The Cyprus Tourism Organisation (CTO) is the state body of the tourism sector in Cyprus; a sector that contributes almost 30% to the country’s GDP. The CTO’s main mission is the organisation, development and promotion of Cyprus tourism by exploiting the country's capabilities. It is also responsible for enhancing the value of Cyprus Tourism industry, in collaboration with the tourism sector and all other stakeholders to increase incoming tourism and revenues. Central to this mission is to initiate and support promotional activities in all markets that the CTO is targeting.  

The CTO wants to increase awareness and consideration of Cyprus as a travel destination in international markets.  Since 2011, the CTO has strategically decided to invest in digital communication to reach out to the global travellers more effectively and efficiently, primarily by driving traffic from across the globe to their digital presence.  

Designing international tourism campaigns comes with its many challenges, namely the diversity of different markets, brand perception and/or recognition in each market, product differentiation per market, cultural elements, and others. 

Furthermore, it’s common knowledge that competition is rife between mature Mediterranean destinations including Greece, Cyprus, Spain and Malta, particularly in terms of finding that unique point of differentiation between the regions when historically they’ve been promoted in a similar fashion more or less.

Year on year, we have had the challenge of designing something truly creative that not only captivates and engages a diverse online audience, but also effectively showcases the products, places and activities that someone can enjoy in Cyprus so as to achieve competitive advantage.  

With each online campaign, we have had to offer a unique digital experience that people will be eager to interact with and that will result in clickthroughs.  We have had to find and target relevant audiences, discover where they were spending their time online and understand what information they are looking for in terms of international travel and world-wide holiday destinations.

Working closely with the CTO since 2011, our strategy has been to design and execute creative digital campaigns in 11 countries across the globe to demonstrate the appeal of Cyprus as a travel destination for world travellers. 

Our digital marketing strategy was to create engaging user experiences that would showcase the tourism product of Cyprus. This was achieved by creating unique dedicated landing pages that talk to targeted international audiences so as to drive them towards conversion.  

We have produced Facebook applications that were leveraged to encourage audience engagement and drive traffic. We also utilised a mix of digital marketing campaigns - search, display, video, mobile and remarketing - across networks including Google, Yandex and Facebook in order to reach relevant audiences on sites across the web, and to attract visitors to the CTO’s website.  These campaigns were continually optimised based on the results and of A/B and multivariate testing of messages, design, creative and performance.