Myths and Mountains Marketing Case Study
Myths and Mountains is a leading provider for luxury adventure travel. They cater to more affluent travelers looking for custom trips to exotic destinations world-wide. Already a well established brand, our role was to position Myths and Mountains alongside mammoth rivals like GeoEX, REI Adventures and Adventures by Disney.
This Internet marketing case study provides an overview of Myths and Mountain’s complex goals and we set out to achieve them.
Background and Marketing Context
OCG was originally brought in by another search engine marketing firm specializing in PPC advertising like Google AdWords. That agency’s campaigns hit a wall at the conversion level because the website was, well, horrific.
Meanwhile, their ad spend was ridiculous–especially considering the poor user experience provided by the website. So, while the pay-per-click advertising did bring a high volume of website visitors, it did nothing in terms of ROI.
Since, that was the primary (only) driver of traffic to the website, it really was like throwing money out the window. The hard truth was the website was never going to perform well, no matter how great the advertising budget.
Marketing Goals and Challenges
Marketing goals for Myths and Mountains centered around online lead generation. We did have a role nurturing repeat business, but survival, let alone growth, depended on attracting new, high-end, adventure travelers.
While the poorly designed website was clearly a problem, it was by no means the biggest challenge. The biggest challenge was marketing a travel agency of this type against the world’s bet known brands. Myths and Mountains is well-known in luxury adventure travel. The company has a decades-old reputation for being a top tour provider among industry leaders. Still, the likes of Disney and National Geographic are household names.
It would be impossible to compete head-on with any of top-tier rivals. We’d have to carve out a growing base by bolstering interest in destinations where Myths and Mountains had a clear advantage—both in local expertise and personal relationships nurtured over many years.
The Competitive Landscape
As mentioned, Myths and Mountains is in direct competition with the biggest names in adventure travel. In the old days of Yellow Pages advertising, the rule was that you had to take out an ad at least as big as your largest competitor. In website terms, that means your website has to be at least as cool as that same competitor—and just as visible.
With that in mind, our first job was to figure out, not only who, but what we were going to have to compete with. We began by conducting a few simple searches like any other Google user. Once we had a sense of who shows up in various keyword combinations, we used a range of research tools to find out what the competing companies are actually doing.
In this case, it’s all big names—National Geographic, Lonely Planet, REI… They have lots of resources, tons of clout, and they know what they’re doing when it comes to designing marketing websites. What that meant for us is a very high standard and a ton of effort spanning many months.
Market Positioning
Myths and Mountains is recognized by Conde Nast Traveler, Wendy Perrin’s Wow List among others and has been featured in major media outlets worldwide. Credibility was never a problem, and even industry giants like Lonely Planet are challenged to earn such accolades.
One of our website section headers sums up the Myths and Mountains market position perfectly: Hand Crafted Custom Travel Experiences.
Major brands—even those that are famous for a century of exotic exploration—have a hard time convincing individuals and families that their custom experiences are really all that custom. For Myths and Mountains “custom crafted” is just part of their DNA.
The Right Travel Marketing Message
After decades serving the world’s most discriminating travelers, Myths and Mountains knows its customer. Messaging for our marketing efforts was a matter of understanding, interpreting and packaging communications that occur in now-routine interactions with customers spanning many years.
The root of the message is that travelers can feel comfortable entrusting Myths and Mountains to safely deliver dream experiences in remote corners of the globe.
Marketing Message Elements
As is typical, we put a great deal of effort into “nonverbal” messaging. Of course, that includes photography, but typography is just as important, along with getting icons and navigational elements just right.
Unlike, say, a local restaurant, luxury travel planning involves much bigger decisions. We can’t sufficiently help with that decision using images alone. We worked with Myths and Mountains extensively to develop copy for every page of the website, as well as hundreds of blog posts and email campaigns.
Copy, Voice & Writing Style
The writing style for Myths and Mountains is similar to a high-end travel magazine. Our role was strategic editorial planning, curating, optimizing and publishing content. The majority of the copy was written internally by Myths and Mountains directly.
We met monthly for face to face meetings, where we’d present visitor data along with ranking reports and strategic opportunities. We’d then make decisions about blog articles and page content that would need to be written as well as publication deadlines and goals for each piece.
