www.figarodigital.co.uk
CLIENT CASE STUDIES
Custom Travel
Visit Cornwall worked with digital agency Nameless to create an award-winning destination site which enables users to customise their browsing experience. In an in-depth case study, Digital Marketing Manager Lauren Hogan explains how the personal touch delivered success
“W
hen I joined Visit Cornwall,” says Lauren Hogan, Digital Marketing Manager at the
guide, “I was very much of the opinion that unless destination and Tourist Board websites start to think about the future and what customers really need, then eventually they’d just become irrelevant.” Visit Cornwall’s work to relaunch
visitcornwall.com, which receives 1.5 million visitors a year, was undertaken with Bristol digital agency Nameless, and has blazed a trail in the busy leisure and tourism sector, transforming what was previously a static online brochure into a dynamic, personalised destination site. At the heart of the project lies an increased focus on customer service. And underpinning the customer service offering is a new emphasis on customisation. So how was the new site conceived, and what makes it such an innovative proposition? “One of the biggest challenges we have is that Cornwall has such a wide appeal,” says Hogan. “Destination websites can tend to be a bit bland because they’re trying to target too many customers. It can be a marketer’s nightmare in that respect. You don’t want to exclude anyone so you can’t be too targeted. But by trying to meet the needs of everyone, you can create a slightly unhelpful site. One of the key things in the brief we put to Nameless was that we wanted to create a website which pitched the right products to the right customers. We wanted people to get to what they needed as quickly as possible.” Central in achieving that goal was a new focus on personalisation. “Another thing that can happen with destination sites,” says Hogan, “is they focus too much on suppliers. We might have a thousand products on our site, from B&Bs to hotels, but we wanted to make sure the customer could block out anything that wasn’t relevant to them. In actual fact, focusing on customer requirements is
the best way for us to increase business to the suppliers advertising on the website.” What that meant in practice was the creation of a
‘customise your visit’ tool, which sits at the top of the site’s
opening up the tool,” says Hogan. “There they can tell the site who they’re travelling with or if they’re coming with children. They can let us know if they have access needs or even if they’re bringing their dog. Once the site registers those relevant. So, if you’re travelling with children, the site won’t provide you with events or venues where children aren’t welcome. Then you can specify the ages of your children, because someone with pre-school kids will have different requirements to those travelling with teenagers. “Secondly, Cornwall’s a big place, so you can specify where
you’re staying. If you’re in St Ives, for example, you may not want to be driving all the way up to Bude for a restaurant, as it’s two hours away. The third level, and this is key for us, is to do with booking. People often book at the last minute because they’re waiting for prices to drop. But they’re doing their research six months in advance. What that means for us as a destination website is that we need to keep our homepage looking very dynamic. It has to be current and on that homepage in January and be researching a visit in July. The customise tool lets you specify the time of year at which you’ll be travelling. Once that’s supplied the site only presents information relevant to your stay. Everything on the needs. That was a real achievement for us.” Unsurprisingly, the project was not without its challenges. “We had to revisit the taxonomy,” says Hogan, “which was
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