The island of Anguilla, one of the most beautiful pearls in all the Caribbean, sought to attract more tourism business in the midst of an up and down world economy. The challenge was how to effectively bring the island, its people, culture and unique attributes to targeted audiences throughout the world and to do so cost effectively, with maximum Return On Investment.
In January 2011, The Anguilla Tourist Board (ATB) retained Progressive Marketing Group, Inc. (PMG), a Strategic Marketing Organization located in Melville, New York USA, to conceive, design, implement and launch a fully integrated marketing initiative.
PMG’s strategic direction was specifically designed to enable the ATB to better target their prospective markets and communicate more efficiently in real-time. The plan included metrics to gather feedback, which in turn would provide greater prospect and sales conversion. The program, which was introduced in conjunction with a public relations opportunity that featured the island on national television, has outperformed all calculated predictions and expectations.
Despite the extremely narrow timeframe of four weeks, a large (50-page) website (anguilla-vacation.com) was developed, one that would dynamically set the island apart in the most positive branding scenario.
Anticipating heavy traffic from consumers and agents the world over, PMG utilized a special load-balancing server to ensure that the site remained operational during this flood of interest. At the time of the airing of the Anguilla feature presentation, the dedicated server spawned three additional servers to handle the website’s traffic, ensuring that the site would not go down and would be accessible to visitors.
From wire mapping to graphic design, from optimization to proprietary data capture, PMG created a full-fledged 50+ page website. It not only included attention-grabbing art and content, but also had backend capability to help stimulate repeat visits from prospective tourists, and to enable push-pull campaigns from the online home of the ATB.
The website reports speak for themselves. Within the first 2 weeks after launch, the web traffic increased dramatically over the original website, and in comparison to other tourism destinations’ websites.
The site continued to perform well, attracting new users and returning visitors. Shortly after the site launch, traffic to the site was further driven by the exposure the island received on a popular, syndicated TV show giving the website and Anguilla international attention.
