations from artists across the world.
The Campaign
For the first time since River of Light started in 2016, Marketing Liverpool took the lead on the marketing campaign, utilising audiences and tactics via the VisitLiverpool channels.
The campaign included a dedicated, branded landing page for the festival and associated supporting content such as suggested itineraries and information on each individual installation.
To raise awareness and drive traffic to the content on VisitLiverpool.com, the team ran a targeted ad campaign across a number of digital platforms and channelled best practice SEO.
The day before the festival opened on October 31st Marketing Liverpool joined forces with Liverpool City Council’s Comms team to host a ‘Preview evening.’
Over 50 local and national press, influencers and bloggers were taken on a preview of 7 of the 11 installations, ending with a drinks reception inside the iconic Royal Liver Building clock tower. This secured coverage and generated interest across a number of online platforms and continued throughout the nine day festival.
The Results
Since the campaign launch on 23 September the River of Light festival has generated over 280,000 pageviews on VisitLiverpool.com and received coverage in both local and national media such as the Liverpool Echo and BBC Northwest.
The official hashtag #RiverOfLight has seen over 10,000 pieces of content uploaded and over 6,000 engaged with the official event on Facebook.
The online ad campaign generated 1.2M impressions and a reach of 666,000 for the campaign period.
Organic social via VisitLiverpool generated 4.3M impressions and over 100,000 engagements.
What Now?
Marketing Liverpool is extremely pleased with the results from this campaign and look forward to working with colleagues in Culture Liverpool in the future.
We’re now fully focussed on our “Christmas in Liverpool” campaign which runs from November 15 – January .
In the new-year we’ll look to evaluate Christmas in Liverpool and will get to work on phase 2 of our destination campaign, “Liverpool. Do it your way.”
If you’d like to hear more about River of Light, Christmas in Liverpool or Liverpool. Do it your way please contact Jess at jcavendish@lccdigitalserver.co.uk