Situation:
In his 2010 Initiative, South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds challenged South Dakota’s state tourism industry to increase visitor spending from $600 million to $1.2 billion by the year 2010. To accomplish this goal, the South Dakota Office of Tourism and Lawrence and Schiller were directed to search for new ways to increase visitor awareness by forming partnerships with the industry. The Giant Step program, created by L&S in the 1980s, is a cooperative marketing effort between the South Dakota Office of Tourism and 40 in-state visitor industry partners. For over 20 years, this program was a 16-page piece inserted once into five magazines.
While this program was considered a success, Giant Step began to lose steam as technology changed and consumers became more travel savvy. This meant the program needed to be redesigned to significantly increase visitor inquiries and reach the goals of the 2010 Initiative.
Solution:
In 2006, Lawrence and Schiller changed the design and media placement of Giant Step to help partners get maximum exposure. Instead of a 16-page insert, the layout was changed to three-page spreads with visually stunning imagery. These spreads were then inserted two to three times into eight magazines that would better reach our target audience, including Ladies Home Journal, Midwest Living, Readers Digest and Parents. Giant Step partners were also given a banner ad on the home page of the state tourism website and a page within the site to promote their destination. The Giant Step program also impacted the rest of the state’s marketing materials leading to a complete redesign of the state’s website and all collateral materials.
Results:
The total number of South Dakota inquiries from the featured publications increased 50% in 2006 compared to the same time period in 2005. In 2007 inquiries increased 34%, then another 20.9% in 2008. Midwest Living, a partner publication, conducted an online survey of their readers to test recall of 81 travel-related advertisements in one issue. South Dakota’s ad ranked number one for brand association and number two for total recall. Overall, 53% of Midwest Living readers took some kind of action after seeing the ad.
Giant Step also contributes to visitor spending which has consistently increased since the redesign. In 2008, visitor spending topped $967 million, compared to $865 million in 2006.
Creatively, the Giant Step program has also received regional and national awards including a 2007 Travel Industry of America (TIA) Mercury Award for Cooperative Marketing.