Cradle Coast Authority
Tourism Marketing Strategy Toward 2020
Project Scope
The Cradle Coast Authority (CCA), who are the Regional Tourism Organisation for Tasmania's North West, approached us to develop a Destination Marketing Strategy.
The objective of the Strategy was to identify marketing tactics that would grow the region's visitor economy, specifically visitor nights, average length of stay, expenditure, visitor satisfaction.
The Process
Board Consultation + Research
The first step in the project was to undertake a consultation workshop with the CCA’s Tourism Board Members. The aim of this workshop was to gather information relating to current marketing investments, carry-over investments, and ideas for future investment. During the workshop we also brainstormed a regional SWOT, key experiences the region has to offer, and undertook a customer profiling activity.
We then analysed relevant strategies and plans that could possibly inform the new Marketing Plan, and curated visitation insights from a variety of sources to develop a comprehensive Measurement strategy for the Plan.
In addition to the Situation Analysis, we recommended, and the Board agreed, to undertake a Primary Research project on Latent Demand to help inform the actions within the Plan.
We worked closely with Tom and Jaci Hannon-Tan from McGregor Tan Research (Adelaide based research agency) to develop a survey that would help to identify the demand prospects for the current and potential tourism product for the North West, in addition to marketing opportunities that could be activated across the region to grow the visitor economy.
Plan Development, Delivery + Adoption
Once we had established a detailed situation analysis, we could then combine these insights with our own knowledge and expertise to develop the Destination Marketing Strategy.
The strategy was then presented and adopted at the September 2017 CCA Board meeting.
Results
Following are results since the Plan's adoption late 2017:
Marketing Tactic Clarity
- Ideal Customers and Niche Markets were identifed in the Plan, which guided CCA around key brand messages, brand storytelling, marketing channels and cooperative marketing investments.
- They have been able to say no to marketing investment that wasn't aligned to the region's Ideal Customers, saving many $$.
New Website
- We project managed an independent Website Tender process to build a new Consumer Website
- Woof Media were the successful agency to win the tender to build the new Visit Cradle Coast website, which went live in September 2018
- The new website is very consumer centric, and is designed to attract, persuade and covert more people to visit the region.
Improved Regional Storytelling
The CCA Marketing Team were able to implement a strategic Content Marketing Plan based on the insights of the Plan's Ideal Customer Profiling. They were able to identify stories that would motivate and inspire their Ideal Customers to visit the region.
Results to late 2018 include:
- Their Instagram and Facebook pages have seen organic community growth of 45% and 25% in the 12 months to November 2018. More importantly, at a time of decreasing organic reach, they've maintained above average organic engagement by reach % compared to other leading destination social media communities.
- Activated their Blog, that is driving increased organic search and social media referral traffic to the new website.
More Strategic Campaigns
They stopped investing in mass market, hard to measure, high cost, low trust, TV campaigns, and instead, they've partnered with digital influencers, transport and retail brands, which are aligned with the region's Ideal Customers, to run emotive, engaging and conversion optimised campaigns such as:
The experience of working with Paige and Rebecca was absolutely fantastic!
I was really lucky to work with Paige and Rebecca from Tourism eSchool, who developed our 3-year marketing strategy for me. The experience was absolutely fantastic, they bring with them a wealth of experience, are highly professional, and were able to deliver an exceptional marketing strategy for me. The good thing about them, is that they are really committed to working long term with you, so I’m excited to work with them on an ongoing basis to ensure that I’m able to deliver the strategy, and also to work out creative ideas to promote our region, and increase visitation going forward.