Greater Palm Springs’ Authentic Visual Content Inspires Travelers to Find Their Oasis
Results with Stackla-powered UGC:
- 209% growth in average webpage session duration
- 141% increase in average webpages per session
- 66% reduction in average webpage bounce rate
- 81% increase in Eat & Drink page session duration
- 51% increase in Eat & Drink pages per session
- 65% reduction in Eat & Drink page bounce rate
Greater Palm Springs CVB, a DMO consisting of nine beautiful cities in the oasis of Southern California, knows how to chill. With attractions like sprawling golf courses, poolside cabanas, natural mineral water hot springs and Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, Palm Springs is an iconic destination for Californians and visitors alike.
The vibrancy and colorful nature of Greater Palm Springs makes it an iconically Instagrammable destination. From the pink doors (you know the ones!) to the rainbow hotels and dinosaur statues — and so much more — visitors leave Greater Palm Springs with thousands of photos that are naturally primed for social sharing.
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Explore the doors of Greater Palm Springs. #visitGPS Photo by @fredbaby13 via @kellygolightly
With all of that great user-generated content (UGC) ready to be leveraged across their content channels, the team at Greater Palm Springs looked to Stackla for a solution that could scale. “Visitors are coming to Greater Palm Springs and capturing their moments on Instagram,” says Krystal Kusmieruk, Digital Marketing Manager at Greater Palm Springs CVB. “We wanted to be able to share those experiences with our visitors and build up our galleries.”
But, in order to build up these galleries, the team needed to be sure they had the rights to the images they liked. “We wanted to ensure that we were doing user-generated content the right way,” says Kusmieruk. “It was really important to our organization that we had rights management within the software. We wanted to make sure we could get the rights quickly and easily.”
With Stackla’s robust rights management workflows, the Greater Palm Springs team now has hundreds of user-generated images, and they’re featuring that authentic content across their website and social channels.
Managing rights, saving time, creating lasting experiences
The Greater Palm Springs looked to Stackla to improve an essential component of their marketing strategy: time management. “We don’t have unlimited hours each week to be looking for UGC,” said Kusmieruk. “We needed our solution to be effective and easy to use. We know how busy everyone is, and we know how easy it is to be endlessly scrolling through Instagram looking for that perfect poolside photo.”
As marketers (and as humans), we’ve all been stuck in that endless scroll. But, with Stackla, the Greater Palm Springs team can easily surface all the best content they previously had to search for manually, saving ample amounts of time. “Stackla allows us to quickly aggregate terms and hashtags we want to find,” says Kusmieruk. “From there, we can easily request rights to the photos we like from within the platform.”
After sending requests out through Stackla, the Greater Palm Springs team sees approvals come in. “We’ve found that we get a higher response when we customize our requests within Stackla,” says Kusmieruk. “It allows us to have a quick turnaround to feature all the best travel photos from Greater Palm Springs.”
By customizing rights requests for specific photos, content creators are more inclined to respond. Personalized efforts go a long way, especially when marketing with your customers — according to a recent Stackla report, 67 percent of consumers (73 percent of Gen Z and 70 percent of Millennials) say it’s important for brands to provide them with a personalized experience.
With traveler-created content, Greater Palm Springs sees a 209% growth in session duration, 66% reduction in bounce rate across all webpages
With a repository of rights-managed photos ready to use, Greater Palm Springs featured that content across the website — and they’re seeing results. “Once we chose the photos we liked, we easily built a gallery on our website. Now, we have UGC featured on over 15 pages on our website,” says Kusmieruk.
And, that authentic UGC is working. Compared to the webpages without any user-generated content, the pages with UGC galleries saw a 209 percent growth in average session duration, 66 percent improvement in bounce rate and a 141 percent increase in pages per session.
These compelling UGC images are engaging consumers, too. Visitors to the Greater Palm Springs webpages who interacted with the Stackla-powered UGC galleries had a 170 percent higher average session duration, 87 percent lower bounce rate and 110 percent increase in pages per session.
Authentic UGC on Eat & Drink pages increases average session duration by 81%, reduces bounce rate by 65%
“It’s really nice to be able to add customized tiles within our Stackla galleries,” said Kusmieruk. “Our official brand hashtag is #FindYourOasis, but we really want to get people familiar with the culinary scene in Greater Palm Springs and #dineGPS.” So, the team created a #dineGPS-specific UGC gallery to display on their Eat & Drink page — inviting visitors to share their favorite dining experiences in Greater Palm Springs alongside other delectable photos.
“We’re hoping that people will see the photos we feature, dine with us, and then share their own photos with the #dineGPS hashtag to help us build an even bigger repository of photos we can pull from later for other content channels,” says Kusmieruk. And, that strategy is proven to work; according to a recent study, 85 percent of people said they would post about a positive dining experience at a restaurant.
That authentic food and drink content is not only inspiring visitors, but it’s encouraging them to engage as well. Compared to the Eat & Drink webpages without UGC, the Eat & Drink pages with authentic visual content saw an 81 percent increase in average session duration, a 65 percent reduction in bounce rate and a 51 percent increase in pages per session. And, users who interacted with that UGC spent 238 percent longer average sessions and had a 20 percent lower bounce rate. That’s authentic content driving real results.
A fully integrated digital asset manager with UGC alongside photographs and branded imagery
By integrating Stackla with their Barberstock digital asset manager (DAM), Greater Palm Springs always has these engaging and authentic visuals available to the entire team. “We can have all of the photos we’ve rights managed alongside the other photos in our DAM,” says Kusmieruk. “Anyone on the digital team can quickly go in there, download the high resolution version and use that.”
In the future, Greater Palm Springs is already planning to expand their UGC use cases into email marketing efforts and actionable ShopSpots. “It’s very easy,” says Kusmieruk. “The implementation process was really quick, and we jumped in and customized and we’ve continued to build out use cases. Working with the Stackla team has been really helpful.” Greater Palm Springs is certainly an oasis, and we look forward to more colorful, engaging content in the future.
To learn more about how Greater Palm Springs leverages authentic content, tune in to the on-demand webinar, How Greater Palm Springs Leverages User-Generated Content to Inspire & Attract Visitors.
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