Compelling campaigns that make history come alive.
The Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, and it's living museums, are located in the Historic Triangle in Williamsburg, Virginia. Through actor portrayals and historically accurate reproductions, visitors are able to experience first-hand how the early settlers and Indigenous people established their communities, ways of life, and more.
As a longtime client of Ciniva, our team has been responsible for campaign creation, launch and management, website design, development, digital marketing, social media marketing, and SEO strategy. With some of our recent work, a few projects of notoriety have been the Tenacity campaign, History at Home (during COVID shutdowns), and FOCUSED: A Century of Virginia Indian Resilience exhibition campaign.
Communicating tenacity without sacrificing historical integrity
This exhibition was a deep dive into the lives of three extraordinary women and their journey in the early days of colonization. In order to accurately measure our marketing efforts, we suggested the development of a microsite featuring videos, information and resources about the exhibition. This would firstly act as a universal landing page for potential visitors, but it would also allow us the freedom to develop brand new visuals for the entire campaign.
Advancing the campaign through new marketing tools
Museum visitors, day-trippers, weekend warriors, and history buffs all use mobile devices. We built the destination website but now we needed to get traffic. Facebook instant experience ads, Instagram story ads, and mobile-focused programmatic advertising grabbed users attention, especially on mobile devices. Facebook and Instagram experiential ads allowed us to layer in engaging visuals. After earning the first interaction we could prompt users to choose a story to explore.
Building upon past knowledge using similar tools
Using what we learned from the previous campaign, we knew we could gain increased conversions by going with the microsite marketing approach. This led us to creating flexible designs that JYF could deploy quickly and easily for new campaigns. A simple swap of media, copy, and fonts was all that was needed to deploy landing pages for the summer season.
Engaging viewers with new content
Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation keeps their information and exhibitions current by refreshing the topics and stories for their visitors to enjoy. New content and assets are always being sought to be coupled with the new exhibitions, campaigns, events and more. Ciniva assists the team with coordinating assets to prevent audience fatigue and to keep our audience engaged in our ads and purchasing tickets to visit the museums.
History from the comfort of your own home
When Covid hit in Spring of 2020, we helped ensure Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation provided offerings and information to anyone who sought some additional information regarding history while at home. As the decision came to close the Museums, we were prepared to encourage virtual visits through the website to experience history at home. This was thoughtfully accompanied with a vast learning library, video lessons, and more. Our campaigns transitioned to History at Home and we started to see a significant increase in traffic. Engagement on the site and allowed JYF to remain at top-of-mind for anyone looking to explore more about history while at home during Covid.
Preparing for a highly anticipated reopening
Once the museum was able to reopen to the public, Ciniva was able pivot the advertising strategy to encourage the public to return to visit the museums in person. This adjustment focused our audience demographic to potential visitors and locals, selecting them from the wider net that was cast during the height of COVID. This adjustment was able to recapture our audience and drive traffic back to visiting both sites in person.
