Case Study:
Switzerland Tourism
Adventure content creation
A long-term partnership with Switzerland Tourism to create adventure content and promote three stunning regions to our engaged outdoor audience.
This is an ongoing partnership with new content being released throughout 2024 and 2025. However this report focuses on 2023 production.
The Client
Situated in the heart of Europe, Switzerland is famous for its breathtaking scenery, with impressive mountains, deep Alpine lakes, and lush green valleys attracting adventurous individuals all year round.
Switzerland Tourism approached us with a brief to extend our long-term partnership, during which we would create high-quality visual and written content to help them promote the Bernese Oberland, Valais, and Alpes vaudoises regions.
Our Approach
With so much ground to cover, we split the content creation into two campaigns: summer 2023 and winter 2023. For the summer campaign, we organised a 12-day shoot involving trail running, hiking, kayaking, mountain biking, and much more to showcase the variety of activities on offer within the Bernese Oberland, Valais, and Alpes vaudoises regions.
Summer 2023
The Shoot
Following an extensive pre-production process, the team on location included athletes Jenny Tough, Ebba Forsgren, and Jess Clark, as well as filmmakers Summit Fever Media, and photographers Grace Taylorson Smith Pritchard, Sam Dugon, and Rachel Keenen – all overseen by Sidetracked’s Creative Director, John Summerton.
Multi-channel Content Distribution
Online
We produced a series of feature stories and destination guides and created a dedicated online hub on Sidetracked’s website for each region. Our athletes wrote character-led feature stories in true Sidetracked style, and Sidetracked produced the destination guides in partnership with Switzerland Tourism.
Promotion
In addition to extensive organic social media promotion, we ran a paid media campaign on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube to drive traffic to the online hubs, and continuously monitored the ads to identify the best-performing channels, content, and target travel audiences.
Each content creator shared organic posts and stories on their personal pages and engaged with their audiences about the destinations. We also shared the content across Sidetracked’s Instagram and Facebook pages and extensively through our Field Journal newsletter.
The social posts received positive engagement as people reminisced about their adventures, commented on the beautiful landscapes, and planned trips to the promoted destinations with friends and family.
Video
We created four athelete-led videos on YouTube to showcase our adventures within the Interlaken, Jungfrau, Valais, and Alpes vaudoises regions, and targeted the promotion to a tailor-made audience of adventure travellers.
Competition
To increase audience participation and engagement, we set up, managed, and promoted a competition to win a trip to each region on our social media networks and amongst attendees of the Sidetracked Creators Tour. The total number of opted-in entries exceeded 3,000.
Print
To reach our print audience, we created a 44-page supplement to distribute with Sidetracked magazine Volume 27 (June 2023) and on our Sidetracked Creator’s Tour. Complimentary copies were also printed and supplied to the regions.
Sidetracked Creators Tour
We included Switzerland Tourism as a prominent partner in the Sidetracked Live 10-date UK tour. As part of this activation, Switzerland Tourism received prominent branding within tour promotional material, consistent mentions when promoting the tour on social and within our newsletter, verbal endorsement during the events, a film screening of an edited version of the videos, and promotion of the competition throughout.
Winter 2023
The Shoot
For winter 2023, we followed a similar model, organising and producing a four-day shoot focused on activities within the Jungfrau Region and Interlaken. We created a character-led feature story and detailed destination guide hosted within the Bernese Oberland online hub. We also included a six-page feature within Sidetracked magazine Volume 28 (released in October).
The Results
This year-long partnership with Switzerland Tourism enabled us to showcase what’s possible within the regions as the seasons change. We created stunning visual and written content that connected with our readers on an emotional level, and engaged with our audience at every touch point – from online to print, across social media, and in person.
Our total reach for the content exceeded an audience of 850,000 – 70 per cent above our target. Our total article reads surpassed 25,000 with an average reading time of over two minutes – 40 per cent above our target KPI. On average, people spent over two minutes watching the videos and viewed nearly three quarters of each video with a total of 163,000 views on YouTube alone.
You can view the on-going campaign via the Switzerland hub on our website: sidetracked.com/switzerland/
Print magazines are at the heart of Sidetracked. Outside of our tri-annual magazine, we take on a limited number of bespoke projects. If you would like to see your brand story in print – from single-page cards, supplements, and books to bespoke magazines involving editorial, design, and print management, please get in touch and we can make it happen.