Come home to Vale Campaign
Leveraging nostalgia to re-engage winter sports enthusiasts and drive regional tourism
The Work
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To effectively capture and re-engage this niche tourism audience, I managed the targeting and media buy across a multi-channel digital rollout:
Facebook & Instagram Ads: Built custom audiences to target known winter sports enthusiasts and past visitors, delivering highly visual, nostalgia-driven content directly into their feeds.
YouTube Video Ads: Executed ad placements for existing video assets, leveraging dynamic visuals and targeted pre-roll to invoke the thrill of the Valemount backcountry.
Google Ads: Managed search and display campaigns to capture high-intent traffic from tourists actively planning their seasonal winter trips.
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Beyond authoring the messaging, I was responsible for the end-to-end execution of the digital campaign. This involved setting up the targeting parameters, allocating ad spend, and actively managing the campaign across Facebook Business Manager and Google Ads. By closely monitoring audience engagement, I ensured the nostalgia-driven narrative was reaching the exact subset of snowmobilers most likely to convert into returning tourists.
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Marketing to returning visitors requires a different psychological approach than marketing to first-timers. I anchored the overarching campaign in the concept of "coming home," leveraging the powerful emotional pull of nostalgia. I wrote highly effective, short-form copy that seamlessly supported the client's pre-existing photo and video assets, ensuring the final ad sets felt cohesive and highly engaging.
At a Glance
Client: Tourism Valemount
My Role: Lead Copywriter & Digital Marketing Strategist
Design: Chris Young
Deliverables: Destination Marketing Strategy, Digital Media Buying, Audience Targeting & Campaign Copywriting.
Advertising Platforms: Google Ads, YouTube, Facebook & Instagram Ads.
Project completed while working at KIMBO Design Inc.
The Brief
Tourism Valemount needed to stimulate the local tourism economy by attracting winter sports enthusiasts back to the region's pristine backcountry. The challenge was maximizing the impact of the client's existing photography and video assets by developing a highly targeted digital campaign that would resonate specifically with past visitors—primarily the avid snowmobiling community.
The Strategy
Acting as both the lead copywriter and digital campaign manager, I developed and executed the overarching "Come home to Vale" strategy. Rather than casting a wide, generic tourism net, I crafted highly targeted, nostalgia-driven copy designed specifically to remind veteran snowmobilers of the world-class terrain they had already experienced. I paired this emotive messaging with the client's existing visual assets, building custom audience parameters to retarget past visitors and actively managing the multi-channel media buy to ensure optimal ad delivery.
The Impact
The targeted, nostalgia-based approach successfully cut through typical tourism marketing noise. By precisely targeting the right demographic with the right message, the campaign effectively re-engaged past visitors, significantly growing Valemount’s social media communities, boosting online engagement, and successfully restoring top-of-mind awareness for the region as a premier winter sports destination.
“Social distancing doesn’t have to be boring.”
“Let the mountains move you. It’s worth the ride.”
“Wide-open terrain and untouched snow. All pow, no crowd. #explorevalemount”