Jumpstart your Summer!

As a tourism board, Tourism Montreal has always focused its campaign efforts to target visitors from outside the province, in Canada, south of the border in the US, and abroad.

Talking to our own inhabitants was a first: we needed to promote tourism in Montreal towards Montrealers who had never been tourists in their own city. The only thing we knew is that Montrealers would have preferred to spend their vacation traveling around the globe, but they couldn’t. The true question remained: how can we convince Montrealers that the city had lots to offer, even if it doesn’t sound as exotic as a trip to Asia or Latin America?

Tourism Montreal also has a fundamental and unifying role with the various parties involved in tourism activities in the city. Business partners, tourist attractions, and hoteliers are all partners who rely on Tourism Montreal's campaigns to be promote to a population eager to travel.

This campaign therefore represented a double challenge for Tourism Montreal since it had to make Montrealers participate in the economic recovery of the city while ensuring the visibility of all these partners. 

The goal would be not only to engage Montrealers to spend time in their city as tourists, but also encourage them to participate in the economic relaunch of the city by helping local businesses.

To make Montrealers fall in love with their city again, we had to pin point what would trigger their interest, and we knew it was not the same as international or Canadians from other provinces. And because the ever changing situation around the pandemic and health regulations in place that could impact the what activities Montrealers were willing to participate in, we needed to be ready to react and readjust our strategies in real-time.

We set up data feeds in order to learn and track the different centers of interest of Montrealers. This way, we would know which activity to promote in our ads. By integrating real-time search queries and organic ranking to our dashboard, we were able to identify the most sought activities in the city and highlight the experiences that were the most promising for Montrealers. Four areas of interest stood out: urban well-being, culture, gastronomy and urban animation. We coupled this knowledge with the activities offered by our tourism partners to create our different activity passports.

After finding the most interesting activities, we needed to know who were the Montrealers that were the most up to participate in the economic recovery of the city. Because we had no insight, we adopted at first a very inclusive audience strategy, ranging from large audience buckets: foodies, athletes, families, adventurers, etc.

To go further in understanding our audiences, we created the Relaunching Montreal Interest Index, an index automatically connected to our dashboard that allows us to monitor audience learning in real time. It helped us identify typical portraits of Montrealers who were most receptive to our messages. More than 35 audiences were built after connecting the index, which flowed according to the receptivity of the different audiences, in real time. This way, we could adjust our investments according to the most qualified and relevant audiences.