For my Digital Content Promotion course, I created a semester-long digital marketing campaign for a fictional environmental initiative I was passionate about. Combining two fields I love—sustainability and travel—I created the initiative Natural Travels. I wanted to create an initiative to promote sustainability in a realm in which most people are not eco-conscious. The impact of tourism on the environment and social communities in popular travel destinations is detrimental. With Natural Travels, I sought to combat that by providing location-specific cohesive travel guides to make sustainable traveling easier. To promote this, I created a Weebly website for my initiative, a blog, an HTML email campaign, and a social media campaign with Instagram and Facebook.
With every digital marketing asset, I strived to abide by best practices in each medium and focused on honing my initiative's branding style, message, and purpose. I wanted to help sustainability come naturally to travelers.
For Natural Travels, I utilized the website to distribute travel guides and sustainable travel content. My goal with my additional digital assets—HTML email and social media—was to drive traffic to my blog to spread sustainable travel information there.
One strategy I honed in on developing and improving throughout this semester was learning how to create an HTML email that is enticing enough to drive click-through rates and open rates. I recruited an audience that had a slight interest in sustainability already to help further develop content that would be geared toward sustainability-interested travelers if this campaign were done with a unique audience.
Lastly, I utilized Instagram and Facebook as the primary social channels to promote Natural Travels and each week's blog post. I wanted the social platforms to be unique but still overlap with the other digital channels to make the campaign feel cohesive. But again, the goal with each post was to drive visitors to the website and blog since sharing information was my initiative's primary purpose.
In all, this campaign taught me a lot about how to create a multi-channel cohesive brand and promote something. It was a challenge to promote and develop an audience with no funding, limited materials, and a finite amount of time, but it was interesting and pushed me to create copy and visuals that were intriguing. I am proud of how the branding design came together on my website, individual assets, and more. However, I will be taking away invaluable skills in website design, branding strategy, copywriting, email advertising, and more.
