Campaign Overview

After establishing baseline awareness through a successful digital campaign targeted to meeting and event planners in 2024, the Experience Ruston team began collaborative planning sessions between their marketing and sales teams to considered the core question: "Why choose Ruston for a meeting or event over a larger city?"

When hosting meetings, Experience Ruston regularly calls on strong community relationships to creatively navigate challenges such as limited venue capacity, transportation, and scheduling. Local partners routinely open their doors after hours, customize group tours, coordinate shuttle services, and help build individualized experiences that larger markets can't often match.

This reality inspired the campaign theme: "Small Markets Can Pull Big Strings." Rather than treating Ruston's size as a constraint, the campaign celebrates it as an advantage by emphasizing flexibility, personal service, and authentic community support. The messaging reframes Ruston as a destination where collaboration and hospitality combine to create meaningful, memorable meeting experiences.

Channels

The primary goal of the campaign was to position Ruston as a competitive regional destination for small meetings and conferences by increasing awareness of Ruston and Lincoln Parish, driving stronger engagement with meetings-related content, and generating qualified sales leads.

This was accomplished through a targeted, multi-channel strategy designed to reach meeting planners at key moments in the consideration journey.

Targeted Digital Display

Email Marketing

Social Media Marketing

Creative Examples

Results

1,247 meeting planner guide clicks

220% increase in engagement compared to 2024 campaign

5 qualified sales leads during 2-month campaign duration

Conclusion

Advance Travel and Tourism played a pivotal role in helping Experience Ruston achieve their marketing and sales goals related to meetings and events. Through strategic campaigns on social media, display advertising and email marketing, they achieved impressive results, significantly boosting interest, engagement, and number of leads.

Advance Travel & Tourism truly helped us level up our meeting planner campaign. Building on insights from the previous year, we optimized both messaging and delivery for 2025. From the outset, the team took the time to understand our goals and provided thoughtful insights to help maximize conversions. Their attention to detail and regular check-ins gave us confidence in the campaign’s performance throughout its run. From concept and design to strategy and final reporting, Advance checked every box to help make this a successful and award-winning campaign.

Tori Davis, Experience Ruston

Tori came to us in 2024 with the idea to target small-market meeting and event planners, which marked a new B2B campaign for both of us. We approached the 2024 effort as a baseline campaign, laying the foundation for a second phase in 2025. Thanks to Tori’s collaboration and creative direction, we were able to deliver strong results in 2024. In 2025, we built on those learnings through creative, messaging, and targeting optimizations, while introducing new tactics, including targeted email, to take the campaign to the next level. This campaign is proof of two things: the importance of committing to the process when engaging a new audience, and the value of recognizing your strengths and building on them rather than trying to be something you’re not.

Anna Kaitlyn Berry, Advance Travel & Tourism

Case Study:

Experience Ruston