Marketing the Peggy’s Cove Area [Client]

That’s one of the things I’m working on these days at Colour. We’ve still got lots of things on the way for this project, but I wanted to chat a bit about what we’ve done so far.

The project started with defining the problem with our clients, the St. Margaret’s Bay Regional Tourism Association. (Shout outs to the wonderful Anne Chisholm, chair of the association, and Ron MacInnis of the association and Oceanstone. Awesome people with great ideas)

Well, the opportunity: The Peggy’s Cove Area does great through the summer weekends; B&Bs are booked solid, lots of tourists out all the time, plenty of stuff going on. Okay, no worries. But the fringe seasons of early spring and late fall, and weekdays? Well, there’s room to grow there.

The strategy surrounded this key thought: The wishes you have when you’re sitting at your desk on a Wednesday afternoon. Wishing you were some place much, much better. You want to get away, refresh, relax. Well, escape.

But you can’t. You don’t have the money. You don’t have the time. You don’t have the vacation days. But you still want to escape.

So, the offer from the Peggy’s Cove Area is this: With us, you’re not just buying yourself a vacation. You’re buying the ability to leave. Because the Peggy’s Cove Area is so close, has so much to do, is affordable and about as different a world from the city as you can imagine. And it’s right next door.

So how do you convince people, especially people living and working in Halifax, that they should head out to the Peggy’s Cove Area during the week, or in the fringe seasons?

Well, we thought that a good place to start is to get them to really think, “Why Not Now?” We want people to see that there’s so much to do, so close (just about 20 minutes away from the city), so why not?

To launch the campaign, we started promoting through Twitter and Facebook a photo taking tour of the region. Basically, we would take a few bloggers from Halifax and Facebook contest winners down to the Peggy’s Cove Area for a day. They’d be taken to a three gorgeous photo-taking spots, get a boat tour around the bay, take part in a wine-tasting, have a five-course meal at a great restaurant, and then stay for the night (and then we bussed them back into the city in the morning).

We did this on a Sunday in late September to show off that trips to the area don’t have to be planned far in advance, don’t have to be on Saturdays, and that you can stay for the night on a Sunday and still be back in town in time for work on Monday (if you feel so inclined).

We still have print ads to go, and some really cool other pieces to hit the market, but already the feedback has been incredible.

We’ve had some great blog posts written about the tour, plus a write up on the blog for Halifax Magazine. And the campaign has its own blog at PeggysCoveAreaBlog.com.

And we’ve only just begun.

Stay tuned!

Photo courtesy Things to do for Two.