| dc.description.abstract | Customer engagement is repeated interactions between customers and organizations (Hollebeek, Glynn & Brodie, 2014). Content marketing is an essential element of digital marketing strategy (Hollebeek & Macky, 2018, p. 27) with the main objective of creating content that adds value to the audience’s life and creates long-term engagement (Baltes, 2015). This is particularly important within tourism as the focus is to maintain a long-term relationship with the consumers. There has been much research conducted about what customer engagement is and different types of engagement. However, research into how content marketing in social media can generate engagement is rare. Thus, this dissertation aims to identify which content messaging on Visit Norway’s Instagram account generates engagement, and if the national tourism strategy is being reflected in the content. In order to achieve this aim netnography, which is a qualitative research method, has been applied. Furthermore, data in the form of comments and likes for this dissertation was collected from content (i.e., pictures and reels) posted on the Instagram account of Visit Norway. The findings suggested that Visit Norway has been using three messaging themes on their Instagram account: rational, emotional, and unclear content messaging. Unclear content messaging generates the least engagement, whereas the combination of rational and emotional messaging generates the most. Conversely, if the unclear messaging is combined with an emotional picture or reel, it could create high engagement due to the emotional aspect within the engagement construct. Secondly, the combination of rational and emotional messaging generates the highest ‘advocacy’ engagement. The same applies to posts with nature and adventure content characteristics. Moreover, city content, train journeys, and other content that present Norway’s unique nature (northern lights), lifestyle (ice bathing), and culture (trolls) are all among those content characteristics that generate an engagement higher than the average for that month, which in this dissertation, is considered as high engagement. Lastly, a limited number of strategy posts on Visit Norway’s Instagram account is evident, starting from June 2022. Nevertheless, the number of related posts has been increasing from a 12.7% to a 37.2% in March 2023. These posts encompass a rational or unclear content messaging, lacking the emotional aspect which could be the key to gaining higher engagement. | |
