Background
A client of mine runs a travel business in a popular city in Europe, which which has a very small population of around 45,000, but receives 2,000,000 (yes, 2 million) tourists every year.
My client sells discount cards online. The cards offer people between 10 and 25% discount on popular activities, tours and restaurants in the city. My client is partnered up with 50 of the top restaurants and tours in the city. They don’t charge business partners anything to be on the platform; they choose the best partners and invite them to join the platform for free. In return, all they had to do was offer discounts to people who turn up with the business card. My client would do a lot of online marketing for the business partners for free, which meant that the got a lot of customers coming in with no extra effort. Because of this unique arrangement, local businesses are more than happy to join the platform.
After bringing a few business partners on board, my client wanted my help to create measurable results that they could use to convince new business partners to join the programme.
Solution
We did some SEO work and ran a small test for a few weeks with one of the partners who was already signed on to the platform.
Before we started our work, we did a search on Google for the name of the business partner and the activity that they offered. Only one or two results in the first couple of pages were related to the actual partner business we were searching for. After recording this baseline, we started our work.
We created and tweaked some articles, videos and posts for our client, using only their web site and their own social media. We did not have access or make any posts on the web site or social media handles of the partner business.
Results
Within a few weeks, results showed: when someone searched on Google for the name of that partner or the activity that they specialized in, out of the 10 results on page one of search results, six links belonged to my client and went to their web site and social media, while two results belonged to the business partner.
Because my client wasn’t charging the business partner anything, the business partner was quite happy that whenever someone searched for the name of their their business or the activity they offered, they’d either find the discount card that my client offered, or find the business partner’s web site directly.
My client was happy with the results, as this activity helped them bring on more partners onto the platform. The search results, tweaked in this way for each of their partners, would help them sell many more discount cards. The business partner was happy because they’d get new customers through my client’s web site without doing any extra work. And obviously, customers who bought the the discount cards would be happy because they’d be getting a discount on food and activities with a bunch of top rated businesses.
Ah, the joys of travel!