Root

PROJECT PURPOSE

Root's mission is to create a more vibrant and inclusive Tulsa by helping people discover the unique and hidden events, places and things to do around Tulsa that make our city culturally diverse. We're a small team working together to manage Tulsa's most comprehensive listing of places and events and publish a daily-updating website (17,000 monthly active users), social media accounts (over 22,000 followers across Instagram, Facebook & Twitter) and a weekly newsletter (over 3,600 subscribers). For this initiative we want to run two marketing campaigns leveraging the Root website: the first ($70,000) is aimed at luring out-of-state visitors to Tulsa County before the end of Q2 2023. Users living in Dallas, Texas make up over 12% of the roottulsa.com audience already, so we want to start by retargeting them with ads prompting them to book an experience in Tulsa, thereby bringing in out-of-state dollars that otherwise wouldn?t have been spent here in the first place. The second marketing campaign ($20,000) will be aimed at local entrepreneurs from low-income populations and/or underserved communities, to encourage them to become experience providers on the roottulsa.com platform.

EVIDENCE

None

POPULATION DESCRIPTION

For the first campaign we will target previous Root site users living in the drive market but outside of the state of Oklahoma, particularly in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, northwest Arkansas and Kansas City. For the second campaign we will target underserved communities in Tulsa County, particularly in north Tulsa and east Tulsa. Rather than sit back and wait for Tulsa entrepreneurs to sign up for our platform, we want to go directly to underserved communities and encourage entrepreneurs there to sign up for our platform first. Primarily, our campaign will accelerate tourism to Tulsa, which as an industry, was broadsided by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Tulsa destinations including theaters, museums, restaurants, bars and concert venues shut down, and a few never reopened. Our goal is to bring in out-of-state foot traffic to these destinations that otherwise wouldn?t have come through in the first place. Meanwhile, small local businesses and individual entrepreneurs will be able to join the Root business platform and market experience-based services to our site users. So for instance, a local tour operator who lost their job giving guided tours of downtown Tulsa?s unique architecture could make up the lost income by providing the same service to our site users on an on-demand basis.

PERFORMANCE MEASURING

This tourism campaign responds to local needs by investing in Tulsa?s digital equity and by enabling local entrepreneurs to develop new ways means to market tourism services to interested customers. We'll use Google Analytics to monitor our site traffic, as well as Facebook and Google Ads analytics to monitor how the two marketing campaigns perform. Once users on roottulsa.com have booked experiences in Tulsa, we'll be able to follow up with them on an individual basis with surveys to evaluate customer feedback.

ONGOING INVESTMENT AMOUNT

$

ONGOING INVESTMENT DESCRIPTION

None

ONGOING INVESTMENT REQUIRED

Able to continue operation without additional funding from the State of Oklahoma