• 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.

Publishing stories was really time-consuming

Jamie: “For a number of years we had been using a CMS that we had developed ourselves. With this old CMS, it was really time-consuming to publish stories. But in addition to that it had limited multimedia options. We were looking for a solution which would enable us to more easily publish news stories with rich media such as video and photos, which can easily be shared via social media.” When looking into the solution that PressPage offered them, it seemed like a good fit: “We had strict brand guidelines and security guidelines, but all of those requirements were dealt with really professionally.”

Migrating seven years of history

There was a bit of a challenge: The University of Manchester wanted to migrate approximately seven years of stories (their archive consisted of more than 6,000 stories in total). “Although it seemed like a challenge, everything was migrated easily. Since the PressPage platform is so easy to use, it was quite easy to train other people within our team to use it. During this implementation our dedicated customer success manager responded quickly whenever there was an issue.”

Ease of use and flexibility

Overall Jamie is very happy with how the platform works for them. “The biggest benefit of working with this platform is how easy it is to use. We’ve trained people very quickly across different teams. It’s really flexible and people actually want to share the content now, which they didn’t before. Social media traffic to our website has dramatically increased, more people than ever before are reading the news articles and they’re staying on pages for longer.

One of the other pluses is that the news releases can be enriched with all sorts of media. “You can add a video, add an image gallery or even social media sharing options. Using PressPage saves us a lot of time in creating better releases and publishing them.”

Collaboration with PressPage

Jamie does not talk about a supplier, but about a partner. “Collaboration has been key to the success of this project. Not only does PressPage always respond quite quickly, we can also feed ideas in and we’ve noticed those ideas are coming back and being adopted on the platform. That’s really helped us to put our own ideas forward.”

Of course it does not stop here, there are also improvements to be made for The University of Manchester. Jamie notes: “We have seen the effect of the scientific community on Reddit, which made us think that we should do more with that platform. But also we want to incorporate our online magazine into our newsroom, to enrich the type of stories that are now being posted.”

Totally outdated

Daimler's realization that their old media platform was insufficient to their needs led them to seek other solutions. It was ‘totally outdated’ and needed to be replaced with a new platform. Morawski: “The old system was not intuitive and it was complicated.” Although all options for a new system were arranged for the global sites, local offices needed find their own solution. With Daimler Poland looking for a new tool, PressPage offered the solution.

Jaroslaw Morawski, responsible for ecommerce & CRM within Mercedes-Benz Trucks Poland, is supporting his colleagues with the creation of press releases. He trains them in using PressPage and, if needed, helps with publishing the releases via the platform. Morawski: “In the old system, we needed to undertake a lot of manual steps. Publishing a press release took a lot of time and mistakes were easily made.”

Time saver

Compared to the old system, Morawski sees lots of positive changes through using PressPage. “Before I needed transfer the articles from the corporate website one by one and check if these had the same layout. With PressPage, the releases we post are automatically shown on the homepage and through the use of tags, we do not need to put all the articles into a category by hand.” For Daimler Poland the biggest advantage is the ease of creating a press release in the system. “We were used to doing a lot of things manually, such as connecting the releases to the navigation, assigning them to specific categories and individually uploading each and every picture. Now we can easily create a release and publish it directly our website.“

The publication workflow has become faster and more efficient, due to the intuitive interface and flexibility of the platform. Morawski: “What is also important for us is that our newsroom matches with the corporate identity. The template of the Daimler Poland newsroom is similar to the Corporate Daimler Media site because the same look and feel has been applied. Now we do not need to spend time creating the layout for our own press releases in our newsroom. This enables us to be consistent in our appearance online.”

Keep improving

Although using PressPage has led to an optimized publication process, Daimler Poland continues searching for opportunities to improve their main communication platform. Morawski: “One of the things we are looking at is PressPage Mail, so that we can proactively inform journalists about new press releases that are published. Although we are already using Twitter and other social media to communicate, sending notifications via email would be a nice addition to our current process.”

The biggest advantage of using PressPage compared to the old system is the time spent to publish a press release. The newsroom being shown in the same look & feel as the corporate website, was one of the reasons to implement a new system. “We don’t need to spend time to manually create the layout of the press release.” Morawski and his colleagues are very happy with the time saved using this new platform. “Here the system automatically publishes the whole package. Our colleagues are all satisfied, we only have positive comments.”

Below you can the previous newsroom (left) and how the current newsroom looks like (right).