Sunshine Matters

VISIT FLORIDA recently completed our second year as presenting sponsor of the annual iHeartRADIO Ultimate Pool Party held June 27-28 at the iconic Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel.  The wildly-popular two-day music festival was hosted by Nick Cannon and included performances by Jennifer Lopez, Neon Trees, Tiësto, Ariana Grande, Iggy Azalea and Lil Jon.  With the event streaming live on Yahoo! and the CW airing a concert wrap up special tonight, VISIT FLORIDA expects to garner nearly $2 million in promotional value.

VISIT FLORIDA’s sponsorship of the event aimed to target the millennial demographic and highlight the Sunshine State’s fun, playful destinations.  In order to reach this market, VISIT FLORIDA launched an aggressive integrated pre-, during and post-event social media campaign that included promoting the #LoveFL and millennial-focused content on VISITFLORIDA.com, as well as hosting Twitter chats with key millennial social media influencers.  The pre-event chat had more than 236 people join within the first hour and engagement was very high with nearly 1,700 tweets from participants responding to questions VISIT FLORIDA initiated.  The pre-promotion pitching resulted in an increase of #LoveFL mentions by 14% in the weeks leading up to the event.

In addition to our hosted Twitter chats, VISIT FLORIDA invited four top millennial travel bloggers to experience the event first-hand and write about their adventures in the Sunshine State.  Those bloggers included Kirsten Alana of Aviators and a Camera, Natalie Paramore of Food Fetish, Jessie Rosen of 20-Nothings and Angelic Sinova of Simply Sinova.  After attending the music festival, the bloggers went on fam trips hosted by seven VISIT FLORIDA Partners that extended their stay in the Sunshine State and offered hands-on knowledge of additional destinations they could write about.

To further enhance the social media outreach, VISIT FLORIDA had social media ambassadors at the event distributing promotional items, while encouraging attendees to share their memories via social media using #LoveFL.  During the two-day event, #LoveFL had nearly 23,000 mentions on Twitter generating more than 73 million impressions from over 17,000 contributors.  VISIT FLORIDA also increased the number of tweets sent by 160%, resulting in 786% more engagement with our handle and added 129% more Twitter followers than in the average week.  In addition, #LoveFL received more than 1,200 posts on Instagram generating over 350,000 favorites or comments, more than double the engagement of an average week.

New this year was VISIT FLORIDA’s Promotions department created the Ultimate Pool Party VIP Upgrade Sweepstakes that ran May 5 through June 6.  The lucky winner enjoyed a behind-the-scenes experience at the event, air transportation and accommodations, a $500 gift card and a 2015 Mazda 6.  With nearly 138,000 entries, this was the largest month-long promotion VISIT FLORIDA has ever done.

The millennial market is an important component of VISIT FLORIDA’s marketing efforts.  Through partnerships with millennial-targeted organizations like iHeartRADIO, VISIT FLORIDA and the Florida tourism industry are well positioned to reach this key demographic.  To see what all the excitement is about, be sure to check out the special on the iHeartRADIO Ultimate Pool Party airing on The CW tonight at 8:00 p.m.