Ears of Experience
www.themouseexperts.com

"Sūmèr has helped us immensely by doing what they do so well by allowing us the time to do what we do best: plan amazing Disney vacations for our clients.”                                                                            --Amy Sinclair, Ears of Experience

Ears of Experience is a boutique, no-cost Disney travel booking company based in Charleston, South Carolina. They work closely with clients to determine their specific desires and needs and create a highly personalized and detail-oriented Walt Disney World® itinerary for families. They also offer their expertise to families who have children with disabilities to help them plan the perfect Walt Disney World® vacation. 

Challenge: 

As a family-owned travel firm competing with Disney’s direct booking availability and larger travel agencies—and ones which cater to a variety of destinations, not solely Disney—the company was struggling to stand apart from the crowd as the Walt Disney World® expert vacation planners. With 70% of business coming from referrals, the new company needed to steadily expand their market base online by creating a unique brand story and sharing that story through online promotion. 

Solution:

Sūmèr created a comprehensive publicity strategy to support Ears of Experience’s goals, objectives, and need for media and blog exposure. We first pinpointed their target audience and key influencers and then identified where these targeted groups spent their time online and what publications they read. We also helped them identify their niche markets—military families and families with disabled children—and created niche-focused campaigns to create a buzz. 

In order to effectively approach their audience online, Sūmèr implemented a unique and strategic PR strategy to tell the Ears of Experience story, enhance company exposure, and position them as the no-cost Disney travel booking company. Specifically, our campaigns aimed to generate media coverage in print media and online platforms, gain blog readership and subscriptions, build incoming links to boost overall search engine rankings, and drive qualified traffic to the main Ears of Experience website and blog. 

Results: 

The results of our PR efforts generated print and online publications and online chatter on social media among key influencers, which has significantly increased. Publications have included numerous articles in newspapers, magazines, and newsletters, and spotlights on prominent family-oriented blogs. A few of these include a feature article in the Arts & Travel Section of The Post & Courier, an article in the high-end magazine Baby Couture, a write-up on The Good Stuff Guide blog (which receives over 183,000 visitors a month), page one positioning on Google for certain industry keywords, a significant increase in blog traffic, numerous leads from the internet, and best of all new clients. After 5 months of tracking, 12% of their revenue came from The Post & Courier article, 9% from the military blog marketing campaign, and 9% from the disability PR campaign. 

Ears of Experience is now well publicized and known in their niche markets, specifically military families and families with disabled children. In a single campaign on their specialized services to autistic and Down Syndrome children and their families, we were able to place their story in two well-trafficked blogs, four autism industry newsletters, and a magazine as a feature article. 

As a result of reaching out to key influencers and the overall media exposure, Ears of Experience has had a major increase in their Facebook followers by 47%. They receive several inquiries a day from social media sites and have had an increase in their blog readership. 

Benefits in the client’s own words:

• A strategic and personalized promotion plan: “Sūmèr’s innovative thinking and way of approaching my company vision was creative and extremely effective. After listening to all of my concerns and company goals, Michelle and her team came up with a plan that worked to fit my individual needs.” 

• Increase in blog traffic: “Before hiring Sūmèr to promote our blog, our blog only brought in .57 percent of our website traffic. In two months time, our blog is our third-highest referrer to our website. With the help of Sūmèr working with us to understand what our target audience wants to hear, we’ve been able to provide valuable content on our blog. It is now a useful tool for our clients, prospects, and lovers of all things Disney.”  

• Stronger connections with key influencers and prospects: We’ve worked with Sūmèr on incorporating our blog into our Facebook and other social media sites. We’re seeing a great amount of success through that, and whenever I post something on Facebook—whether it’s the blog that comes up or just a blurb I post—the percent of website visitors shoots way up. People are out there talking about us and sharing our posts.” 

• More efficient use of time: Hiring Sūmèr to help me with PR and blog marketing saved me time on things I know less about, raised our website presence to a completely different level, and expanded our services to potential clients. They’ve helped us immensely by doing what they do so well by allowing us the time to do what we do best: plan amazing Disney vacations for our clients.”

Sūmèr created a comprehensive publicity package to support Ears of Experience’s goals, objectives, and need for media and blog exposure. Out of this need, we implemented a unique PR strategy to tell the Ears of Experience story, enhance company exposure, and position them as the no-cost Disney travel booking company. Specifically, our campaign aims to generate media coverage, gain blog readership, build incoming links to boost overall search engine rankings, and drive qualified traffic to the main Ears of Experience website and blog.

The results of our PR efforts have included a feature article in the Arts & Travel Section of The Post & Courier,  page one positioning on Google for certain industry keywords, a significant increase in blog traffic, numerous leads from the internet, and best of all new clients.