Number of students required to work in team: 2 teams of 3 students (flexible)

We are a 25-year old, family-run, "boutique-style" tour company (www.america4you.net) that was strictly B2B until 2020, working with international tour operators to bring visitors to the US and Canada. With the borders being closed due to the pandemic and therefore with time available to concentrate on a different project we fulfilled a longtime "dream" and branched out to create a travel company (www.travelyourbackyard.com) offering our packaged self-drive tours and ranch stay vacations to the domestic direct consumer. As a wholesaler we knew how to market ourselves through sales missions and trade shows, as an online direct marketing company we now need to find marketing strategies to attract direct consumers through, for example, social media. We need to find ways to optimize our website to make our products attractive to the active traveler, offering "adventures" and cultural experiences. Being well-traveled we know our "products" and are excited to share our knowledge so it translate into a perfect vacation, but we need to find the right strategies to be successful getting our name in front of the right audience.

The students would help create content and engage and attract followers for a travel business by looking at the current content calendar and advise changes and new strategies.

In short we are looking for a social media marketing wizard who can help us drive more traffic and improve our SEO positioning. The primary project requirements include:

1. Keyword analysis to determine relevant search terms to our organization
2. A strategy document to outline:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) requirements to ensure our organization appears on the first page of Google for relevant keywords
• Social media requirements to increase the number of followers/likes and share. Currently we are on Facebook (Travel Your Backyard) and Instagram (travel_your_backyard), but would like to expand to Twitter, Pinterest etc, if deemed appropriate for our kind of industry.

1. Content Calendar Execution: Timely deployment of all our social media content to drive maximum traffic to our site
2. Creating engaging content for prominent media websites
3. Working with tools and programs such as Hootsuite and Canva

We’re excited to work with students who can help us not only brainstorm, but also execute a strategy to achieve:

• Being the top-ranked result for the keywords 'Ranch Vacation'", "Self- Drive Tours" ," itineraries" etc.
• Create original and unique posts that attract the appropriate "travel" consumer while creating a marketing strategy to attract industry partners like state tourism offices and visitor bureaus to use us as a marketing tool for a fee.

This is a great project for students to prove their digital marketing expertise to future employers, as the impact of their work on this project can be easily measured and communicated.

Having been in the travel industry for 25+ years we can provide adequate virtual supervision to a student as well as mentorship when it comes to travel-related subjects. We will be available for guidance and training to gain in-depth knowledge of the needs of a travel company like ours. Lena Ross, the main contact for this project has a Masters in Sustainable Travel and is currently on the executive board of IITA (https://inboundtravel.org/)