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.