Episode 3 – Reimagining Destination Marketing

Untangling Tourism Tech Episode 3, with Fabienne Wintle and Liz Ward. Times match the video. We removed filler words and fixed mis-heard names.

[00:01] Hello, hello, third episode of Untangling Tourism Tech, live from the very picturesque Food I Am in Wagga Wagga. So we’re going to sit down now that you’ve seen the beautiful surroundings. Yeah, we’re at the Local Government New South Wales Visitor Economy Conference, so we attend this, we try to attend it most years, the last few years. It’s a really great event because this is where all of the tourism officers and people involved in tourism in New South Wales regions come together out of the councils, and so it’s a really good opportunity for sharing and learning together, et cetera, so it’s great. And for us to catch up again. Oh, here we are again together. Awesome, awesome.

[00:47] But what we wanted to talk about in this episode was, it’s just something that keeps cropping up again and again, and it has for a long time, but we’re hearing it much more frequently again now, is the risks to destination marketing organisations losing funding and really fighting to find that really strong relevance and value proposition to their members. And we’re working with some clients, well, you’ve been working with a lot of clients, haven’t you, Fab, in terms of working on their user journey and their website to be able to find that fantastic kind of sweet spot for commercialisation.

[01:26] And it really started, I guess, a year ago. I think it was all brought by GA4, you know, the changeover from Google Analytics, where they started asking the question: how many leads are we passing to members? Where do people click on our website, on the listing? Is it on the phone number, on the address, is it on the email? Quite a lot actually click on the email address as opposed to the website. But tourism marketing organisation and council really want to see the value that they bring to their local operators, and they’ve really started to track those leads down.

[01:58] Yeah, and I think that’s where it begins, and this is the power of analytics, isn’t it? Because if you can measure something, you can then work against a goal. So if your goal is financial independence for a start, because you’re running the risks of losing government funding, then you’ve got to know where your relevance and that value is. So you’ve got to be able to measure the leads going out to your members’ websites, you’ve got to be able to measure very clearly the bookings that you are generating on your own website, or it might be through your visitor information centre that you’re managing. What marketing campaign has actually worked to generate those leads and bookings, and where to invest your funds next year?

[02:41] It’s incredible to see that, you know, not that many destination marketing organisation had actually had that tracking set up to be able to do that, so that’s where it really starts. So it starts with the analytics, but it really does open up the much bigger question of what does… My hand is dying. We really should have brought the props, shouldn’t we? We’re all about live. That’s right, and we’re live in a fantastic place. It’s a bit frosty, but it’s beautiful.

[03:09] So if you can get the analytics, then that’s the starting point, because financial independence comes from providing that really strong value to your local operators, and it really means that we have to start to challenge what is the right kind of DMO business model. Would a perfect world for a DMO look like complete financial independence from government, with a really strong value proposition to the local operators, where the DMO was the number one source of truth for inspiring, planning and booking capability for the region, and they weren’t tied to a select set of operators who were members, but are actually the best offers in their region that they want to put forward to their consumers?

[04:03] It’s critical to have that trust and authority that your tourism organisation, if it wants to rank well and be the number one authority, you have to showcase the truth of your whole of industry and not just specific members that have paid a membership fee. Otherwise you’re already starting, you know, not really portraying or missing out on understanding the needs of the client and matching them to what they really want to do. So will they eventually trust you once they realise that you’re only showcasing maybe a third of what the destination is about? No. So the best way to actually be relevant is actually meet the need of the customers.

[04:44] So we believe strongly that you should be representing the whole region and find a business model that matches the needs of that customer. So perhaps, you know, if you are doing memberships, perhaps there’s another way to actually fund. Perhaps you should think about turning into a more commercial model and having staff that is sales-driven, commission-based, being able to put itineraries together. We know that using technology is really hard. I don’t know about you, Liz, but we’ve been talking about itinerary creation, planners creation for so long. But what we see is that not many people book online directly on the destination website. So do they want to talk to people? If that’s so, get them connected to someone who’s ready to help them, like a local travel agent, to take their booking.

[05:33] I think that’s the big opportunity, Fab. If we go, we want financial independence as a destination marketing organisation, we’ve got to look at the business model. We’ve got to say, if we are going to generate revenue through booking commissions, booking fees, then we have to be the number one travel booking service for the destination, the best information source and the best way of getting booking. Think about what the customer needs now. Customers expect, when they go on to a good service website, like a travel agency website, they can chat to someone, they can get help with that booking. Imagine a DMO website offering service that was better than Booking.com for their region. Like, if that’s the benchmark, Booking.com or Expedia, I don’t think it’s that hard to do that better by bringing in some bit of using your tech to be high touch.

[06:30] You’ve got advocates working in your business, volunteers, local knowledge. You really know, you know, your teams know the local area and what are the best things to do and places to go, and they’re passionate about the vision for the destination, for your visitor economy. Therefore, how do you capitalise on that as an asset and rethink your role in the destination, and think about providing the best possible information and booking service and coupling that together, so that customers to your website or coming to the visitor information centre are raving about the service they got, and that you completed an itinerary for them and booked it? And at the same time, as an organisation, you’re generating fantastic value for the local operators by passing these leads and bookings on, and you’re increasing your revenue through this revenue stream of booking fees and commissions.

[07:32] It’s kind of like DMOs are kind of halfway there. They provide the booking service on their website or the VIC, they’ve got great content, but they’re not really taking a commercial focus to be the best possible sales team they can be. And solve the problem. Like, if you’ve got people coming to your destination site or to your LGA site, if they want to talk to someone, don’t make it hard for them to find the contact details. Make it easy, put a pop-up, create a lead magnet or anything like that that will put the customer closer to a person. And if they want to talk to a person, they will be able to talk to a person, and that person will be able to seal the deal and really help them have a great stay in the destination.

[08:22] Ask yourself: what is your sales strategy? When was the last time that your VIC staff did sales training? They probably did customer service training, they get access to that quite regularly through different services, but what about sales training? What about transparency back to the operators about the leads that you’re generating? So opening up the analytics to be able to demonstrate that strong value proposition. There’s like… I feel like the DMOs are sitting with these great assets and they’re not that far off this. It’s just rethinking the model, commercialising the model.

[08:58] Yeah, commercialising. Imagine you never had government funding and you were relying purely on membership fees. Is there a better way than membership fees to actually drive that value for your operators, by providing leads and bookings, so that you can open up your services to everybody in the region and sell the best of the region, not relying on membership fees? You’ll have people, you’ll have operators coming to you because you’ll be communicating, you’ll be selling. Everyone will want you to be their agent. Basically, you are their in-destination agent. So we’d just like people to think about that, because we can see the potential. We’re sitting on the other side helping people solve these problems, and we really think the time is now to rethink the business model of the DMO.

[09:51] Exactly what you said. That’s right, what I said. All right, we’ll see you at the next fabulous place somewhere in Australia, at great businesses like this one, Food I Am. Yes, next week. See you then. See you.