Hello everyone

I’m Quie Ying, my team and I head up the digital marketing for Tourism WA and I am here to let you know what the online’sgoing on.

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In the last 30 years, mankind has produced more information than in the previous 5000.

At the same time attention spans are down to 8 seconds and falling.

On that note, I hope you can all bear with me as I race through the next 20 to tell you about…

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Who we are

What we do

How to get involved

Tips and trends

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We’re a team of 3.8 full time employees occupying 5 human bodies.

We sit alongside our colleagues in campaigns, brand marketing and destination PR. Collectively we’re known as the brand and marketing services team.

We are one half of marketing – the other half are our colleagues in trade and partnerships.

And of course, marketing is one of the divisions at Tourism WA. The other divisions include Events, Destination Development and corporate business services.

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Simply put our role is to promote Western Australia through our earned, owned and paid digital channels.

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Simply put our role is to promote Western Australia through our earned, owned and paid digital channels.

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Let’s take a look at our owned channels first.

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WACOM is our consumer facing website.

Year on year it attracts from 2.5m – 3m visits a year.

It’s role is to help break down perception barriers (time, distance, money value equation) and knowledge barriers (where, what, how and when) of WA as a holiday destination for our consumers.

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The role of our consumer facing website – which my team and I manage – is to help break down their perception and knowledge barriers of WA as a holiday destination.

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1. How?

By making information available in the languages that our consumers speak. Our site is currently available in five foreign languages for our key markets – China (simple and traditional), Indonesia (Bahasa), German, Japanese and Korean.

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2. How?

By geo targeting our markets – so we are able to serve a specific website (and it’s content) to those countries and markets.

And by being accessible via mobile.

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3. How?

An image after all is worth a 1000 words and our site’s design uses full width imagery across key landing pages.

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4. How?

We also embed video content on our site like this one.

And we are able to also insert full bleed video across our headers (we haven’t done any yet because the experience can be very slow and we’re also refining the mobile version of this functionality).

This is a small 30 second video that is available on our YouTube channel; it sits alongside a series of videos that are designed to break down what the key attractions and highlights are in each region. We use a map to visually convey where these are in relation to Perth (something research has told us that consumers want to know).

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We further help to breakdown perception and knowledge barriers by providing a lot of content which we broadly categorise into

• Experiences (e.g. snorkeling)

• Destinations / Attractions (e.g. Exmouth / Ningaloo Reef)

• Products (e.g.: Novotel Ningaloo Resort Exmouth)

Under Experiences we include content such as Must See and Do suggestions, itineraries, themes such as food and wine or indigenous tourism.

Under Destinations we include regions through to actual destinations.

And by products we mean the 1000’s of tourism destinations, attractions, events, commercial operators and visitor centres in our database.

Having a lot of content is however not enough, it needs to be presented in a way that is relevant to the user and so that it answers their need or question.

For example, for those who are looking to get a broad understanding of what there is to see and do in WA we have Top 10 lists. For those who are actively considering taking a holiday there are over 70 itineraries to help them understand where they can go, how long is required and how to get there.

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5. How?

How else do we break down perception barriers? By presenting content created by fellow travelers and other people on social media.

This form of social proof offers reassurance to the consumer that WA is a worth considering and therefore worth booking.

How we do this is by pulling through curated content across social media via an API. The platform we are currently using is called Stackla.

We would love for you to share your Instagram imagery on our site; simply use #thisisWA and #justanotherdayinWA alongside your destination or attraction’s name and we can look out for it to publish on our site. Our site will show your social handle and in doing so promote you to the visitors our site receives.

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Staying with our owned channels…and looking at our consumer newsletter:

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Our monthly consumer email newsletter is called The Westerly. If you’venot subscribed to it please do so via our website.

We also send out ad hoc eDMs as part of our tactical campaigns with co-operative partners.

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The role of this channel for us is to nurture our audience and to nudge them from awareness to planning.

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How do we nurture our audience via email?

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We sent this global survey out to all 125,000+ subscribers and received 20,000 entries – the prize was fairly lucrative though but the information we received was really interesting.

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Of those who completed our survey, just over 40% of our subscribers are from Australia.

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When took a closer look we noticed that email preferences aren’t that different for locals and non-locals:

Both segments value deals, reviews & testimonials, photos, short stories, and have a similar preference when it comes to how often they receive their email and how much content is provided within. However, content could be tailored to the local vs non local market, e.g. with specific deals, and events better suited to one market over the other

Non locals:

Dreamers because 64% have no immediate plans to visit.

59% of Internationals and 70% of Interstate have visited WA previously.

69% of non-locals who have already been want to come back.

Locals:

Doers because majority they have done a trip in the last year and 37% travelled in last 3 months. 40% are thinking of taking a trip in next 3 months.

Locals are inclined to travel within WA (70% at least once in the past year) with 41% planning to travel in the next few months.

Locals forward our newsletter to friends and family coming to visit.

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Deals, offers, packages & savings: Both segments are looking for savings and value when planning their trip to and around Western Australia.

