New Zealand Trails offers fully guided hiking tours in Aotearoa to smart, adventurous folk who are often over 50. Typically underrepresented when it comes to tourism, New Zealand Trails have successfully built a business catering their offering to travellers from all across the world so they can have the trip of their lifetime. From the United States and Canada to the United Kingdom and Australia - their trips are carefully crafted to show the very best of New Zealand in small groups. 

Their care and dedication to their guests is the most important foundation for achieving success with them. 

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Audience Strategy

One of the greatest strengths of New Zealand Trails is their extremely detailed understanding of their guests. Beyond the data and demographics, it is almost as if New Zealand Trails understands the DNA of their guests. 

This is apparent throughout their business, with Guides trained to take in the little details (just check out their +220 5-star reviews on TripAdvisor).

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Being able to utilise the rich, first-party audience data is critical to the success of these campaigns. The New Zealand Trails sales team actively monitor and use these audiences and segment them into relevant buckets. Combined with automations to feed this into paid platforms, this made our audience targeting even more high-quality and relevant to the market and stage in the booking journey. 

We were then able to incorporate this into our audience and messaging strategy, using these segments for lookalike and steps in the retargeting funnel alongside other digital signals.

Additionally, reading weekly reports of both qualified and disqualified leads provided real world results around how our campaigns were performing. The open communication between New Zealand Trails and Aro allowed us to work on weaker markets and celebrate the success of high-performing campaigns.

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Market-Led Approach

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The first central approach across all our creative and targeting was to focus in on audiences at a country level. With guidance and insight from the New Zealand Trails team we were able to understand: 

• Common guest concerns (for example, their ability to do a trail and the fitness level required)
• The country and often regional makeup of different trips (Americans love a Grand Explorer)
• The nuances in what these different trips provide for these groups (those on the Kiwi Classic want a bit more independence, they want banter with their guides)
• And more

The majority of our campaigns were structured by country, with creative tailored to audiences within the country and further refined by what stage in the journey they were at.

This market-based approach set good foundations and helped to lift the number of monthly qualified leads on average by 85 each month. But there was still more to improve on, which led to our next audience approach. 

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Audience Interest Approach 

The evolution of the market-led approach was to segment further based on key interest groups that book with New Zealand Trails. These include Solo-Travellers and Women who have their own unique concerns and needs as a group. 

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We were able to consolidate secondary markets into one campaign, keeping the United States separate to optimise the budget and increase the efficiency of results. We saw great results with an extra 158 qualified leads a month coming through since launching this approach. 

Additionally, we were able to speak to these groups in a way were they were represented and celebrated. Our objective was to make sure they felt seen and empowered as readings suggest that our target market is often underrepresented in tourism (1). 

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The Takeaways

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If you haven’t guessed it yet, the audience is the critical success factor. If you’re looking to improve your audience targeting and approaches, here’s your shopping list for campaign success: 

• Segmented, regularly cleaned first-party lists that connect with your paid platforms. 
• A rich understanding of your customers
• Audience-led creative

We are incredibly proud of the results we have been able to achieve with New Zealand Trails and the fantastic, collaborative working relationship we have with them. 

Some highlights we just have to shout out include a: 

• 94% increase in the volume of qualified leads year on year (May 2023 to May 2024). 
• 82% increase year on year in qualified leads for the key USA market, with even more substantial increases for their Canadian market (519% increase) and United Kingdom market (427% increase) (May 2023 to May 2024). 
• The lead-to-booking rate has decreased with a significant increase in the number and frequency of zero days to book.