Digital Advertising Through Change

okay welcome back uh it didn't take long long uh we're thrilled to welcome emily primavera from south australian tourism commission uh she's going to be talking about digital marketing through change uh if you joined us yesterday georgie said a solid foundation alongside uh kelly noble talking about the organic side and the content side um of what's going on emily is going to be talking a little bit more around the advertising activity

and i'm really looking forward to hear it so just a little bit about emily if you haven't met her before she's the digital marketing and optimization manager for the south australian tourism commission she started out with a solid background in data and marketing science at ehrenberg bass institute she's part of uni over say our sponsor um put emily on a path and thirst for the power of data in marketing with several

internships under her belt she found her way into the world of tissue from here she pioneered the use of social media advertising for people's choice credit union launching their first social media advertising strategy she then taken this experience to the tourism commission where there was previously no digital marketing or integrated strategy emily was instrumental in planning um and implementing a full marketing technology stack and have since led the audience digital optimization

and digital media strategy satc was the first state tourism organization to utilize martech and the most advanced in digital marketing strategy in the country and um just on a personal note uh as someone who works at ceiling emily and i have had the opportunity to partner um and work together on campaigns and the data insights that we've been provided from shtc have been valuable to us um typically because we're not targeting

people in that earlier part of the customer journey um so yeah it's a fantastic opportunity um so working with key travel planners like airlines accommodation online travel agents and ceiling um she's initiated the first in-market digital focused marketing strategies including leveraging first-party data and audiences drive results she also worked with facebook to implement the first travel brand conversion study earlier and is a bnt 30 under 30 finalists if i'm not mistaken

so without further ado over to you emily thank you thanks robina that was quite an introduction um so yes obviously as you know my name is emily from rivera and i'm the digital marketing optimization at south australian tourism commission unfortunately i didn't win the b t 30 under 30 awards but look as always next year um today i'm going to talk to you a bit about i guess off the back of

what georgie spoke about yesterday a little bit about our digital marketing strategy at the south australian tourism commission and also how we've been i guess how we've been going in 2020 and how we've um how we've tackled it and hopefully some key things that you guys can take away that will be useful to think about as you keep going as well with your digital marketing so as the south australian tourism commission

i know you some of you might be quite familiar with who we are and what we do but just as a way of um as the tourism commission our job and our key objective is to inspire and to drive considerations so we set out to inspire people to visit south australia to get them to come to south australia for a holiday um and to drive them to consider that south australia is

even a worthwhile tourism holiday what are we trying to achieve so as an sto as a state tourism organization our aim is to build the awareness of south australia as a tourism destination and to generate leads to the industry generate qualified travel partner leads and leaves um to deliver sales and referrals to tourism businesses in south australia as well as industry partners so airlines travel agents as ravina mentioned people like c-link

as well to get people ultimately to spend and visit in south australia so my main aim obviously is to increase tourism expenditure and visitation in south australia it comes with lots of challenges and especially in terms of digital marketing because i know most of you either work for a brand or have lots of brands that you manage as a part of a consultancy and as a part of that you know you

have lots of products or you're familiar with those products i used to work at a bank we you know naturally sold home loans and personalizing things we had clear products as an sto as a state tourism organization we don't have any products we have so much content as georgie talked about yesterday so many cool places to see and to do as many of you know as well but we don't own any

airline seats we don't own any hotel rooms we don't have any tours that we can take you on so our key assets are our audiences and they are the people that we know are interested in south australia but then how do we translate this into visitation and expenditure because as i said that's our main aim but we can't actually sell anything how do we solve these challenges and in particular how do

we solve them in 2020 when it's even tougher so you know and i know when you're booking a holiday you don't always do everything in one particular order so you don't always look at flights first um you know sometimes you might be scrolling through your instagram feed and see that your friend posted an awesome picture of kangaroo island and you think maybe i want to go there um or perhaps you've you've

been reading an article on glam adelaide or you've you know found a really cool airbnb you want to stay in you don't always do it in the same order um and you don't do it each time or for each destination that you go to so it's not a linear path to purchase we love it as much as it it it could be that path that is inspire plan book travel and share

that's the challenge for us is that it's not so how do we tackle that how do we get people through that funnel and get them to come and visit south australia we have some great brand campaigns as you would have seen with book them out post bushfires also you would have heard a lot about it in the media and it's not necessarily in the creative in adelaide but old mate was a

great campaign these campaigns do a really big job in terms of reaching a wide audience and encouraging people to start to think about south australia or inspiring them to travel how do we address and how do we bring people along that consumer journey that i mentioned and bring people to actually start planning and booking a holiday the way that we tackle that with is with our performance media so our digital media

