Case study: From building audience personas to conducting a competitive analysis, Wray Ward helped Echota create a marketing strategy and brand positioning to give the luxury residential community a competitive edge that matched its exceptional character. Explore the Echota case study.

How does the right blend of strategy and creativity help brands build authentic connections?

John: Immersion is a critical part of the process to understand the DNA of a brand or a location, along with what they offer and what makes them interesting.

Let’s be honest: Not all families are looking for a family vacation, so don’t fall into the trap of assuming that every trip will be the same and have the same motivations. Instead, we broaden the messaging by appealing to individual interests in things such as exploring the outdoors, experiencing cultural diversity or attending sporting events and concerts.

Then we think about how to connect those drivers back to the brand and location, what they offer and what makes them interesting. You may have the things your target audience wants — activities, lodging and transportation — but how can you tap into those desires and make emotional connections?

Immersion enhances our storytelling by allowing the audience to become active participants in a brand’s narrative through emotional connections, multisensory engagement and authentic experiences. To successfully create that level of engagement through a memorable brand story, it really does come back to understanding your audience’s core interests and affinities as well as the circumstances of why they will be taking the trip.

Leslie: When it comes to destination marketing, it’s important to consider some fundamental questions about the audience and what drives their decision-making, such as:

• Is your audience traveling for “bleisure” (combining business and leisure) or to visit friends or relatives?

• What are their motivations for going back to a familiar place? Are they affected by certain emotions or nostalgia?

• Or is it about finding something new — experiencing a new place, experience or culture?

By answering these questions and analyzing the data, research provides the fuel for better-performing work that is strategically positioned to resonate with its target audience.

Case study: Wray Ward used photography to help the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority capture and promote the full Charlotte experience to visitors and businesses worldwide across paid, earned and owned media. Read the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority case study.

How does great marketing help audiences imagine their way into these richly textured experiences?

Leslie: Brands have to connect emotionally with their audiences. When you start talking about destination marketing, it gets really personal. Certain destinations elevate, energize and/or stoke something within our audience in a way that’s unique to them. They make a deeper connection than the usual family vacation.

That sort of connection is hard to pull off in advertising, but our folks do it exceptionally well.

John: When the creative work really nails it, you feel it more than you think it. It makes an emotional connection that resonates.

The creative work that achieves this kind of connection transports the audience by portraying what it would be like to be in that place — that emotional feeling it will give them. This, in turn, helps them feel they belong there too, based on whatever they desire from a place.

Great work allows the audience to imagine in a way that compels them to take meaningful action, such as buying a ticket or booking a trip.

Case study: To help Palmetto Bluff build brand awareness through video, print and digital display ads, Wray Ward aligned contextually with targeted publishers to entice top prospects to learn more about the community’s rich history and progressive future. Explore the Palmetto Bluff case study.

The Art of Crafting Richly Textured Experiences

A strong strategic foundation is vital to producing work that not only stands out in the travel and tourism category but also uniquely stands for the brand or destination itself. Creating this foundation requires first researching market dynamics and consumer trends and then translating those essential insights into ownable marketing and communications strategies and executions.

That’s the magic of going beyond traditional demographic profiling to gain a deep understanding of a target audience’s mindsets, motivations, influencers and media habits … then taking them there in the most creative and exciting ways possible.

Learn more about how we take people to that place.