Tips from Club Med on delivering a visual treat without breaking the bank

Telling a visually impressive and engaging story is something that all travel brands aspire to but how to do it effectively?

Barbara Greene, a cousin of the British novelist Graham Greene who travelled with him on his first trip outside Europe, once said: “If you tell me, it’s an essay. If you show me, it’s a story”.

This is something that Rob Barnes, senior online marketing executive for Club Med UK & Nordics, took to heart when he embarked on a new content project, with media agency Mediacom iLab, to coincide with the launch of the group’s summer mountain holidays.

Using the ‘Six Giants of Europe’, a series of mountain peaks all with amazing, if sometimes scary, stories and history, “we wanted to inspire and excite people with the story and with beautiful photography,” says Barnes.

The result is a dedicated website that used the latest web technology (HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3) to allow parallax scrolling which lets imagery and content flow or slide underneath each other. An added bonus is that it’s responsive on mobile and tablet devices.

Although the technology has been tried and tested by traditional media outlets like the BBC, The Guardian & The New York Times, for long form pieces, this is reportedly the first time the technology has been used in the travel industry. Admittedly, however, Club Med’s venture is on a smaller scale to Snowfall, the New York’s Times multimedia project that made headlines in recent times. “That was a huge project though involving hundreds of hours of work and massively complex,” says Barnes.

In fact Barnes reveals that their investment ran into just a few thousand pounds and this covered everything from research to content creation, image sourcing, design, development and outreach/seeding. But he warns that “for anything larger or more complex you can go all the way to give figures and beyond!”

When it comes to key performance indicators, Barnes says the advantage of a project like this is that it was designed to be evergreen. In other words, it should age well, won’t date and will continue to be read, shared and linked to over time. “For more time or event sensitive content, usually we’d be looking at social signals as well as the number of visitors to the content and number of links pointing back to it (or where else it’s been shared),” he says.

For brands thinking about embarking a project like this Barnes has this advice:

  • Standout: Try to look to do something that others haven’t
  • Plan ahead: Consider the outcome first and work backwards. Great content requires planning!
  • Put mobile first: People share and email things from their mobiles constantly so if you want people to spread the word then ensure it works on mobile/tablet devices
  • Bring stories to life, make it interactive: Use great imagery and other media wherever possible to separate your content from other brands
  • Focus on the content not the brand: A purely sales driven approach doesn't drive engagement
  • Think about what people want: Some of your content can be focused on what you do, but for larger pieces it’s probably best to think about what people want – if that’s a guide, a story or a series of videos then that’s the way to go. 

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