VisitNorwich Shortlisted for The Travel Marketing Awards 2025
VisitNorwich has been shortlisted in the category “Integrated Campaign of the Year (Up to £500,000 media spend)” at this year’s Travel Marketing Awards.
Organised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s Travel Group (CIM TG) and the Travel Marketing Professionals Network (TraMP), The Travel Marketing Awards is a prestigious event in the travel and tourism marketing calendar, and one of the industry’s most sought-after accolades.
The Awards celebrate brilliance in travel marketing, rewarding the originality, creativity, innovation and relevancy delivered by brands, teams and individuals across a wide range of disciplines within marketing, advertising, digital and PR.
A hotly contested category, the awards will see VisitNorwich up against Brand USA, Nassau & Paradise Islands and Visit Austin. The Awards ceremony will take place on 9th July at London Marriott Hotel Grosvenor Square.
About the VisitNorwich Campaign
Delivered in partnership with Fabbrica Media, the VisitNorwich campaign aimed to demonstrate how a weekend in Norwich can deliver unforgettable experiences, increase awareness of Norwich as a city break destination, and encourage Spring breaks.
With a modest budget, it was essential that a single-minded approach was taken to audience; so, we applied VisitEngland research, audience research and media insights to plan a campaign with the ‘pre-nesters’ (those aged 16-34 without children in the household) at its heart.
With a clear interest in exploring the outdoors, this audience are motivated by food/drink, and arts/culture. More importantly, those in this audience want to discover the undiscovered – All boxes that Norwich can tick!
We planned four content pillars based on our audience’s weekend break wish-list:
- Old Meets Now: medieval marvels rub shoulders with modern wonders.
- Take A Seat, Let’s Eat: take your pick from Norwich’s abundant supply of creative dining and drinking destinations.
- Act Natural: it’s easy to act natural here with parks aplenty, abundant nature and riverside walks.
- Independent Spirit: with the highest number of independent shops per resident, Norwich is a retail retreat.
Creation & Deployment
Our audience are most likely to be influenced by travel blogs and organic social, so we targeted creative around digital consumption. Working within tight budgets, four campaign films were captured by JH Film Production, taking in 28 locations in a 3-day shoot, a mammoth 32-hour expedition.
Our VisitNorwich website was honed with a new layout and curated itineraries supporting each content pillar. We maximised on-brand partnerships working with vloggers, influencers and Greater Anglia who provided poster sites across their network.
The media was planned to reach and engage with people at multiple stages of the customer journey, including organic and paid social (Meta/TikTok), display, search and OOH. We planned a two-burst campaign, running an awareness phase from September to November 2024, and CTA phase (Boxing Day – February 2025). This two-phase approach gave us an opportunity to finesse creative and incorporate learnings.
This VisitNorwich campaign was unique in the way it has informed our inward investment brand, Work in Norwich (WiN), which encourages individuals and businesses to consider relocating to Norwich. By retargeting those who had engaged with our visitor campaign we were able to bolster our inward investment engagement.
The Campaign Results
The digital campaign enabled measurement of organic social, website traffic/engagement, footfall attribution and data sourced from footfall counters. This allowed us to holistically measure the campaign on a budget. It proved we met and exceeded objectives.
On organic social (Meta), the campaign delivered significant year-on-year growth, with reach increasing by 85.4%, link clicks by 198.8%, and page visits by 50.8%. These figures demonstrate a marked improvement in both visibility and user interaction, highlighting the strength of the campaign’s creative and targeting strategies.
Website performance followed suit, with landing pages experiencing a 65% increase in sessions year-on-year, and the homepage seeing an 81.17% rise in engaged sessions. These metrics confirm that the updated site design and content strategy successfully attracted and retained visitor attention. Engagement rates were particularly strong, with landing pages achieving between 96.01% and 98.96% – well above the industry benchmark of 61.55% (source: Databox) – and the homepage recording a 10% improvement in engagement rate year-on-year.
In terms of footfall, we used programmatic DSP and Adsquare technology to track users who viewed an ad and then visited Norwich. This analysis estimated 8,557 projected visits to the city directly attributable to display advertising. Additionally, early Springboard data indicates a 3.07% year-on-year increase in footfall, with further gains expected once post-campaign data from the second phase becomes available.
