Curacao Tourist Board's online newsroom visits up 180%

• Referral traffic from the newsroom to main website has increased with over 180%.
• Paid search expenditure has been reduced by 20% due to newsroom success.
• The overall bounce rate has decreased to below 20% (Bounce rate metrics for average website = 40.5%).

We spoke with Angelo Harms, Digital Marketing Manager at Curacao Tourist Board about his role and responsibilities and the results they have achieved by using PressPage to tell the ‘Curacao story.’

Promoting the beautiful destination

Although Curacao is a well known holiday destination, there is always work to be done. Angelo Harms, Digital Marketing Manager at Curacao Tourist Board: “When I started in my current role, we felt like we needed to transition our marketing efforts more towards what the trend is nowadays: digital and inbound marketing.” In his role, he is responsible for the overall awareness of the location online, inbound traffic, social media, SEO, and content marketing. Along with their local office, Curacao Tourist Board also has overseas offices in The Netherlands, Germany, Brazil, Australia, United States, and Canada. While the global strategy is created in the head office in Curacao, each individual office is responsible for creating tactics to best execute this strategy in their particular region.

The primary focus of their Marketing and Public Relations efforts is branding and awareness of the holiday destination. By creating individual campaigns for the regions, they try to reach their target audience: people within the age of 25 to 65, middle to upper income and in their target markets. Harms explains: “For example, in June we have set up a storytelling campaign, encouraging people who have visited Curacao to share their story. We hope to generate curiosity and desire among people who are thinking about visiting Curacao.” Every campaign uses the channels that suit the topic and the target audience best. For example, currently, they are targeting people in Chicago via a mobile campaign.

A home for their stories

Before Curacao Tourist Board was using PressPage, they were already publishing content via social media. However, this was content from sources other than their own, therefore it did not link back to their website. Because their audience was not visiting their website, they would often miss out on valuable information about Curacao. Harms explains that “during a social media event in Chicago, I got in touch with PressPage. After the demo, I was convinced. In particular, the SEO options and storytelling features captured my attention. When I saw the logos of their other clients on their website, we definitely knew PressPage was a good fit for us.”

From that point on, the whole process went quite fast. Harms worked on the procurement together with his IT colleague and the PressPage team. “It all went well. Some things took a little longer than expected but that was due to the two different platforms we were working on.” All in all, the whole implementation process went faster than they anticipated.

With PressPage, they now have a good content home that allows them to publish their stories to an even wider audience. “Publishing stories is really easy – the platform is extremely user-friendly. You just copy-paste your text into a release in the newsroom.” When they ran into some problems with their social channels (due to the transition from their Facebook account into a business account), one call with their Customer Success Manager at PressPage was enough to fix the problem.

More traffic and less costs

Looking at the total picture and comparing it to the situation before, Curacao Tourist Board has achieved some tremendous results. Since they started using PressPage, their referral traffic from the newsroom to their website has increased more than 100%. Harms says, “something that we are really proud of is that the newsroom appears as number 7 in our top 10 list of traffic sources. I am more than happy with that.”

Some other results:

What’s next to come?

Promoting the experiences of visitors to the island is something that Curacao Tourist Board is eager to do. Harms says, “we are about to launch an experience tourism campaign. We plan to share videos of visitors recounting their experiences in Curacao.” The PressPage platform enables them to tell these stories while driving inbound traffic back to their website.