is focused on driving the planning and the booking and getting people down that consumer journey getting them to to take that inspiration and to start thinking about planning and booking whether that's from coming onto our site leaving and then jumping onto um you know to look at a ceiling website or to book an accommodation operator that's where we we're really focused on is that planning and booking and actually we look at

this across key channels um those being paid owned and earned and looking at how we leverage those across our digital marketing media but also the the assets that we own so our website as well as our edm and our own social as well as how we link in with our organic strategy and of course our prs but as i mentioned because we don't sell anything so we don't have any products we

needed to define how we would um how we would say that we are generating an interest in in south australia or how we're encouraging people to start planning what we determined was that we could define a travel partner lead which is a click to a website or an email or a to call and tourism operator buy one of the many thousands of listings on our website they also look at the click

to visit a tourism operator or travel partner like an airline or a ferry operator or an online travel agent and we define that as a travel primarily we do this by looking at the data across our website and people interacting with our website and then where they're clicking and where they're interacting with our products as well as with the travel partner deals and offers and links that we have across our site

as i mentioned because we we don't sell anything but we know south australia has amazing um you know unique compelling reasons to come for a holiday we need to define what our key brand pillars were and what makes south australia great and what makes it a unique destination to travel to within so we did that by defining what those are and we defined them by six brand pillars those are to do

with food and drink and wine and the great offerings that we have um our boutique and accessible capital city um and props and view to beaches and out to the regions um the fact that we have so many great events that happen all through um all through the year our natural landscapes from the flinders through the river um how you can immerse yourself in those experiences as well as getting up close

to nature getting up and doing some really cool wildlife encounters swimming with the sharks things like that and then overall the fact that we are a curious place so there's lots of different and interesting um things to see and do here we've got pink plates glammed up mushrooms um there's so much so what we did is we defined them into brand pillars we worked with them across our audiences so on our

digital platforms and on our assets we had identified our interest-based audiences based on the fact that people were interested in the content and in the information about those different poets so as i mentioned events food and drink nature wildlife and city so once we could identify and define that people were interested in these certain things then understand they're interested in certain um brand pillar or certain activity and then where they sit

in the funnel we looked at identifying um what they're doing on our website what they're doing in our data and across channels and identified whether they're in the inspire plan or booking phase so really these form the backbone of our digital marketing strategy and our performance media through that we leverage our data and we leverage these audiences and the interests that we know that people have in south australia across various paid

channels so across search across our content partnerships paid social native advertising display and video it's then really important for us to have identified how we use our paid media and how we um understand where it sits in in that funnel or where it sits in encouraging people to plan and then book or right from the top of being more inspiring what we did is we mapped out our um our media across

those channels and this is something that we continue to work to and readjust as we go because that's always really important as well we maintain the strategy across prospecting display right through down to social which which fits lots of parts of the funnel and then right down to paid search driving that action that demand that booking now paid strategy focuses on optimizing towards a click out to an operator or generating lead

to a traveling partner we focus on ensuring that we have a really broad strategy that covers anything that anyone could be interested in south australia and ensuring that we're finding people that are most likely to click out and go to an operator or start booking our paid social activity looks at the full breadth of the funnel so across our field think and do creatively or inspire plan book which includes our brand

activity as well as pillars so events like lots of party and also for right through to accommodation where we know that people are ready to book or start our star display is where we also leverage our audiences really effectively to ensure that we can maintain our brand um but also run our campaigns using our audiences and different audiences as well with that we adjust our creative to ensure that we're being really

personalized and we're remarketing to move people further through the fun and what we've seen through that personalization and that targeting is we've seen a really high ctr and it's continued to increase we've increased the the cost at which we generate a lead to a partner so the cost at which we encourage people to actually start booking um and for that and for us it means there's more leads for our partners so

more people are starting to book and plan and more people are getting out into region and getting to visit south australia search engine optimization is also really important and it's something we consider on a day-to-day um our paid strategy aligns very closely with our seo strategy and it's something that we look at across all of our content to make sure that we are in google at the top of the page where

people are searching or looking for anything to do with south australia so that we can facilitate that planning and hopefully encourage the booking 2020.

