About Travel Leaders
As its name suggests, Travel Leaders Group is the preeminent travel agency network in North America, spanning the corporate, leisure, and luxury segments. Comprised of more than 50,000 agents at 7,000 owned, franchised, and affiliated travel agencies across the world, it provides highly personalized trip planning services for millions of clients every year.
The Challenge
For a company that is a leader in the travel industry, it was imperative that its digital presence aligned with the size and sophistication of its services and evolved with the way its stakeholders were consuming content.
When discussing the value of creating more robust digital and interactive content, Darren Press, VP of Creative at Travel Leaders Group says “it’s what today’s modern consumers expect. They want that level of digital engagement while they are making a purchasing decision, whether it’s a 7-day Caribbean cruise or a destination wedding in Europe.”
The Solution & Results
The Travel Leaders Group team first viewed the Ceros platform as a way to create more engaging, consumer-facing digital content for their Vacation.com brand. They envisioned using pieces like quizzes, slideshows and interactive planning calendars to help consumers make decisions in their travel planning process.
“Our key metric is conversions,” says Jennifer Coulter, Director of Content, when outlining their goals. Ever since implementing the Ceros platform for demand generation collateral, they’ve seen an increase of qualified prospects moving through the sales funnel. “The more time a prospect spends consuming our information in an interactive and immersive way, the more likely they are to continue progressing towards conversion,” says Jennifer.
After they saw a dramatic increase in engagement, Darren’s team sought to identify additional use-cases for Ceros across the organization. For example, in the past Travel Leaders Group sent slide-based proposals to potential clients, outlining their technological acumen and cutting-edge business philosophy. By switching to the Ceros platform to create highly customized sales decks and micro-sites, they now have the ability to showcase their expertise visually and track how recipients are engaging with the information.
New Creative Possibilities
In the past, Travel Leaders Group was beholden to the limitations of their CMS and their creative vision was restricted to a developers’ time constraints. When the Ceros studio was leveraged to help upgrade assets on one of its corporate websites, they noticed a reduction in execution time and felt like it opened up a new world of creative possibilities. Since interactive maps and animated header assets can now be built by their designers instead of developers, the speed at which they can publish engaging content has increased significantly.
Although Travel Leaders Group has integrated interactive content into all facets of its business, they relied on the team at Ceros in the beginning stages. The progression of usage can be broken down into three distinct phases. To jumpstart their move towards interactive content, the first 12 pieces were outsourced to the Ceros professional services team. After the initial projects were completed, they began to use those pieces as templates and iterate in-house. Eventually, a dedicated team of designers was trained on the platform and they are now creating multi-faceted experiences incorporating video, maps and other complex elements.
Ensuring Success
By relying on Ceros, Travel Leaders Group has not only found a platform that provides its designers the agility to create stunning and immersive content at scale, but also a partner that’s committed to ensuring their brand is presented in a way that truly reflects the caliber of its services.