Driving strong digital marketing results for Scotland’s St Hilda Sea Adventures

St Hilda Sea Adventures helps guests experience the magic of Scotland’s “Wild Isles” with small ship cruises along the Scottish coast and around the Inner and Outer Hebrides. Family owned and operated, they came to Redpoint to expand their limited awareness in the US and unlock the secret to growing that market. They had been marketing in the US previously but just weren’t gaining a strong foothold, and they sought to complement their super-strong UK market with more visitors from across the pond.

Before making any changes to the marketing strategy, we did a deep dive under the hood to analyze what was happening. Armed with the keys to their digital castle, we audited all their US and UK marketing channels to uncover the reality of their customer journey and sales funnel.

What did we find to help us recalibrate their strategy and spending? PLENTY. We identified a slew of pain points and opportunities that we knew would help them turn their marketing ship around (we can never resist a good pun). Highlights from 30,000 feet – because it’s not our place to share their data – include:

• As so often happens with a multinational marketing strategy, there were some critical crossed wires causing confusion with Google for UK vs US traffic.
• The overall marketing mix leaned heavily into promotional messaging with a transactional vibe. Significant gaps in storytelling, inspirational content, and brand awareness were evident, presenting a major opportunity for higher engagement and potential guest connection.
• Ad spending had some imbalances that needed smoothing out.
• Overall, the marketing wasn’t successfully leveraging their KEY STRENGTHS, as a family-owned, high touch, richly experiential travel company. So, a ton of potential marketing lures were being left on the table, unleveraged.

Our focus when we do audits like these is not just to crunch numbers and assess stats. Our focus is: what does the data tell us about consumer behavior, the integrity of the digital tools being used, and – perhaps most importantly – how can we position our clients as the ideal solution for travelers during their research phase? For example, if a traveler wanted to find a small ship cruise experience…why do it in Scotland? And if a traveler wanted to go to Scotland…why see that destination through a small ship cruise experience? And through it all…why is St Hilda the “right choice” for an experiential vacation in Scotland?

After a thorough collab with the owners to review our findings and big picture recommendations, we created a comprehensive US/UK marketing strategy designed to…

• Generate more sales leads but with a lower digital ad spend. This required a full overhaul of both the UK and US digital ad strategy.
• Streamline the customer journey and grease the sales funnel. This required a bunch of website work – both techie and visual – to significantly improve the user experience and untangle Google’s crossed wires.
• Harness distinct US and UK marketing strategies that complemented, rather than competed, with one another. This required a lot of geeky technical work under the hood…but don’t worry, we drank a lot of coffee while sorting through it.
• Breathe new, vibrant life into the marketing mix by infusing it with storytelling and a diverse array of inspirational touchpoints. This meant replacing their automated, transactional email program with a robust, creative, and original monthly newsletter that leans into long-form content and stunning visuals.

How’d it go? Well, data from the first 12 months following all our changes tells a successful story:

• Cost per lead for digital ad campaigns was reduced by 48%.
• Enquiry form submissions increased by more than 40%.
• Total ad spend was reduced by 14%, with a strategic balance between US and UK and consistent traffic levels coming from both markets.
• PPC traffic overall increased by 35%, and SEO traffic by an impressive 10%.

And that revamped email program? CRUSHING IT. Not only did the average open rate shoot up past 44%, but apparently the email developed a fan club. We learned this one day on a call with the owners, when we told them the date/time we were dropping the next email…and their response was “oh boy, time to prepare for all the email responses!” Alarmed, we immediately asked for an explanation, worried that they were getting a large volume of spam reports, bounce backs, or unsubscribes. Turns out, every time we send out one of their email newsletters, they get a flood of love letters from subscribers waxing poetic about how much they enjoy reading it! <we’re blushing>

So, shout out to our design and content teams for creating wildly engaging issues of St Hilda’s Highland Times. You can check out a few issues for yourself here: