Selling a city on how it feels.
A city has nothing to hand you, so we sold how it feels: a website shaped by what social told us, creators picked by audience, and paid social behind the posts that worked. Social following up 23% in a year, against an industry average of 3.5%.
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Work our team led before Marigo existed. Not a Marigo client.
Updated
- Social following in a year
- +23%
- Website sessions, 2.30m to 3.96m
- +72%
- Positive perception of the city
- +10 pts
The job
A city tourism board has no product to hand you. It sells how a place feels, to visitors from Northern Ireland, Ireland, Great Britain and further afield. And those visitors had moved. 89% of Gen Z find new destinations on TikTok (Pion, 2026), and 40% of 21 to 44 year olds go to TikTok or Instagram before Google (Google, 2026).
Where the idea came from
57% of people pick places that feel like them (TUI Musement, 2026). Social is one of the few channels left that can make you feel something. When Dolly Parton died in August, thousands of people were grieving together on Instagram, strangers feeling the same thing at the same time. If the city could make people feel something about it on social, they’d come and feel it in person.
What we did
- The website first. Everything social was telling us went into a new site, launched August 2025: content you can save and share, creators and visitors showing the city, and pages that adapt to what you look at.
- Our own channels. We scrapped content pillars for three tiers: campfires, bonfires and fireworks. One bonfire, a comedy series with a local creator and his mum, has had 1.5m views, 120k interactions and more than 8,000 itineraries saved.
- Creators. Long-term partners, picked by who listens to them rather than follower count. Once a quarter they sat round one table with us: our plans on it, their read of the city back. Themes, not scripts.
- Paid. Always-on paid social behind the best-performing posts, monthly ads to What’s On and the planning pages, and constant testing of hooks and landing pages. If the data said change it, we changed it.
What didn’t work
- Chasing trends that didn’t fit the city. Now we only use the ones that do.
- Posting creator content on our own account first. It got poor views. Posting it as a collaboration fixed that.
- Polish over feeling. Our most produced content was often the flattest. Phone-shot and honest beat it.
What happened
- Social following up 23% in a year. The industry average is 3.5% (Sprout Social), so more than 6 times that.
- Website sessions up 72%, from 2.30m to 3.96m. Engagement rate up from 43% to 52%. 3 in 4 sessions on a phone.
- 542k branded search clicks, and more than 300k itineraries shared.
- Positive perception of the city up 10 points in a year, to 58%, with negatives nearly halved. Likelihood to visit in the next 2 years up 9 points. (The board’s own research: two survey waves a year across Northern Ireland, Ireland and Great Britain.)
- One campaign week: 10m views, 8,000 new followers, 210k website users and 10,000 unprompted mentions.
Not bad for a place with nothing to put in your basket.