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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2017-09-05; Carlsbad Tourism Business Improvement District; ; Select Outside Interactive (Digital) Marketing Services AgencyCARLSBAD TOURISM BUSINESS IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT (CTBID) AGENDA BILL AB# MTG. 09-17-152 9-5-17 RECOMMENDED ACTION: Select Outside Interactive [Digital] Marketing Services Agency CTBID STAFF GENERAL COUNSEL Approve recommendation to select Elevated as the agency to provide outside interactive [digital] marketing to Visit Carlsbad as recommended by the CTBID Board temporary advisory committee. ITEM EXPLANATION: The Carlsbad Tourism Business Improvement District (CTBID) contracts with Carlsbad Convention and Visitors Bureau, a not for profit public benefit corporation ("Visit Carlsbad") to provide tourism marketing services for Carlsbad. This includes the operation of the visitor center, public relations and digital marketing. In the prior fiscal year, the digital marketing portion of the contract was contracted out by Visit Carlsbad to Civilian, Inc. As part of the Visit Carlsbad contract with the CTBID for FY 2017-18, the CTBID Board has requested that a Request for Prop~sal (RFP) be issued for the digital marketing services and that the top 2 proposals be presented to the CTBID Board for the CTBID Board to select the company to provide these services. Visit Carlsbad issued the RFP with proposals due no later than May 15, 2017. Four proposals were received. On August 4th, the Visit Carlsbad Board met and interviewed the four agencies that submitted proposals. Some of the areas that were considered by the Visit Carlsbad Board were the agency's understanding of the digital space, their experience in the tourism industry and pricing. Based on review of the proposals and interviews of the agencies, the Visit Carlsbad Board selected the following two agencies to be forwarded to the CTBID Board for its consideration: The Starmark Group and Elevated. The Visit Carlsbad Board felt that further review of these agencies should be done before selection is made especially in the areas of cost, social media and account representation. They recommended that the CTBID Board appoint a temporary advisory committee to make a recommendation to the CTBID Board at a future meeting. The CTBID Board appointed Tim Stripe, Gary Sims and Kimberly Malaspina to a CTBID Board temporary advisory committee to make a recommendation to the CTBID Board at its September 5 meeting. The advisory committee along with the Visit Carlsbad Board met with each of the two agencies on August 22 to further review their qualifications. Based on this review, and the input of the new Visit Carlsbad Marketing Director, the advisory committee is recommending that Elevated be selected as the provider of outside Interactive (digital) marketing services to Visit Carlsbad at an annual cost of $220,000. See attached budget and scope of services at Exhibit 1. FISCAL IMPACT: Since the CTBID contract with Visit Carlsbad for FY 2017-18 includes $250,000 for outside interactive marketing no additional funding is required since the annual cost for Elevated is $220,000. ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT: This action does not qualify as a project under the California Environment Quality Act ("CEQA") and will not have a physical adverse effect on the environment. (CEQA Regulation 15378(b).) EXHIBITS: 1 . Elevated Scope of services Visit Carlsbad Digital Marketing Services Scope EXHIBIT 1 Moving forward, the following will be handled in-house by Visit Carlsbad Marketing Director with a budget of $20,000 for Paid Social Ads and $10,000 for Social Ad Boosts and Email Management. Day to day social media content creation and posting handled by Visit Carlsbad: 1. Social Media paid Ads 2. Social Media post boosts 3. Day to Day Website CMS Management (Offers, Deals, copy changes day to day, new partners, uploading photos, etc.) 4. Email Campaign Management (Coding/Sending) The following digital activities/breakout will be handled by Elevated: A. PPC Advertising (Google/Bing/Yahoo) B. Website Development (Wordpress Site -Suggested 240 Annual Hours -break out hourly ra,te/total) C. SEO D. Digital Display/Retargeting Ad Networks E. Content Creation (Blog) F. Analytics/Reporting G. Agency Fees Scope of Services I Total Budget Paid Media $85.000 $20,500 $24,000 S6.ooo $54.000 $3,500 $3.000 $24,000 $220,000 In regards to how we positioned everything, we would be happy to walk you through our strategical reasoning but here are a few insights ... Paid Media & Digital Display/Retargeting -we are going to first review all previous data and obviously strategize with the two of you and leverage your experience and knowledge. In regards to display, it will be very important that we are generating great creative for the display/retargeting ads and identifying the best pages to land traffic based on campaign ad group. For campaign ads groups we will need to be strategic on which categories (golf, beach, events, meetings, attractions, etc.) that we test and designate budgets to. Most important will be establishing and setting up agreed upon conversion goals. After digging in to current assets and Visit Carlsbad Digital Marketing Services Scope EXHIBIT 1 data we may recommend building out specific landing pages that we could potentially use some of the development hours to develop. Website Development -We have put the hourly rate @$100 based on the overall commitment. These hours will be focused on overall website improvements and recommendations made by the initial CRO recommendations and month-to-month maintenance. Content Creation (Blog) -this initiative will be integrated with the overall SEO efforts and also leveraged as thought leadership pieces. SEO -for the SEO campaign, the first month will be focused with keyword research/keyword assignment, competitor analysis, striking distance analysis, paid search data review, benchmarking, on-page optimization, etc. The keyword research/assignment will help us determine the content marketing outreach/linking strategy which will be executed in months 2+. Our strategy results in getting internal pages, as well as the homepage, ranking for the necessary keywords that drive users directly to the page that is most relevant to their search intentions. Also, our link development strategy is focused on quality and relevancy and not quantity. 2-3 of these links are more valuable than 5-6 links that most agencies generate. Analytics & Reporting -this will be a separate engagement as well as we will be addressing this within the Paid Media and SEO engagements. This budget is seperate because this will be a very important piece of the kick-off of this engagement. For this we will be doing a deep dive into conversions and events to be tracked and the current Analytics set-up. Based on what we determine are the most important metrics we will build custom reporting based on that for our monthly report. CRO (Experience Optimization) -for us this is another key initial engagement that we would start on day 1 of the relationship. This would include setting up heatmapping and website listening for the homepage so that we could track user behavior until we have enough data to make recommendations based on the results (as well as best practices) to improve (and test) user experience. Depending on recommendations we can utilize Development hours to implement. Agency Fees -only Paid Media/Display/Retargeting management fees are included in this budget. This is calculated by our management fee structure of $2,000/month or 15% of total media spend. We have a scale that the% reduces as the spend increases. For this engagement we have chosen not to charge a set-up fee. Last but not least, one thing each meeting has shown us is that there are many stakeholders with a personal interest in the success of any marketing efforts. I think it would benefit everyone if we were able to include a basic complimentary CRO website recommendation to each of the partners with the engagement to help increase their conversions/sales. I hope that this provides enough insight into our recommendations. Once again, our team is absolutely Data driven so this could be adjusted once we dig into past data as well as collaborate with the Visit Carlsbad team.