so as we all know 2020 has been a big year um and it's been particularly challenging for us in the tourism industry with that um i've pulled together some four things that that i think when i was reflecting on it this is what we really considered and what held us together um and what meant that we could continue to operate um really well and continue to provide support for the industry but

also encourage people to to start traveling when they could they can and enjoy what south australia i'll go through the key things in the next couple but what they are is really be clear on what you know and i hope you can take all of these things in action and we'll think about them in your strategies as well so being clear on what you know and staying strong on this know your

brand know what you have if you have products know what they are and work with them and stick to them your always on activity should be your rock campaigns are great um and as i mentioned they do drive that inspiration but if you've got a solid always on strategy you have noise on process that will help you when things are changing when things are moving and that's what we've really learned on

and don't forget about organic digital media is really important but your organic media and your organic presence is so important that digital presence is really important to make sure that you're top of mind um and you're in in google as much as possible as well as ensuring that measurement and performance is also top of mind and keeping that in mind will help you stay on the path to achieving your goals with

this sticking to what we know and what we knew is that we knew our pillars so when you know we were in lockdown and we were in isolation and we couldn't we couldn't do anything what we knew was that we could still promote the beautiful destinations in south australia we knew that um you know we knew that we could do things like just adjust the the copy on our ads adjust the

creative um just slightly to get people to maintain that dreaming or that inspiration and not necessarily to plan a book now but they could do it when they were ready um and because we we we knew what we were we were currently running and we knew what those brand pillars were we could just adjust really quickly um and easily based on what was happening in our environment we also could do things

like use um you know tap into our audience and understand that if they were interested in something on organic social media we could push that into paid our paid space and we'd see that perform really well so that's really what we did um to make sure that we were still in line with what the consumer wanted to see um and giving them what they what they wanted to see and also and

ensuring we could get people to site continue to inspire them and we could do this across our pillars so ensuring we're still showing people the best of south australia all those unique elements and even adjusting to things like knowing we could easily adjust and copy and update some headlines to note that you know it's school holidays and you can start planning or there's the june level we can't and things like that

and again because it was our um our strategy we knew what our brand pills were and we were always focused on them it meant we could stay on brand and on objective without having to chop and change constantly based on what was happening but of course it really helped to have that always on strategy so to plan to one plan um and everyone sort of talks about well if we you know

if we had a plan in 2020 if we didn't have a plan what would the difference be but really we did have a plan and you know we have the massive spreadsheet we worked through that um and that helped us i think it helped my salary it helped our sanity definitely but it also meant that we could maintain that interest in south australia we could stay top of mind outside of campaigns

we didn't need to wait there was no downtime we could always be chopping and changing adding things in pulling things out adjusting things based on that plan that we did have um which meant we could support the industry so it meant we could um whilst you couldn't drive out to lot 100 and go and sit down and have a pizza and you know have a great tourism experience in the adelaide hills

we could promote that you could buy a diy pizza box and you could make that at home so we were able to do that really quickly and pivot and pull those into our always-on media it also meant we could adjust for you know seasonality in the situation so we're able to quickly say yep we know there's school holidays coming up what can we talk about here you know even though you can't

get out and do things um and yeah as i mentioned it it helped us really adjust and make sure that we maintained that momentum maintain that planning and that booking or that inspiration while we could even though we weren't doing big campaigns or even when people were in lockdown or really hesitant to travel post bushfires we didn't do side organic and that's really important because you know google is top of mind

for everyone when you're searching for anything that's where you go it is the biggest search engine and in saying that as well so was youtube youtube is the second biggest search with that we really held on to our seo strategy we made sure that we leveraged google tools i know um ellis was just talking about them as well but we really leveraged google trends search console and keyword planner to stay on

top of user insights consider what they were and look at actioning them and they're free and easy and simple tools to use and you can get so much out of them if you look at the data and then actually think about how that applies to what you're doing in your business it also meant we were considering the consumer we were knowing you know what they were searching for what they were interested

in and for the first time we built a campaign page that really leveraged organic um so we didn't build a campaign page with you know a top headline about the campaign but we actually built one to address the fact that people were searching for clovid and coronavirus tribal information so that's what we needed to provide to the consumer and after the bushfires we knew that people were looking for content and looking

and asking questions on our organic social and asking questions in in search engines about how they could support operators what they could do how they could travel after the bushfires so we were able to pull that content together and really leverage that and be there being their top of mind from friend of mine for the consumer when they're looking to travel we also didn't lose sight of a measurement performance because this

is always top of mind we knew when we needed to adjust something we knew when we weren't um going to be hitting our objectives or when we needed to adjust them slightly to ensure we were meeting what the consumer wanted and also what we needed to address in the industry so we knew after the bushfires that it was really important for us to get people to categorize and get people out to

the hills and start to support the industry again and also get them to see the beautiful places that we have to offer so what it meant was that because we knew that and we could see the intent and the interest there we could really encourage um and and start ramping up deals and offers across our site and in our media to get people to travel and to encourage that um and then

