Visit Saudi is the official tourism page of Saudi Arabia, it puts a spotlight on the wonders of Saudi Arabia’s rich heritage and celebrates its vibrant culture while providing practical information for people wanting to visit this exciting kingdom.
Opening Saudi Arabia up to tourists
For the first time, Saudi Arabia opened its doors to tourists interested in visiting the kingdom for more than just religious reasons. The extremely conservative Middle Eastern kingdom announced a new e-visa program in 2019 that would allow people from 49 countries to enter the country for tourism and long stays.
In an attempt to motivate travellers to take action and apply for their e-visa, Visit Saudi wanted to concentrate their marketing efforts on promoting the new e-visa.
Plan Of Action
In order to do this, Visit Saudi enlisted the help of planning and media buying agency PHD Media for a campaign that marked the launch of the e-visa service to a worldwide audience.
They needed to reach audiences of great scales, which led them to turn their attention to Facebook and Instagram who provide platforms of 1 billion active monthly users each (Statistica, 2020).
Their team planned to use informative and inspiring video ads that captured the beauty of Saudi Arabia and the attention of their audience in a memorable way. For which, they enlisted the help of creative agency, DBB who created a series of short 15-second videos that were made to be viewed across different platforms. This included a series of square video ads used for the Facebook and Instagram Feed and vertical video versions for Instagram Stories ads.
These ads were aimed at carefully segmented audiences of 20-50-year-olds in select priority travel markets around the world.
The ad campaign used ThruPlay, a billing and optimisation option that changes advertisers for ads that play for at least 15 seconds. Which meant that Visit Saudi only had to pay for when people viewed the entire video to the end. The results of the ad campaign were then measured by five separate brand lift studies.
The Results
This month-long awareness campaign reached more than 26 million people in global priority markets and captured the attention of their target audience with their captivating video, which resulted in:
- 60.3 million people reached
- Over 150 million video views (3 seconds or longer)
- 50% average view rate
- 31-point lift in ad recall worldwide
- 38-point lift in ad recall in UK
- 42-point lift in ad recall in US
If you are looking for advice creating successful Facebook and Instagram ads, get in touch now and arrange a FREE consultation with a member of our team. If you enjoyed this blog, check out more just like it here. This blog was originally for Facebook.
