U.K. Tourism Agency Partners With Yahoo for Content Marketing Campaign
The Discover Great Britain campaign shows off the U.K.'s sights, culture, food, and fashion with sponsored content on Yahoo and a user-curated Tumblr.
Taking the plunge into native advertising, VisitBritain, the U.K.’s national tourism agency, recently launched Discover Great Britain, a one-year content marketing campaign on Yahoo and Tumblr.
The campaign consists of sponsorship of editorial content on Yahoo and native ads on Yahoo Travel, as well as a Tumblr page full of photos, GIFs, and cinemagraphs featuring various facets of the U.K.
“Sharing [content] across both platforms, we are able to combine the reach and targeting capabilities of Yahoo with the engagement and viral capabilities of Tumblr,” says Mark Di-Toro, a representative for VisitBritain.
The campaign focuses on tourists in seven countries – the U.S., Brazil, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., and India – which is reflected by sponsored posts on Yahoo’s international verticals.
“This weekend we will run articles in the Yahoo sports site in France about visiting Manchester around the upcoming and globally anticipated [soccer] derby between Man City and Man United,” Di-Toro explains. “This content marketing strategy combines with the native ads and other media we’re running in these markets to reach the right audience at the right time.”
With nine content pillars – outdoors, heritage, urban, music, fashion, food, adventure, culture, and sports – the Tumblr site covers everything from the world’s largest antiques market on London’s Portobello Road to the views of the Snowdonia Mountains from the Welsh coast to filming locations of Jane Austen adaptations.
The blog is partially user-curated, with a submit tab allowing anyone to contribute their own “outstanding places, glorious landscapes, or exhilarating experiences of Britain.” Allowing users to participate has increased the campaign’s engagement levels, with which the tourism agency is very happy so far.
Since its July launch, around 40 percent of the campaign’s 25,000 follows were through earned media such as clicks to VisitBritain’s sites, and reblogs, likes, and followers within Tumblr.
