Building a Regional Tourism Brand from the Ground Up
A brand that did not exist in 2023 was reaching tens of thousands of potential visitors within weeks of the first media flight.
Performed above the industry benchmark range across both the spring and fall campaign windows. Highest-converting keyword: "Oklahoma tourist attractions."
Paid media drove the initial volume. Organic search and social engagement followed, building a traffic base that persisted between campaign flights.
Rogers County, Oklahoma, is home to eight distinct communities, each with its own character, history, and civic identity. Collectively, they represent a compelling regional tourism destination. Without a unifying brand, a shared digital presence, or a coordinated marketing strategy, they were invisible to the audiences most likely to visit.
A newly formed interlocal cooperative brought these communities together with a mandate to build something from nothing: a tourism brand capable of drawing visitors to the region and sustaining that draw over time. Naming, visual identity, stakeholder alignment, web infrastructure, and paid media strategy all needed to be built concurrently and launched with enough institutional weight to be credible from day one.
Stakeholder research across all eight communities surfaced a destination with genuine depth: Route 66 heritage, lakeside recreation, agricultural character, historic downtowns, and cultural identity that most potential visitors had never encountered. The opportunity was to organize that range under a single, ownable idea and put it in front of the right audiences with enough media weight to drive real behavioral change.
AcrobatAnt led primary audience research to ground the strategy in evidence before a single creative decision was made. We commissioned a formal tourism market study of 500 regional travelers within a 300-mile radius of Rogers County, which surfaced the motivational drivers, activity preferences, and information channels that move this audience.
Emotion drives regional travel more than any specific attraction. Families with children are the highest-propensity travel segment. Word of mouth and social media are the dominant discovery channels. Cost-effectiveness is a significant deciding factor across most segments. This research informed every layer of the work: naming, messaging architecture, media channel selection, and creative strategy.
Creative themes were built around the three entry points that resonated most with the target traveler: history and culture, outdoor experience, and family-oriented discovery. Campaign messaging—including “Where history, culture, community, and nature meet” and the “Memories made here” platform—was designed to align with the values that drive regional travel decisions. Paid search keyword performance validated this alignment directly: “Oklahoma tourist attractions” and “route 66 attractions” were among the highest-converting terms in the campaign, confirming that the brand’s positioning matched active search intent.
Getting eight municipalities to share a brand is a governance challenge as much as a creative one. The research and naming process was designed to give each community genuine ownership of the identity rather than the perception of being subsumed by a county-level brand. The result was a cooperative that could function as a single destination marketing entity from day one.
The brand launched publicly in December 2023 with a press event featuring the lieutenant governor of Oklahoma and other state officials. That event positioned Discover Rogers County as an economic development initiative with state-level backing, not a local promotional effort. It built immediate credibility with tourism partners, hospitality operators, and regional media.
Influencer strategy extended community reach across multiple activations. An OKC radio DJ made verified visits to the county, posted authentically on his own social channels, and recorded unique spots for each day of the radio flight, all of which produced a measurable lift in website traffic from the Oklahoma City market. A separate social influencer campaign targeted families in the OKC area across Instagram and Facebook, generating more than 400,000 impressions, an 8.68% engagement rate, and content shared hundreds of times. Commenter sentiment was 99% positive, with a consistent theme of “I had no idea Rogers County existed—I need to go.” This response is the definition of community being built.
The media plan was developed concurrently with the website, structured in phases to allow board approval at each stage and real-time optimization as performance data accumulated. Paid search launched February 1, 2024. The full base plan was live by February 15. The website itself was built to convert: flexible content architecture, an integrated Claremore event feed to minimize duplicate data entry, an interactive county map, and an AI-powered chatbot to answer visitor questions in real time.
Creative performance was monitored continuously across the flight. High-performing units were scaled; underperforming creative was rotated out to prevent fatigue. The “More to Explore” and “Memories made here” formats consistently outperformed other creative in the spring window. This signal carried directly into fall campaign planning.
Lower funnel — active intent
CTR performed above the industry benchmark in both the spring and fall campaign windows. Highest-converting keyword: "Oklahoma tourist attractions."
Upper funnel — awareness and retargeting
More than 1 million Meta impressions at a CTR well above the industry benchmark. More than 2 million display impressions for retargeting.
Awareness — audio reach
Hundreds of thousands of Spotify impressions. 97% of ads played to at least 75% completion. OKC radio flight drove measurable website traffic lift from the Oklahoma City market.
