Leading tourism organisations on beautiful Kangaroo Island have collaborated to deliver industry leadership in the digital space. They have developed an image portal as part of their Open All Year Project to encourage their local operators to improve content marketing on Kangaroo Island and for their businesses.
The Open All Year project announced the launch of its digital assets portal – a library of photos, videos, fact sheets, tools and more – free and available for all Kangaroo Island businesses to use to improve their content marketing.
Open All Year is a project of the Kangaroo Island Industry and Brand Alliance, with support from Tourism Kangaroo Island. The development of tools and images has been a key facet of the project to address one of the major issues facing Kangaroo Island business – seasonality.
A recent survey of industry group associations – Tourism Kangaroo Island, KI Industry and Brand Alliance, KI Food and Wine Association, Agriculture KI and Business Kangaroo Island – identified that after access, seasonal fluctuations in business and visitation to the island was the single biggest economic issue facing business on Kangaroo Island, whether it was retail, services, accommodation or hospitality.
Open All Year sponsor Craig Wickham said helping businesses to do better in the “off-season” would have transformational impact on the Island’s economy. To this end, the project has been working in several areas, collating insights on the current seasonal fluctuations across Kangaroo Island, providing workshops and one-on-one sessions with business mentor Dave Staughton challenging local businesses to identify approaches suiting their own business and to action these, promoting the Island’s seasonal highlights through the KI Social Media Alliance and working with South Australian Tourism Commission to provide greater seasonal representation and now, through the new portal, providing imagery and content as well as tools to help businesses tailor their own approach.
The portal was launched at a workshop on September 21, 9am-noon at the Aurora Ozone Hotel. Attendees learned what is in the portal, how to access the portal and how to use the materials in the portal on your own website and social media.
In the afternoon, Liz Ward, co-founder of Tourism Tribe, helped operators go one step further and got to the nitty-gritty: giving a quick checklist to review the health of your website, showing operators how to rework the images in the portal specifically for their business – including how to tag images for search engine optimisation, how to use blogs, and covering a range of digital tips and tricks. The $110 fee (inc GST) included a one-year subscription to Tourism Tribe – a 24-hour one-stop shop for digital learning and support for any type of business so they’ve got access to more learning support from digital experts whenever they need it!
Tourism operators invested a day out of their business to understand the importance of content marketing and left with an understanding of digital strategies, access to genuinely useful content and priority actions tailored to their current situation.