also during covered when we saw the interest in booking travel we saw the interest in clicking out to tourism on creators start to drop off we could look at and think about what else can we focus on how can we use our media and use our organic strategy to focus on other things that will continue to help people to plan their trip so to look at you know focusing on on-site engagement

through our analytics platform as well as focusing on edm signups so we continue to draw people in encourage them to engage in south australia as well as increasing our audience and helping us to understand if people are still interested in south australia and what they're interested in and within all of that we didn't forget to test and learn and testing learn learning is something georgie mentioned yesterday i know we do a

lot of because we know it's super important to always stay in touch with the consumer and understand if what we're what we're running and what we're doing is working through that we've seen some great results and we've seen by understanding what the consumer is interested in south australia and serving and relevant content being really personalized and targeted in our messaging we could increase our click-through rate by 73 so just by using

our audiences understanding what they were interested in and then what stage of the funnel they're in we have increased our click-through rate by 70 we're also seeing some great results year-on-year so despite bushfires and despite clovid um you know that we're currently working through we've still seen that interest in south australia maintained because we do have that full funnel approach right through from our brand campaigns leading that inspire message through to

the planning and the booking that we maintain in our digital marketing with that we've seen our website visits increase 46 year-on-year we've seen the leads that we generate to south australian tourism operators and to travel partners like airlines and ferry operators and tourist businesses and travel agents and things like that we've seen leads to those businesses increased by 65 so it shows that there is that in interest and you know people

are planning and they are booking um a holiday in south australia we've also seen the rate at which people visit our website and generate a lead so that conversion rate of that interest that lead generation rate has increased by 13 so we know that people are more and more engaged by the way that we're inspiring them encouraging them to plan and getting them to book um and i think it's great to

see that we can continue to maintain this strategy and pull through even some of the toughest times and i'm sure we might have more to come thank you i've whipped through pretty quickly but let me know if you have any questions hi emily i'm here how's it going thanks again for a great presentation uh let me just turn my video on yeah that's not gonna break anything perfect uh we have had

a few questions come through so i'm just gonna ask them okay first question from natalie hopefully it's an easy one where are those glow-in-the-dark mushrooms great question they are there's two places actually um the key place to go and i've been there and it's awesome um is just outside mount gambier in glencoe forest unfortunately you can't go on a tour this time of year because the season has ended and um also

the lovely um copied um but you can still go and see them um and you can all see them in the adelaide hills the peak season though is made to end of june so you might have to wait until next year yeah well uh that's really important information um we've had a few comments on here as well that while people have been listening and learning from you uh they're just inspired to

go and explore their backyard or our backyard i should say um this one comes from charlene where are you pulling your content from is it all the australian tourism data warehouse or attdw or does the commission the satc commission shoots to generate the content for use across all channels i assume by content we're talking about images and videos like that yeah yeah so obviously yeah in htw we have lots of content

from tourism operators and we use that in our product listings but we do also in terms of our imagery we have um content creators as georgie mentioned yesterday that go out and create content so video and images we do shoot things for our campaigns and we also shoot things regularly as we know things are new and opening up constantly so we have a media gallery that's a south australian media gallery that

you can jump onto and have a look if you need some inspiration or interested in that as well great uh missy's got a question uh more about managing um advertising do you have any tips for keeping such an immense digital advertising effort tidy especially with such a variety of ads shown to a variety of audiences how do you manage that keep track of it and keep it all kind of tidy yeah

um yeah that is a challenge definitely um i don't know if it's just me but it helps to work with the spreadsheet so i do have that always-on spreadsheet that i screenshotted um and that's what we work with as a team and sharing the information as a team and getting help help people to help pull and feed and you know generate ideas and keep that on track really helps as well so

making sure that everyone is across it but also that managing it in a spreadsheet really helps to know what's on what channel at what time um and also just staying across everything being up-to-date and knowing you know you know across all of your different channels what you've got all the time um it's in the spreadsheet but also just jumping into the platforms every day as well as also keeping in our analytics

and being on top of that daily really helps speaking of analytics we had a question yesterday around adobe analytics and the differences between uh that particular product and say google analytics um could you tell us a little bit more about the adobe platform and perhaps how it compares to google yeah of course so google analytics is a free analytics solution which means it's based on sampling website sampling um and which is

that that's fine when you have a you know small low website um with um you know not a really really high amount of traffic that's coming to it because google is quite accurate um we found that google wasn't as accurate because we were getting so you know so high levels of traffic to our website so we do have an enterprise solution of analytics platform which is adobe analytics but it is very