Myths and Mountains Website Design
The Myths and Mountains website design had to compete with top national brands. It had to resonate with its intended audience, but also establish equal footing among industry leaders with unlimited resources.
We set out with the following guidelines and got to work.
- The website had to have the polished look and feel you’d expect major global brand
- The user experience had to be perfect, regardless of the device and viewing environment
- It had to be engineered using a simple, popular CMS platform
- The website platform had to support any SEO strategy or technology
- It needed to be fully integrated with Myths and Mountains’ CRM
- Spectacular photography, website imagery & iconography
- Scalable and flexible for future updates and expansion
We had several CMS options, but chose WordPress largely because it has such an active developer base. Security issues tend to be resolved quickly, and updates are generally very stable. We are well aware of Joomla, Drupal and others, but we didn’t want to invite surprises. Also, clients like WordPress because it is easy to learn and manage.
Beautiful, responsive, search engine friendly website design
We chose spectacular, authentic images throughout the website. Admittedly, we allowed some file sizes to creep upward in favor of visual impact. To help with performance, we used very little JavaScript and did our best to minimize the total number of file requests necessary for browsers to render the site.
We also knew from server records that most visits are users with excellent connection speeds and lots of available bandwidth. Still, the website isn’t slow by any stretch, and we trimmed mobile viewport file requests and sizes to a bare minimum.
The final result is beautiful. Every detail underscores the kind of travel experience visitors to the website hope to enjoy.
CRM Integration Into Digital Marketing Campaigns
One challenge we hadn’t anticipated is how difficult it would be to integrate to the client’s CRM. Client relationship management is a cornerstone of every one of our online marketing campaigns. We integrate CRMs to websites every single day, so it was a surprise for us to learn we would have zero access to be able to properly configure theirs.
It was a struggle, and an unnecessary expense to the client, but we managed to get pretty close to what we needed by working with that CRM provider directly. Essentially, it serves lead generation functions by managing communications for potential travelers as they request itineraries or catalogs.
Email Marketing Campaigns
A critically important component for Myths and Mountains was email marketing. Primarily, this was a twice-monthly newsletter that continues to be a strong performer fostering interest in new destinations among subscribers.
When we got involved, the company had tens of thousands of contacts across multiple email lists. The problem was, those contacts, while all legitimate subscribers, were moved around and stored in several different formats over a period of years. As a result, there were duplicates, partial addresses, spammy ones… you name it.
We cleaned it by writing software that first confirms each address is legitimate. Next, it checks for duplicates before checking it against a known spam database. Once all that’s done, it writes the clean list out to a new file. The next trick was to pull the clean data into their email service without losing data from past campaigns. Setting aside the technical details, we got it done. As a side benefit, they no longer pay the email people to store thousands of duplicate email addresses.
SEO & Internet Marketing
As mentioned, OCG was originally brought in to design and develop the website, but not for Internet marketing. However, ROI from pay-per-click advertising was actually negative, due to the high bid price for competitive key-phrases. That made organic SEO a critical mid to long-term strategy.
The problem with organic search is speed. Myths and Mountains had realistic, attainable goals, but in a highly competitive market. So, while the website has tons of unique and relevant content, onsite efforts weren’t going to be enough. Regardless, that’s where we always start, because if your onsite ranking factors are screwed up, you’ll never compete, no matter how many back-links you manage to get.
Blogging & SEO
Myths and Mountains was always a very engaged client, and as a result, we had a lot to work with in terms of planning and content. To fast forward, traffic from the website has increased about 4 times in under a year–and it was significant to begin with. There are several reasons.
We had monthly marketing and strategy meetings where we set goals and set specific action plans for each individual involved.
Enlightenment. Myths and Mountains was always as committed to understanding the organic search landscape as much as we do. As a result, they understand how to write blog articles for SEO that resonate human readers.
Backlinks. Since Myths and Mountains is fully engaged, they are constantly leveraging relationships to earn backlinks we would have a difficult time getting on our own.
Through constant communication and working together toward achieving the same goals, Myths and Mountains is competing at the national level, in a market made up of global heavyweights.