With clear data and partner insights collected with a campaign, Jordan targets its key markets and reposition the destination.
In 2019, Visit Jordan partnered with travel audience to change existing perceptions of the destination. In this interview with Hakim Tamimi, Adventure & Eco Unit Head at Visit Jordan, we have discovered how the NTO has managed to create awareness of Jordan as an adventure destination.
The travel audience, an Amadeus company, is a travel advertising platform, specialised in working with destinations, OTAs, airlines and travel companies to provide a data-driven, end-to-end solution for coordinating marketing efforts to achieve the maximum end result.
In 2019, Visit Jordan partnered with travel audience with the aim to create awareness of Jordan as a destination, engage with new audiences and of course, to ultimately attract more visitors to Jordan.
Working together with travel audience, Visit Jordan had two clear objectives for the campaign:
There is no definitive definition for adventure tourism, also known as 'adventure travel', as it may have different meanings to different people (isn't travelling itself an adventure after all?) That said, it is also a niche form of tourism which involves exploration, discovery, and more often than not, getting off the beaten track in one way or another. The Adventure Travel Trade Association defines adventure tourism as a trip that includes at least two of the following three elements: physical activity, natural environment and cultural immersion. As such, this niche audience demonstrates particular characteristics and desires when it comes to travelling.
Visit Jordan had to ensure everything was in place for this audience: service providers, sites, guidelines, infrastructures etc. travel audience then helped the NTO to understand their adventure travel segment through the analysts of data, in order to target and attract them effectively.
Another key challenge was how to promote Jordan as a safe destination due to negative associations connected with the destination. In addition to that, historically, Visit Jordan has been promoting a particular image, focusing on the most well-known attractions and sites to visit such as Petra, Wadi Rum, the desert and its environment.
Promoting adventure tourism is a great way to break the stereotype and attract a new market, showing a different side of Jordan, promoting its culinary offer, biodiversity and ethnic diversity. For this, it was important to promote a different image to the existing one that was communicated by Visit Jordan, and to create a completely separate brand from Jordan in the minds of visitors.
Visit Jordan developed a range of new photography to represent another side of Jordan and to challenge the stereotypical desert image. With this high-quality visual content provided by Visit Jordan, Travel Audience helped to create a campaign that was focused on adventure travel, distributed through premium travel display and video.
The campaigns were divided into 5 parts to promote the key adventure activities in Jordan: Cycling, Diving, Canyoning, Hiking and the historic city of Petra. This was very effective in reaching specific audiences within the adventure tourism space as results demonstrate that there was an average CTR (click-through-rate) of more than 1%, which is well above the average benchmark.
The campaign was targeted in the key markets for Jordan: UK, France and Germany. The aim was to bring more traffic to existing markets and redevelop touchpoints in less active markets. In this case, awareness campaigns are appropriate to build the adventure side image of Jordan in visitors minds.
The campaign gathered lots of data insights which will be highly useful in shaping future projects with Visit Jordan. Most importantly, it identified really valuable audience insights like, for example, how the different markets were responding to the activities. For instance, the German market demonstrated the best reaction to diving campaigns whereas the UK market was more responsive to hiking.
The platform also helped to identify key insights such as visitor booking lead times and visitors by month of departure. For instance, German and British visitors showed a similar booking pattern with 30% of visitors from both markets booking their trips last minute (1-7 days before departure) whereas only 9% of visitors from France booked in this way.
This is really useful information for the NTO, as it helps to determine and shape future campaigns, ensuring campaigns are targeted at the right time and during the relevant window for each market.
Furthermore, before the campaign started, travel audience was able to identify audiences that interacted with destinations considered similar to Jordan in the minds of visitors. With these data insights, they were able to target travellers with the intention to travel to similar destinations based on location and activities.
Such useful data is really invaluable when it comes to repositioning a destination as it is crucial to understand the target audience to reach them in the most effective way. With clear data and partner insights, travel audience effectively developed campaigns to target Jordan’s key markets and reposition the destination as an adventure travel destination, in addition to reaching new audiences with the intention to travel that may not have considered Jordan as a destination prior to the campaign.
.webp)