Visit Costa del Sol Attracts 2X More Visitors With HubSpot

Visit Costa del Sol is the tourism board for the Spanish region, helping would-be tourists to discover all that the area has to offer. However, until early 2016, it was mainly using traditional marketing and advertising methods to attract its visitors. It knew that this needed to change. The internet is the first port of call for people researching their holiday options, and the board wanted to turn its website into a lead-generating machine.

Manolo Lara, director of digital marketing for Visit Costa del Sol wanted to attract more people to its website with helpful and inspiring content, so adopting the inbound marketing methodology was a natural next step.

“Our potential customers were already online – they were looking for information, they were ready to book and share. We needed a way to draw them to our site, find out more about them and then delight them with targeted content and online services.”

Visit Costa del Sol initially tried to implement its new plan with Markitude, a Spanish online marketing platform. However, Manolo says that it was difficult to use, and he began the search for another solution. He found the HubSpot website and was impressed by its wealth of expert content on the inbound methodology. After a demonstration of the HubSpot software, the tourist board was convinced.

“HubSpot had everything we needed to kick-start our new strategy. It had all the features we were hoping for – content, analytics, automation, social media and email – and they all worked together. It was an easy decision and we signed on the dotted line in 2016.”

With the help of its marketing agency INNN, Visit Costa del Sol began to move its website to the CMS Hub. One of the first things it did was double down on its blog using the Blog App – it is now filled with topical posts and updated a number of times every week. The tourism board also uses the HubSpot software’s SEO features to make sure that its blog ranks highly with search engines, and it shares every post through the Social Inbox.

The tourist board has turned its website into a content library, adding destination guides, itinerary planners and panoramic videos in six different languages. All content created is targeted towards various visitor personas and is set up on its own Landing Page, accompanied by Calls-to-Action (CTAs) and Forms to boost user engagement.

Once website visitors give their details, they are nurtured through the marketing funnel with Emails and offers based on their specific interests, such as golf courses, day trips, accommodation, restaurants or attractions.

“We spend a lot of time investigating and analysing consumer habits and market trends, and that allows us to produce innovative, engaging content,” explains Manolo. “Then we use the HubSpot software to leverage it in a really powerful way; every visitor gets an experience that is tailored to them. It creates significant brand awareness and ultimately helps us convert website visitors into tourists for our region.”

Visit Costa del Sol is also keen to keep developing its inbound strategy, and the Marketing Analytics Dashboard is essential to that goal.

“It gives us a way to track the efficiency of our entire marketing funnel. With just a couple of clicks, we can see what our best performing assets are, what we need to do more of and what we need to change. It has allowed us to plan in a way that simply would not have been possible before.”