Connemara & The Islands
The Challenge
Bua Marketing was commissioned by Galway County Council in December 2020 to provide support for a destination campaign for Connemara and the Islands to support the tourism economy in the region for the 2021 domestic market.
The Connemara & The Islands region of County Galway is an established destination brand. Within the region, there are a number of sub-regions each with its own identities, differentiators and customer segments.
The Gaeltacht area of Connemara typically attracts fewer visitors than the popular north Connemara destinations of Clifden, Roundstone etc.
Galway County Council had already engaged extensively with industry bodies and representative agencies from the region to build momentum around shared ownership of promoting this destination under the Connemara & The Islands destination brand.
Led by the Galway County Council Tourism Officer, Bua continued that industry consultation to create a domestic destination strategy with the primary objective of ensuring the domestic season supported industry requirements.
Galway County Council recognises the significance of the Galway Gaeltacht, particularly having regard to the county containing the largest and most populous Gaeltacht in the country. Therefore, one of the key elements for Bua was the requirement to support a bilingual campaign that included Ireland’s biggest Gaeltacht region. The Irish language was at the fore of the whole project.
This campaign was required to promote not just the unique region of Connemara and Galway’s islands, but to have a bilingual focus to cater for the tourism industry in the Gaeltacht area and to prioritise the language as a key USP for the region.
The Solution
Key stakeholders in this project included Fáilte Ireland and the ‘Conamara & Árainn’ tourism network which represents the Gaeltacht area, supported by Údarás na Gaeltachta and the CAITN industry network. Bua Marketing worked with all stakeholders to ensure that the Destination Strategy featured the Irish language as a key USP and a content pillar for all promotion.
In terms of Irish language promotion, the whole campaign was bilingual, the website and social media all had bilingual content and one of the key content pillars for the social media campaign was highlighting how visitors can engage with the Irish language through new experiences in the Gaeltacht area. The social media campaign was executed by a separate agency.
Bua Marketing provided ongoing marketing project management support across the project to support the collective activities being managed by different agencies and external companies.
We delivered:
Campaign Strategy/Project Management: We project-managed campaign strategy execution with the client and key industry stakeholders.
Website Delivery: we provided marketing consultancy to the Conamara & Árainn tourism officer to support the delivery of the Connemara.ie destination website.
Photography commissioning: we provided support to GCC in the development of the brief for the Photography Tender and created a photography style guide for the destination brand style.
Campaign PR: Press Releases and itinerary & pitches sent to the Irish Independent, The Irish Times & Freelance travel writers
Brand identity refresh: Bua created a new brand pack for the Connemara & The Islands destination brand.
Bilingual industry workshops and consultations.
The Results
Digital Metrics:
12,000
website visitors
31,000
page views
6,172
followers on Facebook (+2906)
1,175
Twitter followers (+535)
10,300
Instagram followers (+3543)
As the key metric of driving sustainable growth to the destination is only measurable through industry bed nights, visitor numbers etc, these metrics were beyond the scope of the contract.
However anecdotal evidence from the region’s industry was for a much stronger regional balance of visitors and much greater awareness of some of the region’s lesser-visited areas like the Gaeltacht.
From a digital metrics perspective, Connemara & The Islands saw huge growth across its digital platforms:
Connemara & The Islands has seen huge growth across its digital platforms.
