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How Visit Harrogate Uses Visuals to Influence Visitor Behaviour [Video]

Visit Harrogate is the destination marketing organization for the Borough of Harrogate in Yorkshire, England. In this video, the team at Visit Harrogate talks about how they use CrowdRiff to engage with their community, increase website dwell time, decrease bounce rate, and breathe new life into their marketing. 

Here's a transcription and summary of the video above.

Hello, welcome to Harrogate. I’m Richard Spencer, the Director for Visit Harrogate, the destination marketing organization for Harrogate and borough. 

Our goal is to promote Harrogate successfully all around the world, and it’s important to us that we employ the very best in tourism technology. 

Hi, I’m John Light. I look after the Website and eTourism for Visit Harrogate. CrowdRiff has been one of our go-to solutions for when we’re creating new products and new pages.

Using CrowdRiff to find high-quality, diverse visuals and stretch their budget

Before we started deploying CrowdRiff’s technology, we’d go out and we’d harvest images from professional photographers. Far too costly, and we needed to find a different type of way to do that. 

CrowdRiff was able to supply high-quality images, beautifully created, with all sorts of different places, with all sorts of different people. 

Not only have we now got a website that has a completely different look and feel—it’s far more engaging—but also it has allowed us to build up a significant, rich library full of creative and compelling images. 

People are making their decisions purely on the basis of the images we feed them, and it has been tremendously successful. 

Sourcing the best content and interacting with their community with Smart Curation & @Mentions

Some of the best bits and the quickest ways that CrowdRiff helps us get at the good content is through features like Smart Curation, and it really helps us do a quick scan and a quick add of assets if we only have 5 or 10 minutes to add to the task. 

The other great one is our @Mentions. Having those pulled together in one place so we can quickly and concisely respond to people means that we are a more interactive DMO in our office work as well as through our website.

Website pages with CrowdRiff galleries see higher dwell times and lower bounce rates

I really like the way that CrowdRiff has taken the time to integrate properly with Google Analytics, because that gives us more information than we would otherwise have gotten. 

When I’m looking through my live feed on Google Analytics, I can see not only which galleries are up and being viewed, but I can also see how people are interacting with them. I can see that they’re clicking on the assets, they’re viewing the assets, and that they’re engaging at that deeper level than we would otherwise have known. 

One thing we noticed on the pages where we’ve added large CrowdRiff galleries is that the dwell times have increased, but also the bounce rate drops. That’s because people are staying that bit longer, they’re clicking, they’re engaging. 

Promoting Harrogate businesses and strengthening partner relationships  

We work very closely with over 200 businesses right across Harrogate. CrowdRiff has allowed us to say “here’s a new channel, here’s a new way for us to engage with your customers, and for you, as a business, to engage with us, Visit Harrogate.”

We are able to bring them new eyes onto their products. It’s a very powerful conversation, and it has allowed us to create some very enduring relationships and new projects with those businesses. 

Finding somebody who was already experienced in the international marketplace, who understood what marketing agencies need—we were very pleased to find that.