This integrated campaign launched in May 2021 to coincide with national BBQ Month to celebrate an iconic aspect of Texas food culture, BBQ.
In FY21, we continued to build on the positive momentum of the “Let’s Texas” campaign with new advertising that took into account travel sentiment during the pandemic and helped drive recovery.
We continued to showcase Texas as dynamic, authentic and welcoming – while acknowledging the current situation.
In May, we celebrated National BBQ Month and staked our claim on BBQ culture as more and more people moved to make post-pandemic travel plans. The integrated social and digital campaign was called “It’s Not May. It’s BBQ Month.” Elements of the program included: Rich Media, Digital Display, Paid Social on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok as well as a dedicated BBQ email and a whole new batch of website content for further exploration.
Travel Texas partnered with two BBQ standouts in the media space: Texas Monthly and Food Network, to co-create content for these programs. Texas Monthly recipes were featured in a downloadable cookbook. Famous pitmasters pondered BBQ month and offered up their words of wisdom in Facebook and Instagram stories and on TikTok.
In this short 31-day campaign, the results demonstrate a mutual love and fascination with Texas BBQ among our travel intenders. In fact, The BBQ landing page on traveltexas.com accounted for 51% of all brand traffic during the month of May. Digital display ads generated over 309 million impressions, 675K clicks and an average click-through-rate that is 2.75 times higher than industry benchmarks. Paid social reached over 22 million people. We exceeded Tik Tok’s travel benchmark and continued to break Pinterest records with a click-through-rate that exceeded their benchmarks by 122%.Our partners – Texas Monthly, Thrillist and Discovery – delivered over 10 million impressions with our BBQ digital display ads. The BBQ campaign reached 1 in 4 households nationwide and the ads were rated “excellent” and “make me want to visit Texas” according to advertising effectiveness research.