Cardaklije - Case Study

Not far from Bosanski Petrovac, in the village of Vrtoce, is located the "Cardaklija" ethno village. Cardaklije have an excellent position for tourism and are located on the 30th kilometer of the Bihac-Sarajevo main road, 12 km from the Una National Park, 2 hours from the Adriatic Sea and 70 km from the Plitvice Lakes.

Also, this ethno village is rich in amenities for its guests. Horseback riding, great local food, nature trips, traditional wooden guest houses, parties and events are just some of the things on offer. However, the owners were not impressed with the number of guests, especially in winter and spring, so they decided to contact us to help them with digital marketing, that is, to increase the number of guests.

Cardaklije Facebook page, although inactive and full of poor resolution photos, already existed so it was much easier to upgrade the already existing companion base of around 5,000, which was not a large number given the age of the page and the number of guests that in the meanwhile circulated through the village.

The first thing we did was to hire a professional photographer to make new quality household, food and guest photos. 

We started pretty hard with posts and promotion. The posts were made five times a week and consisted of quality, striking photographs of household and food, specific offers of accommodation, amenities and tourist attractions in the vicinity.

The audience response was phenomenal. The posts averaged 700 likes, 50 comments and shares each. Some posts had up to 1,500, 2,000 likes. The cost of sponsoring publications has never exceeded $ 3 per post.

Most of the effect was created by food posts asking people to tag a person in the comments who then had to take them to a household treat. A lot of people regularly commented and tagged their friends and family members, and so at no cost did we get to more and more new companions and people who didn't know about Cardaklije.

The good graphic preparation that was done played a big part in promoting Cardaklije. Posts on the page were promoted throughout BiH and in parts of Croatia and Slovenia, geographically close to the ethno village. A huge number of bookings flooded the inbox on the site, over 500 people responded to messages during the promotion.

In the six months that the digital campaign on Facebook has lasted, as can be seen in the graph above, the number of followers increased by just over 8 thousand, more than double the initial number.

Attention was given to anyone who did some form of interaction with the Facebook page, every comment was liked and answered, anyone who answered the inbox would receive a response as soon as possible, although there were a large number of interactions at short intervals.

It is very important to devote yourself to each follower individually. We also encouraged our guests to share their household photos with us, then included the best of those photos in our posts, further enhancing the engagement of followers on the page. Below is an example of a post that used a photo of one of the guests.

The number of household visitors tripled and the main problem became the insufficient number of household workers who were unable to serve all the guests at times, so there were also some negative impressions on the site, all for the same reason caused by service overload. capacity of the household.

Cardaklije is today one of the leading tourist offers of ethno tourism in BiH. The number of guests is constantly increasing, as is the capacity and facilities of the household. This is another positive example of the impact of well-designed and applied digital marketing.