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Overview

The Utah Office of Tourism (UOT) is excited to share the finalized campaign plan summary for Northern Utah+ in 2022. 

Northern Utah is an expansive geographical region that combines Utah’s metropolitan Wasatch Front with a diverse mix of landscapes, outdoor recreation and cultural experiences across the West Desert, the top and northeastern parts of the state and portions of Central Utah. Northern Utah is the arts and cultural hub of the state and a place that celebrates its diversity. As an outdoor recreation destination, it also offers access to well-traveled spaces and lesser-visited landscapes alike, both necessitating Forever Mighty responsible planning and understanding.

For those familiar with our previous campaign designations, Northern Utah+ combines the Urban campaign, introduced in 2017, and the more recent Statewide campaign (which was everything but Ski and Southern Utah) to remove confusion around the term “statewide.” FY22’s marketing and storytelling advance many of the goals established in previous years with proven tactics to help ensure momentum and bookings for Northern Utah through the distribution of content and creative.

Northern Utah+ locations are integrated with the rest of the state through drive-market access as well as flight-market access via Salt Lake City International Airport. Itineraries often highlight “metro to mountain” and “metro to basin” accessibility or showcase Wasatch Front cities as additional basecamps before or after Southern Utah trips to extend stays.

Our goal in sharing this information across Utah’s tourism industry is to both inform and encourage partners to identify ways to align their own efforts with this strategy. Learn more about campaign specifics below.

Budget

In the April 1st meeting of the Board of Tourism Development, a motion was passed to approve the 2021-2022 Fiscal Year $820k budget for the Northern Utah+ campaign. For the first time, this campaign will include Connected TV as well as Native Content distribution. This offers the advantage of increased reach, targeting and trackability. 

Campaign Strategy

Some key strategy updates will build on past successes and enable the team to achieve our goals, which are: 

1. Increase awareness of Northern Utah’s product offerings in alignment with audience travel motivators by driving engagement with Northern Utah content and messages.
2. Proportionally distribute visitation by responsibly promoting unique Utah product and cultural offerings, i.e. Dark Skies and our local communities.
3. Increase Utah’s brand reputation as a diverse and welcoming destination.
4. Create awareness of Utah’s Leave No Trace Seven Principles among prospective visitors. 

• Travelers who are drawn to cities and those who want the comfort and resources of home within a wider Utah outdoor adventure. 
• Travelers from nearby drive markets who see the Wasatch Front as their closest destination for urban offerings. 
• Film buffs who have shown an interest in visiting film locations while on vacation. 
• Those planning a family vacation.

Flight Dates

The campaign launched on April 4th, 2022 and continues through the end of June 2022. 

Creative and Content

Kicking off the campaign will be a roster of native articles with geographical and cultural breadth. Stories from Logan to Uintah County and Ogden to Provo will cover historic downtowns, access to outdoor recreation, local food and agriculture, indigenous voices, dark skies and more. 

One of the video assets used on Connected TV (CTV) this spring will be a new film featuring Northern Utah outdoor recreation called Rise. 

UOT’s content team is overseeing the creation of an additional CTV spot that will pair city and culture imagery and messaging with the outdoor recreation focus of Rise. This additional spot, called Proximity, will adapt existing long-form video storytelling from the Wasatch Front and showcase the relationship between the metropolitan art, culture, music and dining scene and the easy access to nature. 

The CTV spots will direct viewers to visitutah.com/northern and visitutah.com/city, complementary landing pages designed to build an identity around the state’s northern geography and metropolitan offerings, respectively. Both landing pages illustrate the urban interface with nature and rural destinations to help visitors build itineraries around the full range of experiences that define the region.

An additional flight of paid social will accompany the campaign, emphasizing key landing pages and responsible travel. Public relations, paid search and organic social teams are continuing to pitch key storylines, target and capture search intent and maintain the conversation through their respective channels. Be sure to follow our social media accounts @visitutah, subscribe to our YouTube channel and watch for additional newsletters highlighting new content soon.