Discover The Palm Beaches
Challenge
Trust but Verify-Is That Million Really a Million?
The area is exclusive, yes, but inclusive as well. With 47miles of Atlantic coastline and 39 cities and towns, The Palm Beaches welcome visitors of every type and interests from families on a budget to couples seeking a romantic getaway. Activities run the gamut, and that's where Discover The Palm Beaches (DTPB) comes in.
Driving tourism to the area means reaching out and providing information to current and potential visitors in a way that is both familiar and engaging. Today, this includes social media. Adding reach through highly qualified and well-known digital influencers was the tourism council's white whale, highly sought after but challenging to locate.
DTPB's Gerry Marcelo says, "It's easy to find people who say they have a million followers, when 750,000 of them are really bots. We were looking for people who have a legitimate following and an engaged online community to help us amplify our message to their respective audience."
"It used to take us a great amount of time to research one influencer and their audience. With Meltwater's Social Influencers tool, the search functions make it easy to extract information— making the decision process for who we choose to work with more reliable and efficient."
Gerry Marcelo, Senior Manager, Social Media, Discover The Palm Beaches
Solution
Engaging a Better Brand of Influencer
The Palm Beaches offer a diverse array of activities for visitors to enjoy— sports range from polo, golf, surfing, croquet, race car driving, and other eco-activities; award-winning restaurants and foodie experiences, weddings and honeymoons, family friendly activities, animal encounters, and much more. Because each activity has its own audience, DTPB now uses Meltwater's social influencers platform to reach out more effectively. "Meltwater enables us to tap into the widest possible selection of digital influencers and narrow it down to a targeted list," says Gerry Marcelo.
In fact, DTPB can access more than half a million influencers representing 60,000 different skillsets. Many are simply visitors sharing beautiful images and travel stories with their followers. Meltwater monitoring allows DTPB to contact these influencers and arrange collaborative programs with the back-up necessary to justify the ROI.
Added to this are more serious influencers managing websites devoted to travel and unique destinations. DTPB finds these individuals by searching by region, country, and city, and selecting by status levels that include power users and celebrities. Details on influencers' expertise and preferred channels can be paired with demographic and engagement data.
"Finding quality influencers that you can confidently say are capable of delivering eyeballs to your posts and stories is something that Meltwater excels at."
Gerry Marcelo, Senior Manager, Social Media, Discover The Palm Beaches
Summary
Meltwater Helps Discover The Palm Beaches
Zero in on the right influencers from a choice of half-a-million candidates
"Meltwater allows us to tap into the widest possible selection of candidates. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of people listed in the database. We can drill down with metadata and find people by their history, published content, and compatibility with the type of message that we want to communicate."
Spend less time searching, and more time on strategy, content, and engagement
"Using the social influencers platform, we can quickly verify what an influencer is interested in and what their specialties are. This allows us to accelerate the process of getting to know them at a much higher rate than ever before. This is proving extremely important because it saves us time and resources."
Promote sponsored events, turning online engagement into IRL buzz
"We recently had an event tied to our Spa and Wellness Month campaign, where we invited health and fitness bloggers to join with local spa representatives giving demonstrations and showing off their products. Not only did we have top-notch bloggers in attendance, but our partners were also very pleased with the results."
— Gerry Marcelo, Senior Manager, Social Media