Keep some things as they are: People are mostly happy with the current frequency of EDMs, with most people preferring monthly EDMs that tell them a bit about a few things.

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Over to the earned space...

We’re active in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.

The role of our social channels is to increase awareness and to inspire our audience to consider WA and beyond that to become advocates for our State.

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We’re active in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.

The role of our social channels is to increase awareness and to inspire our audience to consider WA and beyond that to become advocates for our State.

May 2016 – highest favourites on record for our Twitter channel with 11,385 favourites during May

April 2016 – our channel reached 22 million people on Facebook (up from 8.7 million in March) likely due to being tagged in a post by Tourism Australia which was hugely popular. This huge reach also meant we achieved almost 40 million impressions.

February 2016 – we achieved our highest reach on record on Facebook with 9.6 million – a record we smashed in April with help from Tourism Australia.

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The role of our social channels is to increase awareness and to inspire our audience to consider WA. We also want them to become advocates for our State because people trust people over brands and the more people we have saying that they want to visit or have been and loved it the greater the likelihood of someone making that decision to book a trip regardless of time, distance or money!

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1. How?

By using great content that is fit for purpose for the respective channel. We test our content all the time and we define effective content as that which our community activity engage with either by sharing, liking or commenting.

What we know is that:

• Animals – of the furry kind always hit the mark

• Blue sky and blue water is a firm favourite

• Epic landscapes particularly on Facebook is very impactful

What we will be doing a little more of is including more imagery that has a human element to it; we want to share pictures that shows someone in a place or experiencing the destination. This is in line with our latest brand campaign #justanotherdayinWA.

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2. How?

Videos are great on Facebook as well as Twitter provided we upload them directly to these channels. We have found that organic reach for videos on Facebook to be an effective means to get eyeballs. Case in point is a video from Blue Media here in Exmouth of a whaleshark which we posted in mid Feb when we caught wind that some of the whalesharks had arrived early.

This video managed to achieve over 160k worth of organic views –naturally to capitalize on this we boosted views and doubled the views of this extraordinary experience.

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3. How?

How do we continue to increase consideration and advocacy on social media?

Through ongoing education. Social channels have loyal users who spend a lot of time in these digital ecosystems. They’re happy to find information here and we we’re happy to provide it. We would of course love your help and invite you to join in the conversation by adding practicable and doable information in our threads.

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(To wrap up social…)

I’ve focused a lot of Facebook but we apply similar principles of investingin our community, leveraging media and testing to our other social channels too. I don’t have too much time today to go through those in detail so do feel free to come up to me afterwards to have a chat if you need to.

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So, in our paid channels…

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Paid activity is an effective means for us to gain traffic to our site or social channel.

We are active in paid search in AU, UK, NZ, US, SN + MY as well as DE and China. The role of paid search is to capture the consumer and drive them to a targeted destination / page on our site.

We are active in paid advertising in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. The role of paid activity here is slightly different to paid search but more about that later.

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The role of paid activity is to capitalize on a consumer’s awareness and consideration to drive engaged traffic to our site.

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1. How?

By being always on. Consumers search for things when they choose to so it is important that we are found when they are looking.

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2. How?

How do we know we are cost effectively driving targeted traffic to our site?

Well, we test and test and test.

We tweak our ad campaigns, the type of paid search we do (keyword, display and video search) and the landing pages. Our goal: for this traffic source to be more engaged than benchmark traffic.

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Thanks for bearing with me on what we do across our owned, earned and paid channels.

This is a simple visual to demonstrate that although I’ve talked about them separately as owned, earned and paid they are actually all interconnected.

Our social content feeds into our website, our website is the key call to action for our email marketing, we grow our email database through social channels and our search activity spans across our site and our social activity.

Keep this interconnectedness in mind as I talk about how you can get involved in our digital marketing activities.

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How can you get involved and how can you leverage what we do?

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How can you get involved with our website….

1. It is our key call to action for our marketing activities

2. So, it’s important that we have accurate and up to date content

What can you do?

1. Update your ATDW listing

2. Use a great image for your listing

3. If you spot something outdated or inaccurate on our site – tell us.

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So what is this database?

It’s called ATDW and it is a national database of tourism product.

Supported by all the STOs it’s a dynamic source of content for our

websites and 100s of distributors including Tourism Australia.

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If you are an accommodation provider, tour operator, transport, hire, information service or event organizer and accredited we’d love you to list on the database. It’s free.

Details on how where to go to manage your listing and who to contact if you need any help is in the slide.

What we need you to do if you have an existing listing or two is to update your imagery (we need bigger images), description copy (do think about your target audience) and data fields such as from prices, opening hours and address.

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With over 2000 pages on our site and in foreign languages too, it’s easy to get a few things wrong. If you spot something out of order, out of date or just plain out just let us know.

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1. Use our hashtag #thisisWA and #justanotherdayinWA on Instagram in your caption so that we can see what you are posting.

2. We can then pick it up and either repost or select it for our social stack on our website.

3. Like / Follow us so you can see what we are doing and join in the conversation.

4. @mention us on Twitter / Facebook

5. Share videos with us!

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We work with a variety of cooperative retail partners to promote WA.

