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’s going

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…(go to next slide)

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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 and brand

marketing, destination PR and the strategy & research team.

Collectively we’re known as the strategy, brand and marketing

services team.

We are one half of marketing – the other half are our colleagues in

trade and partnerships (insert who from this department will be at

event).

And of course, marketing is one of the divisions at Tourism WA.

The other divisions include Events (Verity who will be presenting

later), Investment & Infrastructure and corporate business services

(the guys who literally keep the lights on and pay the invoices).

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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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Westernaustralia.com 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.

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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’ve not 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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1. How?

By sending them relevant information about WA so that we can aid

their knowledge and understanding of WA.

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How do we know what relevant information to send them?

We profile them and ask what their preferences are – at the

moment we are asking consumers what their content preferences

are and these are loosely grouped by:

• I’m a natural explorer

• I like to relax and recharge

• I’m an urban grazer

• I like family times

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We’re on the cusp of running an incentive based survey to find out

more! Some of the questions we are asking include:

• Why did you subscribe and what are you hoping to find out?

• How often would you like to hear from us?

• Since subscribing, how much has our newsletter influenced you

to visit WA?

What we hope to do with this consumer led information is to tailor

our messaging and our technology platform to help us automate

this delivery. In doing so we hope to nurture our audience through

this channel and nudge them closer to booking a holiday to WA

with what resources we have.

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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

investing in 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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Uh, 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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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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I’d love to hear from you on how else we can possibly work

together.

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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

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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:

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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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