Who is Olivia Fuller?

Olivia Fuller, the current marketing manager of Ultimate Budapest, has a master’s in sustainable tourism management. During the second year of her master’s program, Olivia chose to do an internship report, which involved working a full-time internship and writing about it. For this report, Olivia began working with Ultimate Budapest and stepped into a role where she helped with promotion, events, and marketing. Previously, she didn’t have any experience in marketing, but through her in-depth research and on-the-job experience, she was able to pick it up quickly. 

Now, she is the marketing manager for Ultimate Budapest and works with influencers like Emily Rose to market Ultimate Budapest’s services. 

Emily’s Story

Before becoming an influencer, Emily Rose earned her BFA in musical theater and did theater full-time. In 2018, she sold her belongings and began traveling the world. She got her first travel job working at Oktoberfest and blogged about the experience. 

Her blog, The Wanderlust Rose,  continued to expand, eventually becoming her full-time job, resulting in her working with travel businesses like Ultimate Budapest.  Today, she uses Instagram and TikTok alongside her blog and has active communities of travel-obsessed people. 

Before the Partnership

Olivia’s marketing strategy for Ultimate Budapest began with providing valuable information on Budapest, such as how to get to and from the airport, fun things couples can do in Budapest, Budapest city events, and places that are accessible for English-speaking visitors. 

This strategy coincided nicely with Ultimate Budapest’s website, which has all of the best activities in Budapest available to book on one website. Ultimate Budapest also has many partnerships with smaller activity providers in the area that are often unavailable through other websites or booking agencies. 

Before Ultimate Budapest got into the influencer marketing space, they had virtually no domain rating and less than 200 followers on Instagram. Olivia quickly realized that Ultimate Budapest needed to be active in the influencer marketing sphere to attract the younger generation and gain trust, especially for a newer brand. 

Olivia pitched the idea of hiring influencers to market the brand to her boss by saying, 

“If you don’t know us [Ultimate Budapest] already, there’s no reason for you to book with us, but you might book because this person that you have been following for two years says to book.”

Ultimate Budapest’s First Influencer Marketing Campaign

One of the reasons that Olivia was drawn to influencer marketing was due to the ability to customize agreements with influencers and experiment with different influencers while spending less money than you would with traditional marketing sources. 

Emily was the first influencer Ultimate Budapest worked with. When Emily began working with Ultimate Budapest, she encountered the challenge of working with a brand with virtually no online exposure. 

However, she loved that the company had many ideas for creating amazing Budapest trips, from the activities, tours, and information they provided. Ultimate Budapest’s packages and the fact that you can easily book everything for your journey through one company was an appealing feature for Emily and her audience. 

Blog Posts for Social Media Growth

Emily’s blog, The Wanderlust Rose, provides an excellent way for companies like Ultimate Budapest to grow their audience. 

Blog posts are a great alternative to Instagram posts, which have a much shorter shelf life. Well-written and SEO-focused blog posts can provide evergreen content, more clicks over time, and valuable backlinks for both the influencer and company. 

In Budapest, Emily went on pub crawls and experienced many incredible activities. She documented her trip and shared it on her Instagram stories and her blog. 

Olivia immediately noticed growth on Ultimate Budapest’s Instagram after Emily’s Instagram stories went live. The growth from Emily’s blog post was slower but more evergreen. Since working with Emily and creating an evergreen post on 11 Cool Things to Do in Budapest in November 2021, Ultimate Budapest has experienced a 4.2% growth on their Instagram account. 

Before Emily’s posts, Ultimate Budapest had stagnant Instagram growth, so these numbers were significant. Blog posts are also great for Ultimate Budapest because it’s one of the few website traffic sources they can precisely measure. 

The best part about evergreen content?

Both the influencer and brand benefit big time as each continues to grow and expand their audience. The bigger Emily’s influence becomes, the more people will see her blog posts. The bigger Ultimate Budapest becomes, the more likely people are to see related blog posts and their work with influencers. It’s a true win-win for everyone involved! 

Staying True to Your Mission 

During our interview, Emily emphasized the importance of staying true to your brand, audience, and mission. 

“There’s been a lot of reach outs that are[n’t] always just the right fit. [For example] Can you promote our app? But it’s like not a travel app. It’s a weight loss app, but I’m not trying to promote weight loss. [So I] Just politely decline and move on.”

People don’t want to come to a page and see a random mishmash of things that don’t correlate. Emily insists that influencers should only promote things they genuinely care about and think are cool. She mentioned that some say only 10% of your posts should be ads because an influencer’s social media or blog should never feel like a giant ad. 

Having a social media account that feels like a giant ad can lead to lost credibility, trust, and growth. From Olivia’s and a brand’s point of view, working with a travel-based influencer is key because they want to stay in line with the influencer’s brand and appeal to their audience. 

To say true to their missions, both Emily and Olivia focus on their ultimate goal and brand mission when making deals with other brands or influencers. 

Future Plans

Olivia notes that something that surprised her was that Ultimate Budapest has “more recently actually been pitched by a few, I guess micro-influencers is the word I’m looking for.”

Her next step is learning how to wade through the pitches, figure out which influencers are the best fit, and politely decline those that aren’t, especially because some influencers purchase followers. More influencers than Olivia previously thought. 

Olivia is also working to hire a TikTok content manager for Ultimate Budapest. She’s gone over 300 applications to date and is excited to break into TikTok content. Other big plans include Ultimate Budapest’s upcoming mobile app that allows travelers to take self-guided tours run by Ultimate Budapest. This app may also feature an incentive program to get discounts or rewards for completing activities. 

In the future, Emily is working with Ultimate Budapest using her TikTok account and working to grow her personal brand. Video content repeatedly gets more engagement, and Emily has a successful TikTok with over 3.3 million likes and 154,000 followers, so the partnership between Ultimate Budapest and The Wanderlust Rose is definitely a match made in heaven.