There are over 250,000,000 results in Google when we type “travel blog”. You Could Travel found itself competing against established travel brands and websites with a more global reach. To stand a chance, You Could Travel needed to find a unique niche, boost consideration across its target audience and be able to communicate a memorable message across all social media channels. Doing so meant building awareness not just for the brand itself, but also for its new niche of choice.

We conducted market research amongst various travellers aged 25-34. We developed 5 core personas with associated purchase journeys. Our study uncovered that most travellers decide upon reading a new travel outlet based on their ability to visually explore and imagine a destination. Beyond the importance of media heavy material, our visual thinkers craved information heavy articles which act as comprehensive guides and honest reviews. It was obvious that using just impactful visual content wouldn’t cut it, hence we wanted to showcase the essence of travelling, through a series of well collected, written and distributed travel news, guides and memories.  

42droids developed a digital and offline media strategy for You Could Travel. We focused on reaching the core target audience via a strong branding & identity, a sleek and intuitive website and media partnerships with other already established brands.

Our plan started with a comprehensive market research, moved onto the creation of a digital and mobile presence and continued with A/B testing, social media promotion and SEO. Soon enough, You Could Travel became an authority in its niche and a worldwide recognised travel website which raises individual awareness and continues to grow at a rate of 40% from month to month.

You Could Travel’s target audience are educated millennial couples between 25-34 with a serious passion for travelling and disposable income. We worked on creating an impactful and memorable logo, which has the potential to be expanded towards other business areas You Could Travel wanted to tap into. Born in Bristol, UK, the company’s logo is a hot air balloon as a reminder of the famed international balloon fiesta which brings together various adventure and travel enthusiasts from all around the world. As per our market research, we established the gradient colours which was most loved and associated with the joy and happiness of travelling.

You Could Travel needed to be user-friendly, fully flexible and aesthetically pleasing. Our creative team wanted to have a high visual impact upon initial contact with the website, whilst quickly easing into an array of useful information. As You Could Travel is mostly visited by mobile users, the user experience team created a structure for an intuitive user journey which drives the core audience towards purchase.

We didn’t want You Could Travel to be just another travel blog. We envisioned the website expanding into a never-ending source of useful information. For this, we needed a CMS system which is not only flexible but offers us the possibility to continue to add functionality while keeping information safe and secure.

Our Drupal developer team created an enterprise-level publishing tool which is not only highly customisable but perfect to accommodate an increased amount of content and handle a huge amount of traffic. With powerful editorial features, You Could Travel wanted to opt-in for paragraphs so the content creators can endlessly expand on the site’s taxonomy by being able to create an array of new pages and re-using readily available and styled building blocks. This was key in ensuring You Could Travel doesn’t offer repetitive visual content, but is easily configurable and ever-changing.

Our Drupal development team created custom modules to enable You Could Travel to promote selected partners as well as API integrations to facilitate an easy to use e-commerce store.

As an image heavy site, we faced initial issues with our load time. By implementing responsive image styles in addition to lazy loading and a shift towards adopting SVG images for all front-end assets, we managed to provide a richer user experience.

You Could Travel is highly optimised and hosted in a fully managed environment which enables users to access the website at a very high speed. You Could Travel has AMP enabled which increases visibility and traffic from mobile users. Finally, we made use of Drupal’s cache as well as Varnish on the server to ensure we achieve the perfect combination of performance and quality.