Contiki

Student Marketing Case Study

Contiki Travel, one of the top five most recognised travel brands in Australia, needed to drive awareness of their brand to the youth market in the UK.

What the client said:

“From brainstorming the ideas through to deploying the campaign, Campus Media have excelled themselves throughout. They understood our brand requirements and worked tirelessly to ensure our expectations were met, and in most cases exceeded. In terms of professionalism and performance, I could not recommend them more highly.”

– Graeme Dunn, European Marketing Director

The Objectives:

Campus Media were challenged to plan and deploy a bespoke online and offline campaign with the aim to:

  • Expose the Contiki travel brand to 200,000 students
  • Engage directly with students digitally and face-to-face
  • Set up an ongoing dialogue with 2,000 students

The Solution:

Campus Media used its unique relationships to partner up with major nightclubs and student events across 15 cities, such as the Nottingham Summer Ball. A branded Contiki ‘beach scene’ was set out in the highest footfall areas at each venue, supplying students with beach balls, lip balms, and flip flops – placing surf simulators in the middle of dance floors and encouraging students to sign up and compete to win holidays with Contiki.

Prior to each city visit; SMS messaging, email marketing, flyering and postering campaigns were deployed to raise awareness of the upcoming event. Promotional activity continued during and after each event to maintain interest and engagement with the brand.

A comprehensive social media strategy was also formed around these individual events pages and the main Contiki Facebook page, with a range of approaches. A Facebook welcome skin was created to encourage students to engage with the brand by liking the Contiki page, in order to enter a competition to win a holiday.

Our Student Brand Ambassadors (Campus Media Crew) posted photos, videos and messages on their Facebook walls with a link to the Contiki page to boost the number of competition entries.

Photo galleries for each event were created and students were then encouraged to tag themselves in them to visually spread the message to all of their Facebook friends.

The Result:

  • Raised brand awareness among UK youth audience
  • Growth of social media community by more than 13,000 new followers
  • 2,935 students attended the Contiki events on Facebook
  • Brand message went viral through photo tagging of events on social media. At the Oxford event, a total of 492 people tagged themselves. These students had an average of 690 friends generating 339,480 impressions amongst their immediate peer group
  • Contiki created an ongoing dialogue with 2,290 students