Marketing Success Story - Líneas Romero

The objective of this project consisted in the creation of a responsive website, the creation of buyer-personas, SEO positioning and the implementation of Inbound Marketing to achieve the digital transformation of the company.

Líneas Romero

Líneas Romero is a family business dedicated to maritime transport in the Canary Islands, founded in 1930 by Jorge M. Toledo. In 1970, Juan Romero took the management of the company and changed its name; since then the Romero family has been at the head of the company that is based on the island of La Graciosa.

Líneas Romero was the first postal mail company to make trips between Lanzarote and La Graciosa, and currently offers its regular line services between these islands and Fuerteventura, which has made it the main maritime transport of Lanzarote and one of the most recognized ferry companies in the Canarian archipelago. Apart from its regular ferry lines, it offers excursions and tourist experiences with specialized guides in the Canary Islands: cruises with marine vision, sailing catamarans and various water activities.

The company offers its services to the island traveller and also for the tourist that seeks to move between islands and is attracted by its offer of experiences. In order to continue reinventing itself in its regular lines and its experiences, the Romero family is committed to new technologies, using fast, modern vessels and implementing the latest technology.

The Challenge

For some years, the tourism sector has been one of the sectors where you can see an endless number of changes to which companies need to adapt. Both consumers and the purchase method have evolved and continue changing continuously due to the great influence of the Internet, which has completely changed the way customers make purchases. Clients have the great amounts of online information where to seek advice, opinions, and even compare the products or services of different companies.

This means that one of the objectives to join the digital transformation of the tourism sector is to design and create its own digital channel to attract, engage and delight customers, as well as to stand out from the competition and get the target audience to choose us. This process must have a well-defined strategy and actions aimed at each segment of our target audience. The combination of both will attract qualified traffic to the web, increase the number of potential customers, improve the conversion process, etc.

As this technology leap happened with hotel establishments a few years ago, it is now happening with regular ferry companies. In the traditional tourist trade, customers made their reservations at the physical ticket office, or resorting to tour operators. However, the conventional sale was causing some inconveniences to the company, such as the formation of long lines of customers to acquire their tickets, complications with managing last minute reservations. Travellers choose another company of the competition that does not present these difficulties and facilitate carefree booking process.

The Solution

In order to meet the challenge of Líneas Romero, the Amara solution was planted in three different phases: the creation of an intuitive and responsive website, the creation of buyer personas and the implementation of an Inbound Marketing strategy.

Phase 1

An intuitive and responsive website was designed to act as its own promotion and sales channel. Amara proposed a unique design, attractive and focused specially to attract a greater number of visitors, as well as facilitate the conversion process to turn visitors into sales opportunities.

In addition, we worked to diversify and differentiate the products and services of Líneas Romero, so that the presentation of the company's offer was more attractive and would consequently improve the image of its brand.

Since the company wanted to increase the number of online bookings, we developed a unique booking engine for the company. This booking engine would be integrated by a great variety of technological tools connected to each other, so that processes could be automated in order to save time.

With this website the customer's shopping experience would definitely be improved, reducing dependence on tour operators, reducing long lines of customers and avoiding the complications of managing last-minute bookings. Basically, get a better booking service that allows more speed, and therefore a faster closing of sales.

Phase 2

The creation of profiles of buyer personas (potential customers) had the objective to prepare strategies with segmented actions, so that it would be actions designed for the completely different clients of Líneas Romero. To define these profiles, it was necessary to have the necessary characteristics and information, in order to establish groups of clients that share similarities. We capture as much data as possible from both leads and regular customers, with their customer characteristics and especially their interactions with the brand.

With a greater knowledge of the profiles of the target audience of the company, it would be much easier to create campaigns directed to each buyer-persona and launch segmented actions, such as to create future email marketing campaigns. In order to store all this new and valuable information, a CRM system was implemented to be able to access customer information at any time and in a simple manner.

Once these profiles are created, the corresponding customer types should be attracted to the Líneas Romero website. We conducted a keyword search that different customers of the company used to perform their searches on the Internet. The content created for the website and for the blog was based on these keywords used by the target audience. In this way, we managed to work on a better SEO positioning of the website in search engines and attract qualified traffic.

Phase 3

This last phase consisted in the definition and implementation of campaigns created under the Inbound Marketing strategy. This strategy is very effective in the tourism sector because it consists of creating content of interest for customers to attract them to the website, while presenting the solutions to their problems. Thanks to the definition of the buyer-personas, the SEO strategy and the automation of processes, it was possible to launch a campaign to attract more traffic to the website, and thus have more opportunities to transform online visitors into leads. Essentially, the goal of the Inbound is to attract people prepared to become customers, in order to achieve a considerable increase in online customers in the medium and long term.