The county of Monmouthshire, Wales is full of rolling hills, historic castles, and incredible views. The team at Visit Monmouthshire, their DMO, uses CrowdRiff to help show off the many things the county has to offer visitors.
In this video, they talk about how they use visuals to make their destination stand out, some of the CrowdRiff features they love, and how using CrowdRiff galleries on their website has led to an increase in website visitors and dwell time.
Here's a transcription and summary of the video above.
Hi, I’m Kevin Ford, I’m the Digital Tourism Marketing Officer for Monmouthshire County Council.
I’m Nicola Edwards, I’m the Food & Tourism Strategic Manager for Monmouthshire County Council.
Distributing tourism benefits by promoting hidden gems
The main goal at Visit Monmouthshire is to grow tourism revenue by 10%, encouraging the distribution of benefits across the whole county, so it’s not just the major attractions seeing those benefits but that visitors get to see our hidden gems as well.
In tourism and travel, images are the most important type of content. They’re what make a difference between somebody booking to come to your destination and not booking to come to your destination.
We’re all visual decision-makers these days, so the best photography is what’s needed to make your destination stand out.
I love logging in to CrowdRiff. I like to see what people have been uploading, what they’ve been visiting, and what they’re saying about the images they’ve been posting. The things that they like about the destination are really useful to me as a destination manager.
CrowdRiff galleries have led to an increase in website visitors, dwell time, and referrals to partner websites
We use CrowdRiff galleries on about 40 pages on our website, as well as on social screens across Monmouthshire. CrowdRiff allows us to keep the website’s visuals up-to-date with just a few clicks.
We’ve also had people just telling us in person how great the website looks with CrowdRiff.
Since using CrowdRiff, we’ve seen an increase in dwell time on the web pages, an increase in referrals to the business’ own websites, as well as an increase in visitors to the website.
CrowdRiff helps show that the Visit Monmouthshire website is still relevant in an age where there’s so much competition for clicks.
Adding relevant and helpful information to their images with Google Locations
Google Locations is a good feature because it allows visitors to see a lot more information about the images they’re clicking on — it shows the opening hours, the closing hours, the website address, and exactly where this image is taken.
We have a much bigger library to choose from, and they’re more engaging images because they’re taken from a visitor’s perspective.
A strong partnership with CrowdRiff
Without CrowdRiff, it would take us a lot longer to do our job and our website wouldn’t perform as well. CrowdRiff is very engaged—they’re constantly checking in with us, setting up the next meeting, and telling us where we can go for progress.
We’re thrilled with CrowdRiff. It has exceeded all of our expectations, and we can see from the performance figures on our website that our visitors are just as thrilled as us.
