Ramblers Holidays

The Company

Ramblers Worldwide Holidays is Britain’s longest-running walking holiday specialist. For over 65 years, it has provided award-winning walking and trekking holidays to destinations around the world – from the exotic rivers of China to the striking savannahs of Africa. With a current portfolio boasting over 250 tours in 70 countries, its itineraries are unrivalled in the industry. Its accolades include being partners with The Ramblers Association and winning the recent Wanderlust Travel Silver Award for Tour Operator, while its walks have been featured in the travel columns of The Guardian, The Times and other national newspapers.

Having had Ramblers Worldwide Holidays as a client for more than 5 years, we were responsible for the full redesign and build of their new website, for ensuring that they achieved and held Number 1 rankings in Google for a large selection of profitable key phrases, for generating large volumes of highly relevant traffic from our PPC campaigns, for setting up and running their entire social media programme and for much of the online copywriting on the site itself to improve the salesmanship and conversion rates from the traffic that we were generating for them.

Challenges

Most companies struggle with the challenge of how to engineer the natural phenomenon of word-of-mouth marketing, and Ramblers Worldwide Holidays was no exception when they approached us to find them a social media solution for this dilemma.

The specific challenge that our team embraced, and successfully met, was how to devise and sustain a blog programme that would build a stronger sense of brand loyalty and to encourage clients to talk about the holidays to their friends and families. Since this campaign would be driven by the Ramblers brand, we had to find a way to motivate their clients to tell their stories without appearing to ask for brand endorsement from them.

Building the Community of 700 Storytellers

Using our years of experience as online social community builders, LeadGeneratorsDigital conceptualised and implemented a corporate blogging strategy for our client that took blog marketing to a whole new level.

Over the course of a few years we invited and, indeed, challenged customers who had returned from their Ramblers Worldwide Holidays’ trip to write and send us a short piece about their holiday that meant something to them personally. A story perhaps, a poem, a memorable experience, an interesting friend they made – anything that they would remember over time.

By understanding what really drives and excites their clients, and by working very closely with each of them to help manicure their stories and their images into a creation that they were proud of, we succeeded not only to build a very active community of approximately 700 passionate storytellers, but also an additional 140 excellent entries for our storytelling competition.

That’s a lot of superb User Generated Content that we were able to utilise to maximum potential way beyond the corporate blog arena itself: we used variations of this content to populate onsite web pages, various social media platforms (Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.), other third party platforms (such as the F&L Honeymoons Guide) and, of course, extensive PR exposure.

An Active Community of Brand Ambassadors

With the combination of a unique incentive package and the implementation of our specialist community building techniques, we developed a very active and passionate client base whose members served as effective brand ambassadors for Ramblers Worldwide Holidays – and for many years. Their endorsement of the brand was natural and sincere.

The blog programme was a flagship campaign to use real community building based on real experiences from customers as a marketing tool, and as an integral part of our client’s Content Marketing strategy.

Need a Profitable Blogging Programme for your Brand?

If you are interested in finding out more about how LeadGeneratorsDigital can build and manage a profitable Corporate Blogging and Content Marketing programme for your business, please contact us.