Web Dev, SEO, & Content Marketing for Travel Company
- Content Marketing Pay Per Click Search Engine Optimization Web Development
- $1,000,000 to $9,999,999
- Mar. 2013 - Nov. 2020
- Quality
- 5.0
- Schedule
- 4.5
- Cost
- 5.0
- Willing to Refer
- 5.0
"Traktek always offered us freshness that led to great ROI."
- Hospitality & leisure
- Boston, Massachusetts
- 51-200 Employees
- Phone Interview
- Verified
Traktek provided frontend development and a slew of marketing services including SEO, SEM, and PPC. They've also revamped email marketing series to drive increased engagement and conversions.
Consistently delivering results in a high-stakes industry, Traktek has earned its spot as an ongoing partner. They've been responsive and engaged throughout the relationship, both delivering on requirements and pushing the envelope to drive growth. Customers can expect a confident, skilled partner.
A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.
BACKGROUND
Introduce your business and what you do there.
I was the senior art director and then senior digital marketing manager for the company. I worked on any and all things digital, from website redesigns, email welcomes, and re-engagement emails to SEM, SEO, and third-party digital campaigns.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
What challenge were you trying to address with Traktek Partners?
My company had a challenging environment, in that it was owned by one individual that could easily shift priorities based on a whim. We needed to develop a roadmap for a new website design, solving the issues we had with our current design at the time. It had been done by an agency that really didn’t understand us as a company or how our data model was set up. The challenge really was to understand how customer data flowed through the sales funnel, but also to design a beautifully functional, responsive website that worked for our core demographic, which was 65+ years.
SOLUTION
What was the scope of their involvement?
We had our own development team in the company, and Traktek created the frontend and worked with two other partners to turn over those assets and all their specifications to our in-house team. We were using the Sitecore CMS. The solution was quite complex, given how our products are built. Information has to flow the right way and into the right parts.
In addition to the website design, they handled a robust series of SEM buys and landing page designs. I worked closely with Traktek to set those up and establish the nuances of how they’d work. They also designed a series of trigger emails personalized for each customer.
Traktek worked on our SEO as well, including keyword and content optimization. They identified the richest keywords and optimized those for different sections of the site, while also working through a proper PPC campaign. At the time, the email series were designed through Adobe Campaign, but we recently transferred that to Salesforce.
What is the team composition?
Cyril (Managing Partner) was our lead contact. We also worked directly with Scott (SVP Account Director), who was a CMO at our company at one point and understood our data modeling. Jennifer (VP of Marketing and Client Services) was one of our contacts for SEO, SEM, and PPC. The email part of it was done with either Cyril or Scott, depending on what layer they needed to get into.
How did you come to work with Traktek Partners?
I started working for this company seven and a half years ago, andTraktek had done some prior work for them when I joined. When I first started in the company, Mark (VP Director of Technology) guided us through some of the backend CMS, building some landing pages. They have a number of deep-dive experts that can simplify problems and solve them in novel ways. We worked with other providers that seemed to have all the bells and whistles, but they couldn’t deliver, and it became apparent within a month. Traktek was able to turn on a dime and to be reactive without being a reactive company, meaning that they weren’t just going to jump and do something without having the experience and skillset and being able to talk through it. There are always things happening in the world that we can’t prevent or control for. Prior to COVID, we were always accounting for terrorism, because most of our customers are US citizens traveling overseas. We would have 15 different campaigns going on, trigger emails, SEM, the social component, and so on. Traktek would jump in to help out when we couldn’t turn quickly as a company.
How much have you invested with them?
The total cost was $1 million–$1.5 million.
What is the status of this engagement?
We started working with Traktek in March 2014. I left the company in May 2020, I last worked with Traktek in November 2019.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
Success for the company was getting a new customer to book within eight months. Traktek was able to shorten that a bit through the redesign they made on a welcome email series. People would have certain scores based on where they came from and what they were searching for, and we became more streamlined with that. It worked out rather well.
We almost doubled the engagement and time spent on the page through their SEO work. We had a target of $25–$30 per lead on the SEM side because the average price point was $1,700–$25,000 per customer. We were selling high-end lifestyle experiences. Our cost per lead used to be $65, and we got it down to $20. Because of the improved SEO, people would spend a bit more time on the page. Content was written more appropriately, and it got in front of more eyes at the right time. From there, the engagement would be longer, and we were able to understand behaviors and utilize our welcome and reengagement email series. The net result on those was that the conversion rate and bookings skyrocketed from 5–6 per email to triple that. Traktek not only produced designs in a more robust, responsive way, but they also spoke to the reasons why people did what they did and why they were navigating to a certain place. They made technical and content recommendations and guided us through them based on what trends we were seeing.
How did Traktek Partners perform from a project management standpoint?
We had multiple in-person meetings per week. When they weren’t in-house, we’d have 2–3 scheduled calls per week.Traktek was always on point with deadlines. Delays were always due to shifting from our side. For example, we’d decide to revisit a booking funnel for the website or the way an email looked. My former company was very much driven by the numbers, and what we saw visually was a complement to that, not the driving force behind it. It’s all about 35–40 years of legacy data that gets churned, moved, and cleansed. Traktek provided schedule updates during our regular meetings, and they had a deck ready with all the results week over week.
What did you find most impressive about them?
There was a time when the owner of my company couldn’t find a good CMO after going through about 20 of them. We called Cyril and Scott to actually sit in our office and run the marketing for a while. There was some good trust there.
Traktek is very communicative, and their solution space is very good. They didn’t just deliver what was expected. If we were designing something, they would deliver what they called a “safe version”, which had everything we needed and did everything we wanted, and they’d also go in a couple of different directions, which might surprise us and end up being good things. They had a good understanding of the hierarchy of things and what would work for the customer. It’s not one size fits all when it comes to that type of work, especially with the older audience we have. We wanted to empower them and keep them engaged, not overburden them visually. Traktek always offered us freshness that led to great ROI.
Are there any areas they could improve?
They’ve been great. With my former company, it’s feast or famine, and most people don’t survive three months there, let alone vendors. It really spoke volumes to have Traktek work with the company for such a long time on different projects and different ebbs and flows of the business, over changing culture and times.
Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?
People sometimes go into things thinking they need an agency but not understanding why. Traktek is able to look at the client holistically if the client wants that. They can do a deep dive into the background of the company and what they currently have out there and present what they see as working and as being broken. For example, they looked at our site and found 250 broken links. They found things that we didn’t even know were wrong because everyone was paying attention to their own silo.Traktek is able to see it from a thousand feet and get into the detail of where we want to go as a company. They can also make really good recommendations and work as a collaborative team player with any client.
RATINGS
-
Quality
5.0Service & Deliverables
-
Schedule
4.5On time / deadlines
-
Cost
5.0Value / within estimates
-
Willing to Refer
5.0NPS
"I’ve referred many clients to Traktek, even outside of the travel space.
