Copenhagen Convention Bureau (CVB) is the B2B leg of Wonderful Copenhagen, which means that their job is to attract businesses to our wonderful capital – in this case to host their next event or conference. But after the pandemic, there has been a serious decline in business travel, and a lot of events have moved online.
Because of this, competition has become increasingly fierce – and to top it up, the selection process is long and heavy, and includes a lot of stakeholders. All of this means that the audience is forced to consider at least a handful of host cities.
So how could we make sure that Copenhagen would stand out in their board room meetings where the final decision would be made? And how could we effectively generate leads for future CVB events?
We knew we needed to create extra and proper value for our target group in order to generate valid leads. Hence, our strategy was to not make a traditional campaign as originally requested by the client, but to make a lead-gen tool to campaign around!
CREATIVE IDEA
Every event starts with an invitation. It can be delivered as a verbal request, a beautifully engraved card, or even puffs of smoke behind an airplane.
With this as a starting point, the magic moment happened when we put a creative spin on it: Why not let our target audience create their own beautiful event invitation to envision the future where Copenhagen had already been chosen as a host city?!
Through a brief and simple online survey, future visitors could envision their next big event in Copenhagen — receiving 100% personalized city presentation videos based on their industry sector, interests, number of delegates, event themes and so on.
Beyond being more customized and engaging than our competitors’ usual Powerpoints, the campaign and customization tool generated rich leads and a vast amount of data for Copenhagen Convention Bureau to base their follow-up conversations on.
EXECUTION
We launched a fully automated video tool, accessible through our campaign landing page, where the target group could create their own personal video to showcase and imagine their next big event in Copenhagen. Downloadable within minutes, and easily shared with stakeholders or future participants, this was all wrapped up in a concept called “Your Invitation” – a digital campaign to promote Copenhagen’s values.
All messages in both the tool and the campaign were adapted to fit the audiences' different industries and those of our city’s values that would be important to event organizers.
The campaign consisted of (among other things) a beautiful campaign film & LinkedIn carousels inviting people to make their own video and schedule their next event with us - while showing all the city benefits.
The digital campaign ran on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google Search, where we could target specific job titles, member groups, and C-level stakeholders and event organizers at international associations, corporations, and those looking for locations for their next event. Not an easy group to identify, by the way!
The campaign exceeded expectations by far. More than 10 million impressions on our ads, +56,000 unique visitors on the campaign page, and more than 100 people made a video invitation to imagine their upcoming event in Copenhagen, thus becoming very high-quality leads.
The process to attract and close a new event takes an average of two years, and within 6 months, the tool set us off to a record start having reached and invited millions of relevant stakeholders.
In 2023, CVB is set to welcome 32 international events, each with more than 800 individuals, to Copenhagen, which will bring in a business tourism turnover of approx. 200 million euros.