similar to google analytics um 360 and all the other platforms that are out there in terms of enterprise analytics it just means that the data is more accurate it's um based on our information that is on our site we can make adjustments to it um and it's very specific um it's also updated um on the hour so it's very accurate in that sense as well great and rachel also has a question

here with limited resources and funding um where should uh tourism organizations uh put their energy and focus on again i think organic is really important um staying on top of that and knowing just what your digital presence looks like to a consumer when they're actually thinking about planning and booking i think that's super important so google my business is really important and all of that um as well as linking into to

any you know trade that you need to get your product across the line and get get it sold so on airbnb and things like that but also making sure that you're using um i guess in small scales using facebook ad platform but also using a google app platform what you're doing so the most important thing to do with limited resources um limited time limited budgets is to actually stay on top of

your analytics if you're looking at what's performing and how it's performing then you know what's working you know that you can you only need to spend a certain amount um to to really get a bang for your buck and to see those conversions or see people come to your site and actually start booking um and that's the most important thing is actually just really just tracking and staying on top of um

of all of that and i think that's how you see the most benefit um i guess the other question i have and this is um definitely tourism heavy um on the back of that if uh tourism organizations are looking to leverage the activity of satc what can they do to make sure that their listing looks great on south australia.com for example yeah so obviously yeah it's really important to make sure that

your hwb listing is up to date and that it is a essentially a landing page for your own business and your own site so the way that we see them is it's the simplest way to show or to show your businesses in a small um you know in a short space that gets people to click out and it makes them interested so it's like an ad it's free um and it just

gives you an extension of your website on our website um and then of course on top of that just keep in touch with us and let us know what you're doing if you have any changes update your listing make sure that's live and accurate and then on from that make sure that the links that you're linking to from that listing are the most relevant links so the booking links um they're your

landing pages that will get people through to actually see your product and in terms of working with us yeah stay in touch let us know what you're doing um we can we can look at how we can make sure that we're getting people to your listing but also we're getting people to your website um and we're including you in our advertising in our content as much as possible because at the end

of the day our aim is to get people out to see um operators to see south australia to go into region and to travel really so we want to make sure that our content is as relevant as possible to get people out to see to to action and to plan and actually go and book and experience a holiday so um that's our aim and we're always happy to help as much as

we can because again it's about the consumer it's about getting them to plan a book so that's what we're really focused on um yeah it's great to hear um it looks like we don't have any real questions anyone else got any questions feel free to type them in um and i'll uh i'll ask emily um i guess when it comes to the interstate markets obviously we're seeing quite a bit of instability

in terms of coronavirus and victoria and new south wales um travel restrictions won't be lifted for new south wales and acha on monday as planned so in terms of um the interest today strategy for satc um where does that currently sort of see um have you seen drops in traffic you know from victoria new south wales um how's that kind of played in yeah definitely um in lockdown so when we were

all as a nation in lockdown we actually saw our interstate traffic increase year on year so we had um i don't know the increase of the top of my head but it would have been about 30 to 60 year-on-year we had higher interstate traffic um for that time period so we saw that interest from the interstate market um now obviously it is challenging with the the new lockdowns that we've got um

but what we've seen is we've been able to pivot and adjust our messaging to go back to the messaging that we were running um similar to during the lockdown so ensuring people are still engaged and interested and inspired um because ultimately if they want to go somewhere if you want to go on a holiday you'll book it eventually when you can get to it so it's just about maintaining top of mind

awareness and um being there for the consumer and and letting them have that that escape with our great content as well um and with our performance media because we have that plan we've been able to easily chop and change and adjust the copy that we're running or adjust the ads that we're running in victoria new south wales as well as up to the wider so the nation really and make sure that

we're targeting northern territory and we're targeting wa and we're um we're really finding the consumer that is interested in south australia and getting you know driving that interest maintaining that interest in getting them um to consider planning and booking instead great well it looks like we're running a couple minutes early um i just wanted to say thank you again emily for your time uh in preparing those slides and also presenting today

um if there are any follow-up questions i'm sure we can find their way to you um we will be grabbing some wines for our speakers this year from adelaide hills um wineries that were affected by the bushfires in december and january so please do let us know emily your preference for sparkling white or red and uh i'll probably be by the sotc office to drop it off in the coming week but

again i just want to say thank you and um great presentation as well to our attendees it's time for morning tea please go stretch your legs go to the toilet um tweet with a hashtag digital adl and we'll be back at 10 past 11 with paul gordon thank you thanks for having me