Visit The Woodlands recently received a Gold W3 Award in the Social Campaign and Series: Arts & Entertainment category for a social media campaign titled "Art Gladness". This campaign promoted public art in The Woodlands, and ran during March 2023 (in conjunction with March Madness).
Visit The Woodlands also received a Silver W3 Award in the Social Content and Marketing category for Partner Collaborations on Instagram.
The W3 Awards is an international award competition that celebrates digital excellence and honors outstanding websites, video, social media, podcasts, mobile sites and apps, and emerging tech across the globe. Other Gold winners from 2023 include organizations such as AARP, Frito-Lay North America Inc., IBM, and Netflix. View a full list of W3 Award winners here.
ABOUT ART GLADNESS
As home to over 100 pieces of public art, The Woodlands prides itself on having one of the largest public art collections per capita in Texas. The "Art Gladness" campaign was created to showcase a variety of public art and engage Visit The Woodlands' Instagram followers with a bracket-style voting tournament during the same month as the well-known college basketball tournament, March Madness.
The campaign was launched with a short form video and landing page on March 14, 2023. Over the next twenty days, Visit The Woodlands' Instagram followers were encouraged to participate by watching Visit The Woodlands' Instagram stories and using the Poll feature to vote for their favorite art pieces. Each day, Visit The Woodlands would post Instagram stories featuring the art pieces that were going 'head-to-head' in the voting competition for the day, followed by a combined image with the Poll feature that viewers could use to vote.
Throughout the campaign, Visit The Woodlands' Instagram stories received over 76,000 impressions. After more than 3,000 votes cast, "At Water's Edge" by Dixie Friend Gay was chosen as the winning art piece for "Art Gladness".
Click here to view the "Art Gladness" campaign, saved to Visit The Woodlands' Instagram Story highlights.
A Mosaic from "At Water's Edge" by Dixie Friend Gay
ABOUT PARTNER COLLABORATIONS
As the official Convention & Visitors Bureau, Visit The Woodlands offers complimentary marketing support to hospitality businesses and organizations (including restaurants, shops, hotels, attractions, and events) in The Woodlands. In order to increase the impact of this marketing support, Visit The Woodlands started working closely with local partners to create Instagram reels. Partners and Visit The Woodlands determined content topics in advance before scheduling a time for Visit The Woodlands to capture the content.
When a Reel is published, the partner is tagged as a Collaborator. Since launching partner collaborations in March 2023, Visit The Woodlands has worked with over 25 partners to develop Instagram Reels. This has strengthened partner relationships and helped increase Instagram reach for Visit The Woodlands and partners.
As of June 2023, Partner Collaboration Instagram Reels have received a total of 155K impressions with an average reach per post of 9, 800. For perspective, Visit The Woodlands’ Instagram Reels’ usually have a reach of 3K – 5K. These collaborations are an added value to Visit The Woodlands Partners looking to expand their audience. Visit The Woodlands has 20K followers and can expand partners’ reach, especially for local restaurants and shops that have under 1K followers.
Visit The Woodlands’ Partner Collaborations are planned collaboratively and executed in-house. Are you a Visit The Woodlands Partner who is interested in working with our team on a Partner Collaboration?
