Change the outlet
With paid advertising becoming increasingly competitive and expensive, destination marketing organizations (DMOs) can turn to organic traffic to drive marketing. In this video, Ashley Baer, marketing manager and content creator at Explore Butte County, explains how the DMO used visual stories to increase its visibility on Google, improve its website content, and help local partners to interact with visitors.
CrowdRiff
Northern California’s Butte County, located north of Sacramento, is a destination with a lot to offer: abundant outdoor recreation, wineries and vineyards, gold rush history, museums, and an array of other cultural attractions. As domestic and leisure travel increased when restrictions were lifted last year, the area’s destination marketing organization (DMO), Explore Butte County, wanted to share all its offerings and leverage resources available to travelers in an attractive way.
In August 2021, Chief Marketing Officer Ashley Baer came up with a solution: Explore Butte County partnered with CrowdRiff to use it Location solution for creating stunning visual stories that could be shared and embedded digitally.
Localhood leverages Google Web Story technology, a new short-form visual content channel that Google is investing heavily in, to make the web more visual and engaging. CrowdRiff created Localhood to create Localhood Stories – Google Web Stories designed specifically for destinations.
Web Stories drive organic traffic and look attractive on the first page of Google search results. This is a big help for marketers as traditional digital channels like paid search are becoming more competitive and expensive. The death of third-party cookies, iOS privacy updates, the growing use of ad blockers, and higher advertising costs on social platforms like Facebook and TikTok present new challenges for marketing departments. With Localhood, Baer found a solid option to provide a powerful and affordable boost to their digital marketing efforts.
In this video, he explains how the solution has helped Explore Butte County increase its visibility on Google, improve its website content and cross-pollinate with Visit California, and help local partners better tell their stories.
Increase visibility on Google
Creating content for social channels can be a great way to engage potential travelers, but success often depends on who already follows your DMO on those platforms. Localhood Stories allows users to extend their reach to travelers who use Google, a much larger number than any account’s social followers.
To ensure their Stories performed well on Google, the Explore Butte County team dedicated themselves to understanding the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) opportunity for Stories and implementing best practices. This included putting keywords in the embedded text of each story so Google can crawl it, using a combination of high-quality images and videos, and linking to pages of ExploreButteCounty.com and partner websites to increase backlinks.
These strategies have allowed Butte County to expand the reach of its online content. Within nine months of partnering with Localhood, Explore Butte County created over 100 pieces of content that received over 10 million Google Network impressions and 175,000 total story views.
“In that same period, traffic from Localhood Stories has accounted for 3.5 percent of all traffic to our website, with some months seeing as much as 10 percent of total users referred by Localhood,” he said Baer. “That equates to thousands of additional high-quality website users with some of the lowest bounce rates, the highest number of pages per session and above-average time on site.”
The benefits of Google exposure are many, the most prominent being the additional visibility and discoverability of content that drives organic and reliable traffic, and its affordability and superior ROI compared to paid traffic. Its greater reach allowed Explore Butte County to increase brand awareness quickly.
Improve website content and cross-promote
Localhood Stories help create a more engaging and mobile-friendly website as part of a DMO’s owned media. Baer’s team uses Localhood Stories to enrich the content on ExploreButteCounty.com, with galleries and individual stories embedded on the site. These stories are easy to embed on your website, with no coding required. Visitors can explore each one or scroll for highlights and enjoy the images.
Additionally, Butte County leverages Localhood to work with Visit California to promote each other’s content. County stories have been featured on VisitCalifornia.com, giving Explore Butte County access to the state’s largest DMO audience. The county can also leverage its state partner’s content to enhance its own marketing efforts.
Help local partners better tell their stories
Locality can be a powerful tool for building community relationships, as each story includes an embed code that can be shared with local associations, chambers of commerce, and businesses. These community partners can then use the content to enhance their own outreach at no cost, while further expanding the DMO’s reach and visibility.
With so many other benefits of this marketing tool, the fact that it can also help local organizations improve their marketing seems like the icing on the cake. But that kind of synergy is part of what makes Localhood so effective at generating engagement and excitement for destinations. Baer and Explore Butte County are certainly embracing this new method to create a marketing ecosystem that can benefit the entire region.
visit Location to learn more about how your destination can collaborate with your partners and content creators to share authentic stories that inspire travelers.
This content has been created in collaboration with CrowdRiff and Skift’s branded content studio, SkiftX.
