San Marcos, Texas, is known for its vibrant culture, food, music, murals, and natural beauty. From glass-bottom boat tours and wetland walks to mimosa-infused al fresco dining, vintage shopping, and public art installations, the city is perfect for a chill or adventurous weekend. And, it’s family-friendly.
If you follow Visit San Marcos, you might assume they have a team of 100 staff creating photos and videos to show the world how much the city has to offer. In reality, the DMO has limited time to travel and create content at the volume needed to tell its biggest stories and experiences.
Producing photo and video content to showcase the city’s memorable spots for locals and tourists alike is a growing challenge for the tourism bureau’s two-person creative team.
“We love getting content,” says Sarah Smith, Visit San Marcos’ marketing specialist, “but we simply don’t have the hours to go out and create it ourselves.”
Sarah’s team uses CrowdRiff Creators to connect with local photographers and videographers, leaving logistics, licensing, and other time-consuming details to the CrowdRiff team–allowing her to focus on creative strategy. “It opened so many doors for us,” she adds.
CrowdRiff Creators’ authentic approach strikes a chord.
“Before working with CrowdRiff Creators, we were hiring professional videographers and we were getting very polished videos. But we just needed a lot of custom content—nothing fancy—to meet the skyrocketing demands for Instagram Reels and TikTok. We couldn’t keep up!”
Sarah Smith, Visit San Marcos
For their first project with CrowdRiff Creators, Sarah’s team requested up to sixty unique photo or video shoots. It’s critical that these photos and videos elevate the region and “feel like a fresh coat of paint” on their existing imagery. And shooting vertical is a must.
Sarah wanted creators to “think with a sustainability lens,” creating photos and videos they could use right away, and also reuse, reimagine, and repurpose far into the future. “We often think, ‘What can we get now that we can use in six months… and then again next year?’”
Respecting natural environments and local culture was also important to Sarah and her team. In all shoots, she wanted photographers and videographers to stay on trails, promote responsible river usage in and around San Marcos, and keep arts and food culture local. Sarah trusted CrowdRiff Creators’ strong photo and video capability and editing to make destinations feel authentic.
CrowdRiff’s content moderation team reviewed Sarah’s requests and quickly shared them with local creators before kicking off content creation.
As the shoots started rolling in, Sarah was impressed by the photographers and videographers’ ability to bring new perspectives to things she sees every day.
Her first request—video footage of San Marcos’ murals and sculptures—was an immediate success. “They did some panning work on the mermaid statue in a way I had never thought of presenting it,” she says, “and now I’ve used that clip like 8 times!”
On another shoot, this time at the San Marcos Arts Center, the videographer turned tight space into something entirely new. “They showed it in such a three-dimensional way. They made it look like the place to go.”
CrowdRiff Creators’ unique vision of familiar San Marcos locations helped the team generate new and unexpected ideas for tourism stories.
“Some of these locations might be an old hat to me,” Sarah says, “but through somebody else’s eyes, they’re totally new. We sent somebody to photograph vintage shopping downtown and all of a sudden I started noticing details in those stores or in the offerings that I didn’t realize were there. And now I’m telling people about them all the time.”
Encouraging photographers and videographers to use their creative intuition continued to bring positive results. One of Sarah’s favorite creators, Millie, provided Sarah and her team with many options, enabling them to rework a story into any voice or vibe. “They were capturing dishes from restaurants that I would never have ordered. And I was like, ‘That looks really good!’”
Collaborating with CrowdRiff Creators, Sarah’s team could better understand their content needs and what works for their audience, which it turns out, is mostly video. In the past year, the team has dramatically increased their posting frequency of Reels by 300%. Last September, for example, they posted two Reels for the entire month. This September they posted about two a week.
When she does use still photography—often for blog posts and visitor guides—Sarah pulls it from CrowdRiff’s User Generated Content (UGC) product, a treasure trove of continuously updating images from micro-influencers across the region.
“I love the versatility of the UGC platform. It allows us to keep our content looking fresh.” Sarah frequently builds galleries of UGC content and embeds them into blogs and social media posts. “We utilize them in almost all of our blogs to showcase what people can expect in San Marcos.”
The steady influx of CrowdRiff content is helping San Marcos’ creative team increase engagement on Instagram and TikTok. “I think largely that’s due to the cadence of clips,” says Sarah. “We’re able to showcase a bunch of different topics and shots in a small amount of time so we have more people sharing the videos, asking where certain clips are from, and, my personal favorite to note, more people saving the videos for later.”
CrowdRiff Creators and CrowdRiff UGC are changing how San Marcos DMO’s creative team gathers content. It’s enabling them to move faster and create more videos in half the time. “In the past,” says Sarah, “it would take me at least half a workday to sort through my phone to find videos, maybe go get clips if needed, and edit them all together. Now I just type in a few keywords, download the clips, and slice them together in about an hour.”
The process is also changing Sarah’s role: “I can art direct a little bit more,” Sarah says, “and then see a creator just completely knock it out of the park and exceed expectations.” What she loves most is how one shoot can create limitless possibilities. “I can make an infinite amount of stories with the content that they’ve given me.”
CrowdRiff’s consistent quality and evergreen approach to content creation is revamping Sarah and her team’s process, giving them the tools to build a high-quality archive and tell San Marcos’ story in unimaginable ways. “We started working with CrowdRiff Creators a year ago, and, now going into fall, it feels like we’ve got a full arsenal.”
