Inflow

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the VP, Marketing of Shore Excursions Group

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Shore Excursions Group is the largest independent shore excursions provider for cruise travelers looking for tours and activities to do on shore, in each destination they visit on their cruise vacation.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Inflow to accomplish?

• Paid Digital Advertising - Generate incremental excursion bookings/purchases on our website
• SEO - drive incremental, qualified traffic to our website (cruise travelers interested in booking a shore excursion for their upcoming cruise vacation)
• CRO - increasing conversion (bookings/purchase) from visitors to our website

SOLUTION

How did you find Inflow?

• Online Search
• Referral
• Other

Why did you select Inflow over others?

Already in place when I joined company

How many teammates from Inflow were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

We've implemented a comprehensive digital marketing program with the InFlow team for our eCommerce brand over the past several years, designed to generate excursion bookings from our target audience of cruise travelers, optimize our site to drive qualified search traffic, and optimize conversion from visitors to our website. 

During the course of our agency engagement, this has included a comprehensive SEO campaign (onsite content strategy and implementation, onsite technical SEO, offsite SEO, integrated digital advertising campaigns (across multiple channels including paid search, display, video, and paid social - all with prospecting and retargeting initiatives), and CRO testing to improve conversion rate on our website.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Revenue and more importantly profitability, has grown tremendously since our partnership with the InFlow team. As an example withing our paid digital ad campaign, profitability has increased 73% year to date (vs our benchmark data pre-pandemic. Within our SEO campaign, revenue has increased 82% year to date (vs our benchmark data pre-pandemic).

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Having worked on the 'client' side (big corporate, small start-up and mid-sized companies) and 'agency' side (traditional ad agency, digital agency, marketing consultancy and more) over a long career in marketing, in my experience it's difficult to find an agency partner that consistently delivers like Inflow. 

The lead contact for each activity has deep expertise, they offer smart, strategic recommendations and then execute successfully on them, and utilize a data-driven approach and mindset to optimizing campaigns based on our KPIs. 

The Inflow team is highly-collaborative and results-oriented, they are able to clearly articulate campaign performance and how/when to adjust. They are also very quick to respond to questions and challenges that often arise and need to be addressed quickly, which should be the standard - but in my experience typically is not.

What was your primary form of communication with Inflow?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

I'm impressed with their combination of deep expertise and the ability to deliver consistently - I also appreciate the collaborative nature of the relationship when we meet to discuss campaign performance, review and understand data, and make decisions to continually improve our results towards our overall marketing & business objectives - in our case to generate more website purchases, with focus on efficiency and profitability.

Are there any areas for improvement or something Inflow could have done differently?

Bringing new opportunities and fresh ideas to the table in terms of emerging marketing channels, and how we can expand our target audience to reach more potential customers and ultimately grow our business.