CASE STUDY

CASE STUDY

Sector: Travel

Turning Media Buzz into 40,000+ Conversions in Tourism

VisitScotland, Scotland’s leading national tourism board, sought to enhance its PR efforts, engaging Big Wednesday to work alongside its internal PR team to drive awareness of the country’s lesser-known destinations, support local businesses, and encourage responsible tourism.

The goal was to elevate organic visibility, generate media interest, and inspire travellers to explore the country beyond its most popular sites, ultimately driving more footfall to lesser visited areas, while supporting local businesses and industry partners.

Approach

Using data-driven insights and our bespoke trend analysis, we identified key topics and themes that resonated with media and consumer interest. By working alongside their internal teams, we helped shape the choice of topics, regions, and focus areas to ensure alignment with the organisation’s broader strategy.

In addition to our PR activity, our trends analysis played a key role in supporting other channel activity, equipping internal teams with direction and insights to focus efforts on trending topics and helping to drive engagement through owned channels.

Our PR approach focused on:

  • Evergreen and reactive PR: combining larger campaign activity and storytelling with reactive angles that align with ongoing trends and media moments.

  • Regional promotion: ensuring broad geographical coverage by highlighting a diverse range of locations across the country.

  • Local business support: promoting and linking to independent businesses, tour operators, and cultural organisations.

  • SEO-optimised content: enhancing content and building a strong and diverse backlink profile to the site to drive organic rankings and engagement.

This demonstrates the power of strategic, data-led PR in transforming tourism awareness into real world impact. By aligning media outreach with consumer trends, leveraging storytelling, and integrating SEO-driven strategies, we helped drive meaningful engagement, increased visibility for under-visited regions, and delivered tangible benefits to local businesses.

Our tourism & travel work isn’t just about creating headlines, it’s about creating lasting connections between travellers and destinations.

Does your brand need to increase awareness?

Activity

We developed a series of campaigns that combined data storytelling, industry collaborations, and strategic media outreach.

For example, we explored the country’s traditional music scene, highlighting its resurgence and working with musicians and businesses to secure national coverage. In Spring, we leveraged trending topics around wildlife and walking, highlighting scenic and biodiverse routes in lesser-visited regions.

We capitalised on the launch of a BBC remake of a popular crime drama by revealing filming locations and nearby businesses frequented by the main character, encouraging visitors to explore these areas. Additionally, a literary travel campaign mapped out book-inspired locations across the country in collaboration with a national literary organisation, securing high-profile national media coverage.

This activity, amongst other campaigns, not only helped secure record levels of media coverage in 2024 but also helped to position the country as a compelling and diverse travel destination.

Results

Throughout 2024 Big Wednesday delivered:

  • 536 pieces of media coverage, spanning national publications and primetime broadcast features.

  • 4,556 mentions of different locations, increasing awareness of under-visited areas.

  • 3,351 mentions of industry partners and businesses, driving economic support across 71 different organisations.

  • 227,365 visits driven to the site, fuelling engagement and bookings.

  • 40,603 conversions, translating awareness into measurable action.

  • 471 referring domains, significantly boosting the site’s organic visibility.