Trover: An HMI Success Story
We are so pleased with the success of our friends (and long-term clients!) at Trover, who recently joined the Expedia family.
For eighteen months we worked with Trover on an influencer outreach program that included over 50 well-known influencers across a number of platforms. From Instagrammers to bloggers, Youtubers to Pinterest stars, this ongoing program was a big part of their tremendous growth and success.
Recently, we caught up with Jen Briggs, the former VP of Marketing from Trover, in a session recorded for our first webinar, How to Work With Travel Bloggers. Jen worked closely with our CEO Dalene Heck and was happy to dive into some of the results generated from their work together.
*UPDATE: Trover and HMI resumed their relationship in late 2016 and it is still going strong.
Jen, can you tell us a little bit about Trover?
Trover is an app and a website built for travelers. It is a great tool for people to find inspiration when they are searching for a destination, their next favorite jaunt for a weekend or getaway. And it is a tool for folks to find things to see and do when they have arrived at their destination.
Can you talk about what led to that success?
We worked with influencers and bloggers and a number of very influential brands and personalities in the travel community, and built a really engaged community around travel photos.
And how did your work with these new media influencers compare with other methods that you tried?
Previously we’d been doing a lot more paid advertising, like pay-per-click. The community really gathered around the influencers. We had also done some grassroots events, but what we found was that platform really began to fire up when we gathered around the influencers and their existing communities.
Why do you think that most of the success came in working with travel influencers?
We were able to target a specific type of audience when we looked at the following of the influencers. We were able to bring bloggers to the table who already had communities engaged around this topic or engaged and fired up about travel, and it was a great way to get them moving on to the platform. There was trust already built, they were able to endorse this product that really meant something to them and delivered a particular value that they were able to articulate via their own stories.
Can you tell us a little bit about how Trover measured or determined ROI for these influencer campaigns?
It was really easy for us to measure new traffic coming to the site, new downloads, that specifically correlated with the posts and engagement we had from the influencers and bloggers. One of the ways we looked at that was by measuring our inclusion in wrap-ups or round-ups from the travel industry and also new media and consumer media in general. Specific examples of that included being mentioned in Forbes, Buzzfeed, CNN, and WSJ and then some travel round-ups as well.
We also had internal engagement metrics that we looked at, and over the course of the relationship with HMI, we saw a 10x in engagement on the platform.
We measured success based on the partnerships and relationships that we built in the industry as well. A lot of that came from introductions and the hard work that was provided to us by HMI. They brought us great contacts who had tons of expertise and fantastic collaborators, so it was easy to build those relationships with their connections.
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