Service
Campaign Strategy & Execution
Scope
Strategy · Partnerships · Social
Year
2021
Result
Victorians choosing Victoria
↘ The brief
Stay Close, Go Further launched in November 2020, the week Melbourne came out of the world's longest COVID lockdown.
The insight behind it was simple and slightly uncomfortable: 55% of Melburnians hadn't taken an overnight trip to regional Victoria in the previous eighteen months, despite living within a few hours of the Great Ocean Road, the Grampians, Gippsland and the Yarra Valley.
The job wasn't to convince people Victoria was worth visiting — it was to get people who already agreed with that to actually go.
↘ The approach
Rather than one creative burst and done, Stay Close, Go Further ran as an ongoing, rotating program — a fresh wave built around a different Victorian region every few months: the Great Ocean Road ("Welcome to Greatopia"), the Grampians, Geelong and the Bellarine, Gippsland, and the High Country, each with its own creative, its own paid media schedule and its own performance review.
Every wave paired region-specific video and social content with an always-on paid push across traffic, lead generation and video placements, built on a drive-market strategy Visit Victoria had already proven worked — an earlier iteration of the same approach ("Your Happy Space," 2018–19) had been independently tracked and shown regional travel among Melburnians rising from 24% to 29% over its campaign period.
↘ The outcome
Most government recovery campaigns get a single three-to-six month burst before funding and attention move elsewhere. Stay Close, Go Further held its budget and performance discipline for the better part of two years, continuously refreshing its creative region by region rather than fading out, and was recognised for it — shortlisted at the 2022 Mumbrella Travel Marketing Awards for Best Use of Native or Content Marketing and Breakthrough Destination of the Year.
It also proved out an approach Visit Victoria had bet on before: an earlier version of the same drive-market strategy ("Your Happy Space," 2018–19) had already lifted regional travel among Melburnians from 24% to 29%, so this wasn't a first attempt — it was that same strategy validated at a larger scale, for longer.
Result
Victorians choosing Victoria
Across its 2020 launch and 2021 second phase, the campaign drove over 460,000 clicks through to regional trip content and more than 2.1 million completed video views, reaching a combined 32.8 million social impressions.
Regional Victoria was never a hard sell. It just needed to stay in front of the same lockdown-weary Melburnians long enough for a "someday" trip to become a booked one.