How an O-mi-god Creative Campaign Really Clicked With Consumers

Client: Travel Michigan
Project: Increase visits to the state website
Date: 2005

Challenge:
In 2005, Travel Michigan, the state's travel division had a remarkable but under utilized website. People just didn't know it existed. We needed to promote this great resource to travelers, because, of course, the internet was becoming the way people gathered information and planned trips, getaways, vacations.

Objectives:
With no increase in funding, we needed to increase awareness of the web address, increase visits to the website by 10% over the previous year's and increase the e-newsletter subscriber base.

Results:
Our solutions managed to make the website memorable and sell activities available in the state at the same time. Consumers really "clicked" with the michigan.org campaign and visited the site 53% more than in 2004. The busiest month, July, was up over 68% which translates to 962,787 visits. Click-throughs to private sector Michigan travel industry sites also jumped dramatically to 3.6 million visits from 2.6 in the previous year. That meant potential tourists were visiting these sites 10,000 visits a day. Over 98,000 michigan.org visitors signed up to receive the e-newsletters, including specific information about skiing, snowmobiling, special deals and discounts.