Our Work

Sierra Leone had the product — Atlantic surf beaches, rainforest, chimpanzees, a capital with genuine character — and almost no digital footprint to carry it. Search results reflected an old news cycle rather than anything a holidaymaker might act on. The board did not need a campaign. It needed infrastructure.

We built the national tourism website in a matter of months, with linked microsites for individual campaigns, then treated it as a publishing operation rather than a brochure: on-page and off-page SEO, and a sustained editorial programme that is still running today. We set up and now run the board’s social channels. And we brought in creators to supply the independent voices a new destination cannot generate for itself. Alongside the public site, we built the board a stakeholder management and operator licensing platform — the unglamorous half of a national tourism authority’s job.

Organic traffic grew by an order of magnitude, and search positions climbed steadily with the publishing volume. The social programme lifted brand reach into the millions and made Sierra Leone one of the most visible destinations in the region online. The creator campaigns produced a substantial library of articles and video — content the board still owns and still uses.

At the start of 2018, a country that is roughly eighty per cent rainforest was, digitally, a blank page. There was next to no independent content about Guyana on blogs or third-party social channels, and no inbound links to the tourism website from credible sources — which is a polite way of saying Google had no reason to rank it. Awareness was the visible problem. Authority was the real one.

Two familiarisation programmes — one hard adventure, one soft — with leading adventure creators from North America and Europe. Kaieteur Falls, the Rupununi savannah, ATVs, hammocks, cattle ranches, the Essequibo. Alongside the trips we produced and syndicated a body of articles in partnership with established travel bloggers, chosen deliberately for the strength of the link rather than the size of the audience alone. Then we built a Spotlight on Guyana hub to keep all of it in one place, findable, long after the posts had scrolled off the front pages.

The campaign reached millions of users and generated tens of thousands of interactions across platforms — but the part the board cared about most came afterwards. Referral traffic to the Guyana Tourism website more than quadrupled. The site’s domain authority increased sevenfold. The Spotlight hub became the single largest source of organic traffic both to the creators’ posts and to the authority’s own site. And when the campaign ended, mentions and reach did not fall back to where they had started — the baseline had moved.

A British January in the middle of a lockdown. Nobody could go anywhere, and the whole travel category had gone quiet on the theory that there was no point advertising a holiday people were legally unable to take. The German National Tourist Board had launched a voice-assistant planning tool, and wanted UK audiences to keep Germany in mind for a trip they could not yet book.

A group of UK creators each built the German road trip they intended to take the moment they were allowed to. Long-form itineraries rather than pretty pictures: the Rhine, the Alps, forest hikes, beer gardens, historic cities. Short-form video showed the planning tool actually doing the planning. We then built Germany: Simply Inspiring, a hub curating the strongest Germany writing by leading creators, and amplified it into the UK market.

Engagement ran at several times the rate destination content normally earns, from an audience that had time on its hands and nowhere to be. The hub drew tens of thousands of visitors, and the articles it carried drew more visits still. Most telling was the reading time: comfortably above the site average, and concentrated in a handful of British cities. Not idle browsing. People planning.

Samoa wanted awareness among British travellers. Samoa is also about as far from Britain as it is possible to get, and the budget would not stretch to flying a group of UK creators to the other side of the planet and back.

We recommended British creators already based in Australia. Same accent, same reference points, same audience — a fraction of the flight cost and a fraction of the carbon footprint. They travelled to Samoa for a familiarisation programme covering the beaches, the interior and, more usefully, the people. Afterwards we built a Spotlight on Samoa microsite gathering both the new content and everything about Samoa we had previously indexed, and promoted it into the UK and US.

The hashtag reached millions of impressions and tens of thousands of mentions. The microsite drew a substantial audience over the months that followed and passed a meaningful share of it on to the Samoa Tourism website — visitors the board had not paid for twice.

Jamaica’s north coast has a food culture that gets quietly overshadowed by its beaches. The board wanted the culinary story around Montego Bay told properly, and it wanted it told in four days.

Travel and food creators from the United States and the United Kingdom, on a programme built entirely around where to eat — jerk pits, roadside stalls, the places locals defend. We ran it live, with an Instagram takeover of the board’s own account so the feed carried a real person’s voice rather than a schedule, and a Spotlight on Jamaica page to catch the articles as they landed.

Over a million impressions for the campaign hashtag, and a comment volume far beyond what a destination post usually attracts — the majority of it people asking where a particular place was, or arguing with each other about who does the best jerk chicken. The Spotlight page added a further substantial audience on top of the creators’ own reach, and the takeover delivered a marked rise in the board’s Instagram following.

Kerala Blog Express is one of the most ambitious creator programmes any tourism board runs. Going into a new season, applications had softened and questions were circulating in the blogging community that nobody had yet answered. This was not a reach problem. Reach would have made it worse.

We did not buy impressions. We went to the people who had actually been. We produced a testimonial film that answered the questions creators were really asking rather than the ones the brochure answered, then approached opinion leaders among previous participants and asked them to publish it and engage the doubters directly, in public. We used our own channels to field the rest.

Former participants became the campaign. The questions were answered by the only people with standing to answer them, and the tone of the conversation turned within weeks. The campaign hashtag generated millions of impressions over a single month, and applications recovered comfortably past where the programme needed them to be.

Reach an audience that does not respond to conventional destination marketing, and would not have put Ethiopia on a shortlist if you had asked them to write one: runners.

Creators from the UK, Europe and North America travelled to Addis Ababa to train with the great Haile Gebrselassie and run the Great Ethiopian Run alongside tens of thousands of Ethiopians. They published the training sessions, the pre-run party and the race itself, live. Afterwards, they travelled the country — the highlands, the churches, the coffee — and kept publishing.

Blog posts, video and several hundred social posts reaching an audience in the millions, and a measurable rise in demand for the following year’s race and for country visits around it. The audience arrived because of the run and stayed for the country, which was always the plan.

The Gambia had a new tourism brand identity and a website too small to carry it. The original scope anticipated minor enhancements. It became clear early that minor enhancements to a very small site produce a slightly better very small site, which was not what anybody actually needed. We said so, and the scope changed.

Rebuilt the national tourism website at many times its former scale — destinations, activities, events, accommodation, the practical detail on which a trip is actually planned. Mobile-first, because that is where the audience overwhelmingly is, and restructured so the navigation answers the only two questions a visitor has: what is there, and how do I go. Clean URLs, structured headings, real metadata and alt text throughout, on a platform that can take bookings and a second language later without starting again.

Then the off-page work, which is the part nobody photographs. We placed a captioned, keyword-tagged image library across the major open photography platforms — partly for the inbound links, partly so that a journalist or tour operator writing about The Gambia has decent pictures to hand instead of whatever turns up first.

Alongside all of it, we spent a year training the Board’s marketing team, in Banjul and online, on everything from do-follow links to structuring creator fee agreements.

The site went live at many times the scale it had before, built to be found rather than merely admired, and with a team inside the Board who can run it. The image libraries continue to generate links and supply the trade with usable visuals long after the project has closed — evergreen assets rather than campaign assets.