Collaborating with a Marketing Manager on a daily basis for over two years, I learned and helped to create and implement a successful marketing plan and marketing budget.

I was responsible for the launch of new walking tours, including the Cotswold Way and South West Coast Path in 2018, the Speyside Way Whisky Trail and Pembrokeshire Coast Path in 2019 and the South Downs Way in 2020. This included working closely with the Product Team, supervising the website content, deciding on a marketing plan (email marketing, social media, etc) and executing it in order to effectively promote these new tours.

I managed over 400 PPC Search Ads for Hillwalk Tours – among them 50 I created myself – and was in charge of geotargeting the campaigns, finding the most relevant keywords using SEMrush and adjusting the bidding strategy on a weekly basis based on an allocated budget and competitors’ bids. Additionally, I put in place over 70 retargeting display ads based on visitors’ behaviour on the website to entice them to come back and increase conversion rates.

I designed and created content for over 120 email campaigns using the Mailchimp email automation platform. Targeting each campaign to a carefully defined segment from a 20,000 subscriber base, I managed to obtain an average email open rate of 54% and click rate of 7.5%. On top of this, I came up with the idea of creating a long-running campaign named This Week on the Trail featuring the best photos from customers, which turned out to be a massive success with 18 emails sent and an average open rate of 80.1%. Additionally I actively contributed to the growth of the company’s mailing list by 120% within 30 months using OptinMonster and other signup incentives.

Using the Mailchimp email automation platform, I created a state-of-the-art email automation programme triggering over 50 different email templates that were targeted at Hillwalk Tours’ mailing list based on each users’ preferences and behaviour.

With an average of 12,000 hits per month on the website, boosting the organic rankings played a significant role in the generation of new leads, using tools such as SEMRush Keyword Gap and SEMRush Keyword Magic Tool and tweaking meta tags accordingly. In order to maintain SEO rankings after a website migration from Joomla to WordPress in mid-2019,  I implemented on-page optimisation in WordPress – using SEMRush Site Audit and Google Lighthouse – including CSS and JS minification, image compression, etc.

With a follower base of over 30,000 hiking enthusiasts, I wrote and cross-posted over 200 inspiring posts and stories across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter using Teamup Calendar and Hootsuite scheduler. I also actively contributed to increasing the number of followers by 175% within 30 months.

This included social media collages using Canva or GIMP, promotional videos made with Wondershare Filmora and professional booklets for trade shows designed with Publisher.

In order to achieve a wow factor among our hiking enthusiasts, I was in charge of sourcing the most inspiring and high quality photos for the website and marketing campaigns, using 123RF and Shutterstock, and contacting previous walkers via vibrant email campaigns.

At the time of migrating the company’s website from Joomla to WordPress, I assisted CloveRock Design web agency by designing the mock-ups of the new website, moving content over and creating redirects to match the new url structure.

Known as the “website expert” at Hillwalk Tours, I was assigned the development of extra features for the website, including an online shop using WooCommerce, gift vouchers, an off-season page, new advanced custom fields, lead generation pop-ups using OptinMonster, etc.

For this ambitious project, I worked in close collaboration with Hillwalk Tours founder James Byrne over 6 months to provide walkers with an optimal experience on the trails. This included identifying their pain points and the different booking scenarios before designing an elegant and user-friendly A5 booklet including hikes overview, hiking directions, maps, accommodation, recommendations and more.

To ensure the smothest experience for French speakers on www.hillwalktours.fr, I reviewed the copy of over 200 pages (incl. homepage, country landing pages, tour pages, itineraries, etc) and provided translation for more than 50 pages (incl. T&Cs, Our Story, tour page and itineraries for the Cotswold Way and South West Coast Path, etc) and other marketing materials.