Disruptive Destinations - Bringing innovative content discovery to the travel industry - YOUKNOW Digital
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Disruptive Destinations Bringing innovative content discovery to the travel industry
The Customer
The Virgin brand is well-known for its innovative approach, and
Virgin Holidays is certainly no exception. Ever since its founding
in 1985, the travel brand has built a reputation for dedication to
entrepreneurship and customer service in equal measure, particularly
through its ‘magic touches’, such as the world’s first dedicated airport
leisure lounges or the Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship in the
Caribbean. Consumers voted Virgin Holidays the Best Large Holiday
Company to the USA, Canada and the Caribbean for five years
running at the prestigious British Travel Awards.
2
The Challenge
Never a brand to rest on its laurels, Virgin Holidays has always
sought new ways to enhance the travel experience for its
customers. One way of doing this is through creating an effective
content strategy to guide the customer journey.
To evaluate the brand’s content marketing performance, the Virgin
Holidays marketing team conducted a content audit of all the
customer touch points. They soon discovered a promising angle
where there was room to do things differently, in true Virgin style,
with a little help from Crimson Hexagon.
“We realised that, more often than not, we were telling our
customers what we thought they should be doing in destination,”
explains James Libor, Lead, Media, Digital and Brand Partnerships
at Virgin Holidays.
“After assessing the marketplace we realised this was a common
theme for UK tour operators. So we decided there was space to be
disruptive. We set ourselves a task of finding a new and engaging
way of bringing destination content to our customers.”
3The Solution
Virgin Holidays’ search for innovation led to the launch of Virgin’s As with any complex project, various challenges arose along the way.
Trending Travel Guide, the world’s first socially-aggregated travel guide. Luckily, Crimson Hexagon’s support team were always close at hand to
This innovative content discovery tool brings together insights from guide the implementation process.
millions of social posts to present audiences with the hottest trending
“Crimson Hexagon’s account managers provided us with all the advice
attractions and destinations from around the world. Crimson Hexagon,
we needed to be sure we were pulling the right data,” added Jamie.
with its AI-Powered Consumer Insights platform, is the engine driving
the Trending Travel Guide.
To create the Guide, Virgin Holidays worked with data-driven agency,
Forward3D, who delivered the project using Crimson Hexagon
technology. Harnessing the power of social conversation is no small
feat, and one of the main keys to success for Forward3D was picking
the right tool for the job.
“The level of insight, ease of use of the platform, consistent approach
to product innovation and the different API offerings made Crimson
Hexagon the obvious choice for us,” says Jamie Stilgoe, Content Lead
Organic Performance at Forward3D.
4The Outcome
Overall, the Trending Travel Guide offers audiences a compelling In terms of content marketing strategy, the Guide is helping Virgin
experience for discovering new destinations and travel Holidays in a number of ways. On a granular level, the Guide fulfils the
recommendations. In the process, it also enhances the Virgin brand’s need for effective content further up the marketing funnel.
long-standing reputation for innovation, by keeping the brand at the
Although it’s still early days, some promising figures are already
cutting edge of the industry.
emerging. Visitors to the Guide view 14.75% more pages than those
“Crimson Hexagon’s support for our innovative use of its data meant browsing other inspiration-editorial content on the Virgin Holidays site,
that we were able to deliver a world-first for a client and generate while the average session duration is 75.29% higher when compared
media interest in the project,” says Jamie of Forward3D. to legacy content.
For a brand as dedicated to innovation as Virgin Holidays, flexibility and What’s more, the Trending Travel Guide also helps the Virgin Holidays
creativity are both essential elements when undertaking a disruptive marketing team with meeting its core KPIs, in particular for increasing
project like the Trending Travel Guide. organic rankings for longer tail search terms. Beyond this, the team at
Virgin also expect to see an overall improvement in domain authority
“We’ve been very impressed with the flexibility of the technology and
over the medium to long term.
team in meeting our requirements. Innovation is never straightforward
or easy, and without Crimson Hexagon this project would simply not
have been possible,” says James Libor of Virgin Holidays.
5The Future
The Trending Travel Guide is now a permanent fixture in the Virgin
Holidays marketing arsenal. As a result of its success, Virgin
Holidays is enthusiastic about extending its use of Crimson
Hexagon social analytics to drive future campaigns. The team also
plan to introduce an array of new destinations early in 2019, while
continuing to work with data collected through Crimson Hexagon to
offer audiences a host of new insights into the latest travel trends.
6About Crimson Hexagon
Crimson Hexagon helps global brands better understand their
consumers. With instant access to the world’s largest volume of
unstructured text and images across social, online public, and enterprise-
held data sources, Crimson Hexagon’s AI-powered consumer insights To learn more about how Crimson Hexagon can help
platform allows clients to analyze audiences, track brand perception small marketing teams, schedule a personalized demo
and campaign performance, and even detect competitive and market with Crimson Hexagon today.
trends. Our clients include Anheuser-Busch InBev, Adidas, General Mills,
Paramount Pictures, and Twitter. REQUEST A DEMO
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