If you are not online bookable then do seriously consider it, if you are online bookable then do consider your distribution and where possible align it to the partners that we work with. Attached are some of partners both domestically and globally.

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A quick summary on how to get involved:

- Social media feeds our social activity and our website

- ATDW a dynamic source of tourism product for our site

- Online distribution to get your product out there with our key partners

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Three key trends in 2015

Mobile

Seamless

Experiential

Why? Customer Experience is why. Consumers today are more mobile and as this space matures so do their expectations.

In 2016

Customer experience is pulling other priorities into orbit with the key priority for this year being data. It underpins all customer interaction from advertising to service. Decisions about data driven marketing should be done with the customer’s experience in mind.

Of course data is only as good as the insight that can be derived from it. Marketers surveyed have said that establishing good frameworks for collecting this insight is another priority.

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On the other side of data is content, a fundamental part of the consumer’s experience. Creating content is another exciting area for marketers.

Experiences can only work if businesses can create/ source AND deliver this content effectively. There is so much of it and it’s a complicated landscape. What this means is that people, teams and organizations need to work together better in order to be truly competitive.

According to Skift, by 2020 the travel world and digital will be

Unbundled

On demand

Truly mobile

Giving rise to the ‘silent traveler’. Fully independent and enabled through connectivity this traveler does not want to be sold to. Instead they are seeking a deeper connection and for authenticity in their experiences.

Skift 2020 notes from whitepaper:

• Future of travel is at the intersection of technology + marketing and user experience + design

• Forward thinking travel brands are delivering deeper experiences to travelers by focusing on inspiration, personalization and a path towards self discovery

• Rise of the silent traveler (because they don’t want to be sold anymore)

• The on demand economy and its impacts on unbundling travel services (ubiquity, efficiency, ease of use, connection and conversation)

• Ubiquitous booking

• 2020 = the unbundling of everything, the on-demandification of everything, the mobility of everything.

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So, that’s all well and good to know what the key trends are and where marketers are investing their budget but how do you know which path to follow?

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Unfortunately, there is no magical answer, no Wizard of Oz.

But you can find your own way through this digital spaghetti by:

1. Putting your thoughts down on paper in a structured way. A widely used template to do this is the maturity model. This simple grid can help you map out what it is that you need to do and can provide a pathway to your goals.

2. Become a modern marketer. Adopt a culture and approach to modern marketing and take things one step at a time down the right path for you, your yellow brick road.

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Maturity model

Simple grid to plot things out as you develop your (digital) marketing plan.

Along the horizontal axis we have 3 stages:

1. Emergent

2. Managed

3. Advanced

This is a good place to be honest with where you as a business are and it is helpful as it will simplify the pathway to becoming more “advanced”. Along the vertical axis here, I have used groupings developed by the likes of eConsultancy and Adobe:

1. Strategy, change management, KPIs

2. Data and technology

3. People, teams and culture

4. Working practices, processes and tools

THE GOAL? TO KEEP MOVING FROM LEFT TO RIGHT

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Soft skills: ability to embrace change, spot opportunities, passionate to learn and curious

It is essential for those with more digitally-focused skills to have an appreciation at least, and ideally good knowledge of, traditional marketing and brand skills (and vice versa). Whilst digital is changing marketing forever, classic marketing skills are still essential and those that can combine the two are well positioned within the broader organisation.

T-shaped / Pi Shaped people

Those who have a strong vertical expertise but also wider knowledge or empathy for other digital disciplines. This is not to say that vertical expertise is less important, but more that when this is combined with that wider understanding it is increasingly valuable in appreciating the wider context of specialist work, identifying opportunities for greater collaboration or efficiencies, and seeing the bigger picture.

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Checklist:

1. Collaboration

2. Articulation

3. Empathy

4. Data/ insight driven

5. Adaptability

6. Creativity/ lateral thinking

7. Action-oriented

8. Passionate

9. Curiosity

10.Technophiles

11.Project / campaign management skills

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How do you take these trends and make them real?

- Invest in digital: you have to do digital marketing to a) get to know it and b) get better at it

- Start small: empirical learning curve, baby steps, or file bullets not canons

- Never stop learning, there is always something new around the corner

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Introducing PRIMER. A new learning App by Google. So you can learn in snackable moments.

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Great resources that I turn to…..

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TCWA have range of eTourism Workshops:

• Getting Started Online

• Websites, SEO/SEM & Analytics

• Facebook Insights

• Building your brand through reputation management and influencers

• Twitter, Instagram, Hashtags and more!

Plus they offer eTourism Coaching (one on one) and Detailed Digital Reviews. Find out more on their website.http://www.tourismcouncilwa.com.au/etourism-coaching-and-digital-reviews

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http://blog.sumall.com/journal/15-best-free-social-media-dashboards-tools.html

Canva: to create visual content for your social and online efforts

Hootsuite: to help you manage your social media publishing activities

Zapier: automate task between web apps

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