CASE STUDY

Port of Vancouver USA

Building community awareness for the Port of Vancouver USA

Services: Communications Strategy / Creative Services / Digital Marketing

Opportunity

The Port of Vancouver USA is a major hub for global trade and a hotspot for marine and industrial business in Vancouver, Washington, supporting nearly 20,000 jobs and about $3 billion in local economic impact. Despite this, only 54% of Southwest Washington residents were aware of its work and how it benefits the community. The closed-off nature of the port’s grounds, required for security, and multitude of activities ranging from grain shipping to metalworking and environmental stewardship, made it difficult for residents to understand the port’s impact.

The port hired Quinn Thomas as its community marketing agency to launch a strategic campaign to increase awareness and build positive brand perception locally.

Approach

Quinn Thomas partnered with the Port of Vancouver to develop a highly visual, community-centric campaign focused on three core activities.

First, to showcase the port’s invaluable regional contributions, QT created a new, vibrant sub-brand to distinguish community communications. The new brand leveraged existing secondary colors and reimagined elements of the port’s logo to create a warm, welcoming identity. Campaign messaging was rooted in a new, interchangeable tagline: “[ Songbird habitat ], that’s the Port of Vancouver USA.” The tagline capitalized on the surprise and delight residents typically have once they learn more and provided an opportunity to swap in stories based on audience preference. QT also developed a new campaign landing page designed to capture the attention of a consumer audience.

Second, QT launched multiple comprehensive digital advertising campaigns throughout the year leveraging paid social, video and programmatic. Creative assets were highly visual and interactive, focused on stories of the port, its industrial tenants and employees. Two primary campaigns, the Port Report campaign to promote the port’s annual video update, and the fall community ad campaign, vastly exceeded goals.

To build on paid advertising, QT also led an organic social campaign throughout the year. To do so successfully with a large number of stakeholders, we led monthly content brainstorm sessions to identify in-the-moment stories. Quinn Thomas devised a systematic process to bring together port stakeholders and vendors, curate content, deliver a monthly work plan, and leverage data to test new ideas. This resulted in engagement skyrocketing past industry standard performance metrics.

The Quinn Thomas team has helped us make better connections with our community. We’ve appreciated being able to rely on such a great team to engage audiences in new, exciting ways that we hadn’t tried before.

–Port of Vancouver

The Results

Throughout 2023, our robust approach successfully educated Southwest Washington residents about the benefits their port brings to the region, the diverse activities happening at the port, and increased positive perception of the port’s critical role in the community.

3.6M

Ad views

We led multiple 30-90 day campaigns centered on key events and timely topics throughout the year, served on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, video pre-roll and print advertising.

44.5K

Total ad clicks

We designed ads focused on a variety of topics from cool tenants to environmental practices, to test what the community wanted to learn more about and consistently improve campaign performance.

72k

Organic social engagements

Our organic social campaign highlighted the bold and exciting activities happening at the port through short-form video and photo slideshows, driving a 301% year-over-year increase in engagements.

18k

Organic social clicks

Using the port’s large library of existing photo and visual assets, we supported the implementation of an organic social strategy that drove a 587% year-over-year increase in link clicks.

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