How Journey Oregon’s Content material Technique Generated Over $50 Million in Financial Influence

When Mo Sherifdeen Joining Travel Oregon 19 years ago, he was the first person hired to work on the website.

His role as web manager was to upload documents and images via FTP sites. In other words, he was a glorified pixel pusher (the digital version of a pencil pusher).

As the digital landscape expanded, so did the importance of content in tourism. So in 2010, the Oregon Tourism Agency united its content efforts into a cohesive, structured unit and put Mo in charge.

Travel Oregon Mo Sherifdeen
Finalist for B2C Content Marketer of the Year

“As we expanded into social media and added more channels to the mix, creating a single team made a lot of sense. Fortunately, we were ahead of the curve,” he says.

The content team’s editorial goal is to be the trusted source of travel inspiration and information. To support this mission, the team publishes content to spark the traveler’s desire to experience Oregon.

And it’s doing something (or a lot of things) right: in 2024, Travel Oregon won the honors for best content strategy in the Content Marketing Pricingand Mo was recognized as a finalist for the B2C Content Marketer of the Year award.

Growing as a united team

Today, the one-team approach encompasses Travel Oregon’s marketing and sales staff. Now called the brand management team, it is responsible for develop brand awareness for Oregon globally and inspiring journeys that uplift Oregon communities.

About half of Travel Oregon’s employees work on the brand management team. The other half works on the B2B side, focusing on individual destinations and businesses that benefit from travel and tourism.

Together, the team balances Oregon’s economic, environmental, and social/cultural needs while working closely with the state’s tourism industry and residents.

The brand management team includes a brand services group, which focuses on campaign execution and works with Travel Oregon’s advertising, social, digital and publishing agencies. He also supports the global sales team and integrated marketing department, which Mo leads as director of global integrated marketing and publishing.

Integrated Marketingwho is also part of the brand management team, assumes the following roles:

An editor who reviews what Travel Oregon says on its channels. A production editor who oversees social media and website production. A digital platforms manager who is responsible for website innovations. An SEO manager that manages all listing-related content, like hiking trails and events. , on TravelOregon.com and third-party sites An information specialist who manages, among other tasks, Travel Oregon’s listings on third-party sites An analyst who closely monitors SEO, site speed and UTMs to monitor performance versus ad spend A team coordinator who helps organize work

“It’s a lot of collaboration“, Mo said.

Several partner agencies support the team and Mo emphasizes the importance of involving them from the design phase rather than leaving the final campaign to execute.

“If they feel like a concept won’t work or that our community wouldn’t respond, they point that out up front,” he says.

Travel Oregon also avoids being the gatekeeper of agencies. It encourages its advertising, social, digital and publishing agencies to work directly with each other.

“They have the power to pick up the phone and call each other and build that relationship,” says Mo. “They’re all singing from the same songbook and pitching us the same idea.”

This works well in part because agency partners I’ve been with Travel Oregon for so long: over 30 years in one case and six years in another.

Embark on a fair journey

This leadership support isn’t just about empowering teams behind the scenes. This also extends to Travel Oregon’s strategic vision: to generate equitable economic impact from tourism across the state and be welcoming to all.

This means promoting lesser-known tourist destinations and not marketing the places where everyone goes during peak tourist season. This means attracting diverse audiences, such as the LGBTQ+ community or travelers with disabilities, and showcasing untold stories about the region’s first inhabitants.

“You can’t be welcoming to everyone if you’re not an accessible place,” says Mo. “We have a huge network, but ultimately it’s limited to the people who subscribe to us. We therefore use influencers to expand our reach in these communities,” says Mo.

That’s why they worked with Ravi Roth, the host of Ravi Around the World. An influencer in the LGBTQ+ community, Ravi was thrilled when Travel Oregon invited him to come in July because he is inundated with invitations in June – Pride Month.

“This is just one example of how we try to keep in mind that people are here all year round. We can’t just think about them for Black History Month or Pride Month,” Mo says.

Ravi’s adventure included this reel published on Travel Oregon Instagram account.

“We’re trying to make sure we have fair representation in our content so that it’s not just lip service,” says Mo.

Travel Oregon has also worked with Kelcie Miller, the chronic explorerdisabled environmental scientist and social entrepreneur exploring the world.

Accessible travel also involves tourism related to early Oregonians – the federally recognized tribes of Oregon.

Travel Oregon worked with a tribal editorial steering committee that guides the content work and recruits tribal writers and photographers to help execute it. He published two tribal guides to help travelers experience Oregon’s native culture. He also created a Tribal Nations Section under Places to Go on the Travel Oregon website which features Oregon’s nine tribal nations.

Each country’s guide includes tips on visiting, short articles on places to visit, and more in-depth, longer content. For example, in Keeping an indigenous language and culture aliveAuthor Riley Rice, a member of the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians, tells the story of Warm Springs, incorporating cultural traditions, stories of its people, and places to visit – from a museum to adventure spots outdoors.

Images and a video from Wahoo Films punctuate the long, wonderfully written text:

“When it comes to work, we want to do it in a conscious and respectful way,” says Mo.

Millions of people are adopting Travel Oregon and growing their economic impact

The hospitality strategy is working, as Travel Oregon reported in its Content Marketing Awards submission:

TravelOregon.com, the content platform for inspiration and essential logistics content, attracts 9 million page views and 4 million sessions annually. Printed guides provide information to travelers on the ground. Around 500,000 copies are printed and distributed. Digital versions are also available. Content from its social networks reached users’ feeds 41 million times in one year.

What’s more, Travel Oregon’s content has a financial impact.

Website visitors are more likely to spend $1,000 or more per day on their trip. They are also more likely to have viewed an online travel guide, read a travel article on the site, and used the printed destination guide.

A 12-month analysis (conducted using pre- and post-surveys of website visitors on the site’s impact on their travel) showed an economic impact of $48.9 million from the 25,255 trips additional information made by out-of-state website visitors who had not opted in. to travel to Oregon before visiting the site.

The analysis also found an economic impact of $6.2 million from 16,190 new visitor days – the period when out-of-state website visitors extended their stay in Oregon. Seventy-three percent of out-of-state visitors extended their stay by an average of 2.2 days, and 36 percent of in-state visitors stayed an average of 1.9 days longer.

What Makes Content Strategy Work

Many factors go into Travel Oregon’s success (a small but mighty team, support for thinking outside the box in travel, collaborative agencies, etc.).

But Mo and the team are also aiming for more than engagement. Getting a like on an Instagram image of a beautiful Oregon sunset is never the goal because inspiration without information is meaningless.

Yes, they want the photo to attract attention and pique curiosity so that Travel Oregon can share practical information about the place, the people who live there, the best time to visit, etc.

But Mo says success comes down to one thing.

“Building confidence and doing it consistently through inspiring educational content is huge,” he says.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute