Creative and effective regional destination marketing on a budget

We gathered top tips on tourism marketing from colleagues and tourism industry friends:

• our PR guru

• the director of Australia’s best festival (according to the Australian Tourism Awards Hall of Fame)

• a tourism marketing whiz

• a tourism podcast where each guest expert shares their best budget marketing tip

Anna Hayward, PR guru

Anna has worked on many projects with Tilma Group, promoting festivals and destinations, and organising media familiarisation tours.

Hone in on your target markets

Your destination most likely has multiple target markets, so when your budget is tight you may want to hone in on one (or two) as the primary markets for your campaign.

Think about the timing of your campaign and which audience is most likely to visit during that time. For example, will your campaign be leading into school holidays, during 'the great migration' when retirees and grey nomads are travelling north, or around an event season?

Also consider your marketing goal - are you looking to increase mid-week bookings? Extended stays? Day trips?

Careful analysis and selection of your target markets can not only save some of your marketing budget, but also help you to design a highly targeted campaign.

Location, location, location

Following on from the point above, you can further refine your market by focusing your campaign on one or two key geographic locations where your target audience is located. This will allow you to channel your budget into a carefully selected city or town, to a specific audience or demographic, via multiple channels, with a coordinated, consistent and complementary message and call to action.

This approach allows you to reach the target audience many times via different channels and mediums – think social media, digital, radio, TV, outdoor, print, partnerships, direct mail – whatever mix your budget allows for.

Collaborate

Join forces with other businesses and operators in your region with similar target markets and develop a collaborative campaign where everyone benefits.

You can combine budgets to allow for a more significant destination-style campaign, cross promote each other via social media and on your websites, run a joint competition to boost social followings and drive traffic to websites, and benefit from the increased momentum your campaign will gather.

Learn more

Read Anna’s tips on how to effectively run a media familiarisation tour

Read our tips on how to write a media release and keep re-purposing the content

Learn more about Anna at @anna_hayward_travels

Kate Scott, festival director of Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers on event marketing

Kate has always been very generous sharing with us about how Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers has a laser focus on their target market and the tactics they use.

Travel with dogs

Here is one of Carnival’s quirky marketing ideas, that focuses on all of us who love to travel with our pups!

“We jumped head first into marketing our Petal and Pup itineraries this year. These itineraries have been active for three years now and we saw a great opportunity to reignite them this year: while everyone stayed home more because of COVID they spent lots of time with their four-legged friends so we had a great opportunity to push our doggie-focussed itineraries.

We appointed an ‘AmbassaDOG’ …@rambo_the_australian_shepherd and we had a some photos done of Rambo exploring the city and helping promote all things floral. This worked a treat - we had so many people coming to Toowoomba for the first time because they had an idea of what they could do with their doggo while in town.

Our Petal and Pup Itineraries include listings for dog-friendly accommodations and cafes, pawesome parks and also some local shops too.

This campaign ran mostly on Instragram as we linked to Rambo’s personal Insta account. We made him a little AmbassaDOG coat and he was a real star around the parks and streets of Toowoomba during September with media and VIP catch ups keeping him busy.

This program was really well received and not expensive as it was all kept to Carnival’s social media. Rambo’s dad Howard was amazing to work with and super keen to have Rambo really involved which made it all so easy.”

Hannah Statham, content marketer at MEDIA MORTAR

We’ve been collaborating with content marketing agency Media Mortar lately. Here are boss Hannah’s top tips:

Get crystal clear on your audience

This is not creative marketing, but it’s damn strategic!

Even if you know who your audience was pre-COVID, you can almost throw your historical data out the window because we’re seeing different audiences travel. The audiences across the board look to be younger and more cashed up, which is a huge opportunity for regional towns to capitalise and move away from their dependency on grey-nomad travel.

‘So what would I be doing?’ I’d be working out my target audience and new avatars stat. We have a worksheet on how to create your own customer avatar which is a great starting point if you don’t know where to start.

Create content that will help you get found: eyeballs = dollars

If you’ve been putting off starting a blog, we need to talk! Search traffic for domestic holidays is at its highest point, and we’re seeing search traffic on some of our regional clients grow up to 1,000%.

Take for instance a blog post ’10 things to do in Longreach’ – from January to October 2020, it generated over 47,000 unique sessions alone for the website its sitting on. That kind of organic search traffic is what big business usually has to pay for.

To garner that kind of traffic all you need to do is meet the consumer’s demand for information with supply of yours.  If you’re having trouble with where to start, we wrote a blog post which will help you: how to start a blog for your business

Holly Galbraith - advice from many tourism experts

Holly G’s Tourism Upgrade podcast features expert interviews and insights into the world of tourism marketing.

Holly asks many of her guests, ‘If you only had a $1,000 marketing budget, what would you spend it on?’

Here are some of the responses from her guest experts:

“I would spend it on training my industry, training my operators on a strategy and then potentially doing some really basic sessions on the tools, like how to use Instagram, for example.

I’d probably print some posters that have the destination hashtag on it and give them to the operators and encourage them to put that up at their business and then put it at the back of their toilet door, and on their charter boat that’s going out every day.”

“I’d find creative ways of getting good images without spending $20,000 on a photo shoot, such as working with influencers to creatively tell a story through photos. Influencers see the destination with a different eye, and they see it through the eyes of their followers. “

“I’d do a Facebook campaign using a great video because I would be able to target exactly who I want to see my ad.”

“I’d do an SEO or digital marketing plan, even a simple one, to help my website work a bit harder for me.”

“Because a lot of tourism is based on things like referrals and reengaging relationships with your customers, what I would do is I would use things like Facebook retargeting to reengage customers I’ve already got. Either uploading my own mailing list and targeting ads towards them, or targeting ads towards people who have been on my tours, or people who’ve been to my website, or successfully bought a ticket on my website. I’d use that to reengage my customers who have already had a great experience and who might want to return again or spread the word and refer a friend.”

“Famils. From a media perspective, or even from a buyer perspective, get the people who have the most influence in whatever sphere you’re trying to reach, and send them on a famil, send them on the best famil you can possibly afford. Hopefully people in the destination will comp you stuff, so your $1,000 will go a long way. Hopefully the budget is just going to have to cover flights and a few incidentals because with destination support, hopefully everyone will offer FOC because they see the opportunity in having these really, really high priority people in their destination. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a group famil. You could just pick one publication or one journalist and really impress them. If you can kind of invite someone who has a personal passion for whatever it is you offer, like say you’re a wine region and you find a journalist who’s got a huge interest in wine, that’s a relationship that will just keep giving.”

“Set up something like Mailchimp group email communication tool. Setting up Mailchimp is not going to cost me anything depending on the size of your list. Then I would engage my graphic designer to create a nice looking, on-brand newsletter template. I would then plan out what useful and interesting email newsletters I could send to my database that they are going to find informative or entertaining or useful at some level.

If you are worried about the time commitment think about just doing one a month, and they don’t need to be very long - just a couple of paragraphs. It is so important to keep a relationship going with past visitors, guests or customers. Repeat customers are more likely to buy from you, and they are also more likely to refer you.”

“I would spend it on video content promotion either on YouTube or on Facebook, is what I would do. It’s an innately accessible form of content that has multiple platforms it can be distributed on. So, I would do video boosted on Facebook and YouTube.”

Learn more

Hear more great budget ideas in this podcast on the $1,000 marketing budget question

Tap into the expertise of Holly G’s amazing Facebook group Women in Tourism (Australia). We use it all the time to pick the brains of women across all aspects of Australia’s tourism industry (yes, you can also join if you are a fella)

Over to you

What effective marketing tactic would you recommend?

Have you tried a creative budget tactic that got good results? Share it with the world in the comments!