“The bespoke insight that MHM has provided about the Share the Love segment through running the research and analysis was instrumental in developing the summer campaign. We’re delighted with the look and feel of the results as well as the engagement, which exceeded our expectations. We look forward to embedding all of our insights into future campaigns.”
Liz Gaffer, National Visitor Marketing Manager for WWT
The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust is well-known for its work in restoring wetlands and offering audience experiences at their wetlands centres that engage people in wetlands and their amazing wildlife. The team’s success comes from being led by their vision of defending the natural wetland landscapes, and facilitating the growth of biodiversity, as well as being unequivocally audience-focused, and encouraging audiences to connect with the natural world.
As part of their mission, WWT has been embedding Culture Segments across the organisation. Expression, or ‘Share the Love’ as they’re called within the WWT, are an area of huge potential – with the group showing wide-ranging enthusiasm for WWT’s vision and visitor proposition. Having this key segment has supported the WWT to focus their strategy, programming and content in new ways.
Having informed the frankly excellent recent rebrand and strategy last year (take a look at their 60 second ‘Who are WWT?’ video here), the segmentation is now being used to define visitor marketing collateral. As part of this, MHM hosted focus groups with those in the ‘Share the Love’ segment to test adcepts and ideas, to see how they resonated with those in the segment.
The focus groups confirmed so much of what we already knew about Expression, but also highlighted unexpected angles and responses. The groups loved the adcepts that highlighted the inherent value and beauty of nature, without bells and whistles. They sparked on the adcepts that showed human faces and connection, and loved the emphases on accessibility and on wetlands being ‘for everyone’.
The results will be incorporated into clear guidelines for all future visitor marketing content, but have already fed into the summer campaign. So far, the results of the digital elements of the summer have exceeded expectations on engagement, with website click through from one particular ad showing a 16% increase against the average performance.
