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How Localhood Helps Kootenay Rockies Tourism Create More With Less

Published Date
Author Alice Goode

Learn how Localhood helps Kootenay Rockies Tourism find effective, powerful ways to reach audiences both new and existing, local, and international, by creating more visually engaging, creative, and customized content with less work.

Results: 

Localhood helps Kootenay Rockies Tourism;

  • Save time by creating one piece of content that can be reused on multiple social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok) and searchable via Google

  • Maintain brand consistency across those multiple platforms

  • Use Localhood Stories not only to engage, but also educate travellers 

Located in the southeast corner of British Columbia, Canada, the Kootenay Rockies are world-renowned for their winter activities and legendary “Powder Highway,” giving it the moniker, “BC’s Mountain Playground.” Home to four of Canada’s national parks and more than 75 provincial parks, the region also lies on the traditional territory of four of the Indigenous Nations: Ktunaxa, Secwepmec (Shuswap), Sinixt (Lakes), and the Sylix (Okanagan).

All together, Kootenay Rockies Tourism represents more than 800 different tourism businesses, ranging from natural hot springs to arts and culture and Indigenous experiences. But as much as the destination management organization (DMO) represents, its marketing team is especially small – but mighty -  with only three dedicated team members. 

Shannon Harrison, Kootenay Rockies Tourism’s Content Marketing and Social Media expert, knows and values the importance of having unique and engaging content that can be easily shared on multiple platforms, as well as shared by Destination BC, the province-level DMO. Just like her own role, she needs to use marketing tools that can do double or in this case, triple duty, when it comes to promoting her destination.

So, when Harrison was looking for an easy, effective, and impactful way to develop shareable Stories, she found the ideal solution in Localhood. Harrison and Kootenay Rockies Tourism were early adopters of Localhood, using it shortly after it launched in 2019 and 235+ Stories later, they haven’t looked back since. Here’s why:

Localhood helps them develop content-rich Stories that can be shared in multiple ways and on multiple platforms.

By using Localhood, there’s no need to worry about changing Stories or content to fit different distribution channels, and the Stories often augment existing marketing content. It’s about creating more, with less.

Harrison, for example, has found the most success in using Localhood Stories in tandem with published blogs and photos that Kootenay Rockies Tourism posts on its own website. The Stories are essentially a visual summary of the blog posts, giving audiences different ways to digest the information, and are often embedded within the respective article, as well as posted on the DMO’s home page and shared on Destination BC’s HelloBC.com website.

“Our biggest advantage and opportunity is to be a part of the BC Story Network with Destination BC,” Harrison says.  “We’re producing engaging Stories with other provincial tourism partners to motivate more travellers to visit British Columbia, and the Kootenay Rockies.”  

Sharing published Localhood Stories on other social media platforms is simple and highly effective. 

“We were surprised by how quick it is to produce a Localhood story, especially when we feature our blog stories,” says Harrison. “We use similar visuals and copy/text from the blog stories to assist us to produce each Localhood Story.”  

Once a Localhood Story is published, Harrison will export and download that Story’s vertical slides, produce a video, and then add music to it to share the Story as a piece of video content on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. 

“Localhood Stories are one of the best ways to reach different and new audiences other than our own social audience, or newsletter subscribers,” says Harrison.

Most recently, Kootenay Rockies Tourism used Localhood Stories as part of its winter campaign aimed at families, promoting ski resorts and funky towns along the Powder Highway. They published Stories for each of their eight ski resorts, about what to do in 72 Hours at each one, and then distributed those Stories across multiple social networks.

 

“It’s not a lot of effort, but it’s nice because it’s all so concise together,” Harrison adds.

From 2020 to 2021, Kootenay Rockies Tourism has seen a 40% increase in the number of its Localhood Story Gallery impressions. And Localhood Stories produced by Kootenay Rockies Tourism have nearly 75% engagement.

Updating Localhood Stories is simple. 

Another aspect of Localhood Stories that Harrison values is the fact that they can be easily changed. 

“We’re able to adapt them and change them over time, and customize them for new content, imagery, and video — to really update them and make them more engaging over time,” she says.

“These Stories, unlike Facebook and Instagram stories, are permanent, so we have the opportunity to update them from season-to-season. We will often add newly acquired video and photos and refresh text and Web links to revitalize each Localhood Story.”    

Stories are great PR and educational tools, too. 

Harrison says that in addition to appealing to potential travellers, Localhood Stories are also a great way to convince travel writers to write about their destination, too. “When we have to pitch our stories to them, we’re using these Blog stories with embedded Localhood stories,” she says. 

And for their next spring campaign about responsible travel, they’re also going to use Stories as an educational tool, too. “With our new campaign for the spring, it’s a lot more about educating visitors as well as residents of the Kootenay Rockies – we’re putting more of an emphasis on the educational component of responsible travel,” Harrison notes. “So, it’ll be very interesting to see how much uptake we have on this. I think getting people to engage and understand why we’re asking them to be a more responsible traveller through our Stories is the best way to engage with them and inspire them to want to do this.” 

 

Harrison’s advice for other destination marketers who want to use Localhood is to make it as easy and simple as possible by repurposing existing blog content, and then making that Story work for you across multiple social channels.

Want to learn how you can start creating dynamic Stories for your destination? Get in touch with our team!