In May 2016 Tourism Australia launched its content realignment project, a major reform of all material on Australia.com.
The approach was to captivate tourists and increase traffic by focusing on the unique details of a holiday destination.
Teaming up with Storyation and Fairfax Media to create relevant and shareable content, Tourism Australia's engaged visitors increased 46% and the site is now at a record high for unique visitors.
The challenge
Tourism Australia partnered with Storyation and Fairfax Media to create immediate, experiential and shareable content that would connect consumers directly with products and industry.
The objective was to shift Australia.com away from being a purely functional site that focused solely on instruction and education.
Tourism Australia’s former global content editor Andrés López-Varela says: “We went from being a passive observer to passionate local and no longer wanted a shopping list of facts.
“We wanted to focus on experiences. It’s providing hand holding for the traveller, which is the layer that was missing in the past.”
The strategy
Rolling out a major content realignment project, Lopez-Vaerla and his team used actionable content driven by data that tapped into previously unmet consumer needs.
In addition to keeping content consistent across the site, López-Varela says a change in tone and style would directly appeal to overseas visitors.
The project was aimed at helping visitors overcome barriers to travel such as the distance and scale of Australia and give more information on the value of experiences including interactive maps, galleries and social media content in order to appeal to a “high value” traveller, López-Varela says.
To measure the impact, the global content team dived deeper into the measurement and create a granular measurement system where everything on the page was tracked.
“Data is telling you if people are clicking, engaging and sharing and that’s giving you insight into what they want... and then we can produce content to fill those gaps,” Lopez-Varela says.
The content team worked with Fairfax Media to customise a power index tool that ranked content against awareness, engagement and conversion, so reporting wasn’t only focused on performance but on efficacy, tracking exact click-throughs and how many people read a piece but didn’t convert to an operator.
Content agency Storyation undertook analysis of consumer needs globally and managed a project to localise content for different markets around the world.
The agency also developed a detailed Content Playbook and Stylebook to guide the creation of all content on Australia.com.
The results
Since the project’s inception, Tourism Australia has published 710 new articles and 50 new videos, with engaged visitors increasing 46% and leads to tourism operators jumping 350%, meaning substantial value delivered to the industry.
The site is used by one quarter of all visitors to Australia and is at a record high for unique visitors. More than 70% of traffic to the site is organic or direct.
Page views on the ‘Things to do’ section of the website increased by more than 400% and the number of people clicking on third-party industry sites, such as restaurants, bars and museums, has jumped tenfold.
In the global Content Marketing Awards announced in July 2017, Australia.com was awarded a Finalist for Best Content Driven website.
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