Destination Perth is the official travel website to uncover events, activities, what to do and places to visit in Perth, forming the online presence of the Perth Regional Tourism Organisation, Perth’s peak destination marketing organisation responsible for promoting Perth and surrounds as a desirable leisure destination.
The PRTO is a not-for-profit marketing organisation established in 2004 to act as the primary body for the marketing of Perth and surrounds to domestic and international consumers, travel trade and media. Representing a membership base of more than 300 tourism operators including accommodation and entertainment venues, attractions, transport providers, tour and cruise operators and restaurants, the PRTO uses the Destination Perth website as a platform to showcase its member organisations.
Destination Perth’s goals in their marketing activities are two-fold: to promote Perth as a destination, and to promote their members to Perth visitors and locals alike.
Destination Perth is a long-standing client of Glide Agency, and we’re proud to have developed many campaigns showcasing Perth while drawing attention to PRTO’s members. One recent campaign we devised and implemented was “Perth in Colour”, which ran throughout Spring 2019 to great success.
Glide Agency developed a tailored social media & Google Adwords campaign for Destination Perth, showcasing the beauty and fun of Perth in spring to audiences in WA, the Eastern States, Malaysia and Singapore.
With click-through rates (CTR) being historically low in the tourism industry – particularly for campaigns targeted at overseas markets – our focus was to improve CTR by developing creative campaign collateral that was customised for digital activation. This is quite a different approach from many competitors in the marketing space, who would create collateral for traditional marketing purposes and then realign it for digital. Glide Agency produces truly digital-first tourism marketing campaigns, and it shows.
In order to gain engagement with tourism marketing campaigns in the digital world, the creative collateral must be digital-customised, with graphics that are enticing and eye-catching, and designed to stand out on digital platforms.
Users are often inundated with online advertising and can find themselves fatigued, so to stand out from the pack, we’ve devised campaign collateral that is beautiful, colourful and fun.
We’ve injected creativity into the Destination Perth brand by developing collateral with simplified, striking looks, that goes out of the box and generates a sense of emotional connection. It’s no longer enough to create just a good logo, or disparate collateral: a brand image is increasingly visual, and we’ve used a series of fonts, styles and logos that resonate with users, while really giving a taste of what visitors and locals love about spring in Perth. This carefully constructed series of image collateral gives character and depth to the brand.
We’re sure you’ll agree that the results are gorgeous, engaging and just perfect for getting noticed online!
We’ve also approached this campaign from a UX perspective, with customised landing pages. In previous campaigns before engaging Glide Agency, Facebook and Google advertising for Destination Perth would direct audiences to the main website, rather than campaign-specific landing pages; with our full-service campaigns, clicking through on these ads would lead to a landing page tailored to that campaign. This leads to a better customer journey, more aligned with what motivated the user to click through in the first place.
Glide Agency was a natural choice for Destination Perth to work with, based on our ability to make the most out of the available financial resources of a NFP, as well as our agility and speed to work with different forms of content – audio, video, photography and written content.
As a truly full-service, digital-first agency, we combined all of these media to tell a compelling, fluid story, and delivered great results.
We also understand the financial imperative for an NFP to maximise return on investment, and we’ve achieved that through creating collateral that people love, at a lower cost-per-click. Good creative reduces CPC naturally, because people engage with the content; by developing content such as video, we’ve been able to help Destination Perth to stretch their budget further while getting great results.
We love living, working and playing in this city, and we really enjoy creating content that is playful yet informative, exciting locals and visitors alike about what Perth has to offer.
A particularly exciting aspect of the Perth in Colour campaign was a series of competitions targeted at Perth locals, offering colourful Perth experiences to increase awareness of PRTO’s members and the services they offer, while encouraging locals to #SeePerth in a new way by exploring their backyard and supporting local businesses.
These competitions were very well-received, both in terms of increasing traffic to Destination Perth’s website and social channels, and increasing traffic to the various categories of PRTO members spanning sectors such as tourism, food, attraction, retail and tour operators.
The Perth in Colour campaign delivered some fantastic results for Destination Perth, generating 4 million impressions, 65,000 sessions, and 1,400 competition entries. The clickthrough rate for the campaign was an impressive 8.5%, well above industry benchmarks for the tourism industry.
The campaign also got great results for Member listings, with significantly increased traffic compared to the previous period:
The campaign was also able to help Destination Perth increase their following by an impressive 13%; by creating campaign collateral that people loved, which is simultaneously useful and beautiful, we have been able to motivate users to follow Destination Perth because they want to see more!
