The Dutch holiday rating portal Zoover offers 1,5 million ratings and travel tips from holidaymakers for holidaymakers. They cover hotels, destinations, attractions, camping sites or cruises and therefore provide holidaymakers with the guidance they need to find and book the perfect holiday. A new marketing campaign is supposed to convey the usefulness of the portal.
Orientation instead of validation
"It is exciting to travel to new places, but there is always also a degree of uncertainty. For that reason, it is incredibly valuable to know somebody who has been there before and can provide useful tips. In a manner of speaking, that somebody is Zoover. With our new marketing campaign, we want to encourage our customers to make use of our knowledge, which comes in the form of ratings. We believe that every holiday should begin at Zoover," says Mark Linde, Head of Marketing at Zoover in Zeist.The goal of the marketing campaign is to strengthen Zoover's brand positioning and attract users to the platform during the orientation phase. "We conducted a user analysis and found out that a lot of users perceived us to be a portal that can be used to validate a choice that had already been made. But that is just one small part of what we have to offer. Over the course of this year, that will become apparent on our platform, which we are obviously continuously improving on the basis of the promise to our users," said Mark Linde.
The first major campaign
The new marketing campaign is the first one since the portal was founded ten years ago. "The travel sector has become much more competitive and we are well aware that we have to adapt our marketing strategy accordingly," Mark explains. The ad agency FCB Amsterdam helped to plan and develop the campaign. "We had been looking for a creative agency that understands where we are coming from and how we want to develop in the future. We found the right partner in FCB and together we designed a 360-degree campaign that uses all available marketing channels to reach our target audience," Mark added. TV adverts are the focal point of the campaign. In addition, there are radio spots, billboards and online advertising, for example in the areas of video and social media as well as retargeting, which means online ads that are displayed to users after they have already visited the Zoover website.
The holiday pioneers
The commercials of the campaign show holidaymakers as trailblazers that found the perfect beach, thoroughly tested the hotel buffet or mastered the art of negotiating at a souvenir booth, and from whose insights the many travellers that are to follow will benefit. The commercials were filmed in Cape Town in South Africa. "Cape Town is a popular location with a good infrastructure for commercial shoots and guaranteed good weather when it is winter in Europe," Mark Linde explains. The actors for the commercials were South Africans. "We had to ensure that our actors actually looked like Dutch holidaymakers. But that wasn't a problem, since a lot of local actors have Dutch or German roots."
Launch in Zeist
"Since this is the first major marketing campaign in our company's history, we organised an in-house launch party for our employees at which we showed the spots for the first time." The Zoover cafeteria was transformed into a little holiday paradise for the party – complete with real sand, a pool and parasols.The campaign launched on 8 January 2016, just in time for the early booking season. A second phase, also referred to as "Flight", is scheduled for June 2016. "We are very happy with the campaign and are seeing a noticeable increase in our key indicators traffic and brand search, which means the number of page views and the search for the keyword Zoover".
