We are partnering with the City of Aiken to shape its tourism future with a new website, commercial content, and seasonal digital campaigns.
A Historic
Brand Refresh
The strategy celebrates Aiken’s legacy as a genteel Southern town, while gracefully ushering it into the future. The visitor-facing logo refresh streamlines its elegance and simplicity, helping Aiken tell an old story with a contemporary twist.
Content & Website
Informed by market research, our new visitor personas drove the casting and creation of high-end video and photography content. And a new destination website was created to receive the traffic driven traffic through programmatic display ad campaigns.
Video
Production
The commercials highlight Aiken’s unique character, leisurely culture, and timeless Southern charm.
Community Engagement
As always, our process involved listening to the ideas and concerns of the local community, government leaders, and tourism stakeholders, resulting in the brand achieving full buy-in and support from Council.
Destination by Design partnered with the City of Aiken to create a refreshed brand identity and campaign strategy under the “You’re Invited” tagline, leveraging Aiken’s storied Winter Colony history while attracting a new generation of visitors. The project included a streamlined logo refresh, high-end video and photography, seasonal digital campaigns, and a new VisitAikenSC.com destination website built to convert programmatic display advertising into real visitor traffic.
In South Carolina, destination marketing and community branding often work together to help a historic town balance its legacy with a more contemporary appeal. Aiken’s campaign reflects that pairing, using market research and visitor personas to guide casting and content creation, then channeling that content through a refreshed logo and streamlined brand identity that carries Aiken’s genteel Southern character into a modern visual language.
A town with deep historical roots, like Aiken’s celebrated equestrian and Winter Colony heritage, needs a marketing approach that honors that legacy without feeling dated. Aiken’s campaign strikes that balance, pairing commercial video that highlights the city’s leisurely culture and timeless Southern charm with a modern digital strategy, all shaped by community engagement that earned full brand buy-in from city council and local stakeholders.
Destination marketing is the practice of promoting a place to attract visitors through advertising, content, and digital campaigns designed to grow tourism and regional awareness. For Aiken, that meant a full marketing agency partnership covering brand strategy, visual identity, video and photography production, and web design, all built to introduce Aiken’s rich equestrian heritage to a new era of travelers.
Aiken sits in western South Carolina near the Georgia border, long known for its equestrian heritage and its history as a Winter Colony retreat for wealthy Northerners escaping the cold. That legacy of leisure and horse culture remains central to the city’s modern identity, giving the “You’re Invited to Aiken” campaign its foundation of genteel Southern charm.
