Tourism body Australia’s NorthWest has wrapped up a three-year campaign marketing the Kimberley region by winning a top prize at this year’s state tourism awards.
Tourism body Australia’s NorthWest has wrapped up a three-year campaign marketing the Kimberley region by winning a top prize at this year’s state tourism awards.
The Characters of the Kimberley digital campaign, which attracted more than 260,000 YouTube views this year, provided three local people with the opportunity to become ambassadors for the region.
It also included a competition offering a trip to the Kimberley to meet the characters featured in the videos, which drew around 30,000 entries.
The campaign won top award in the destination-marketing category at the WA Tourism Awards, having won silver the past two years.
Australia’s NorthWest Tourism chief executive officer Glen Chidlow said there was an increasing level of awareness for the region.
“I think the region really does have a reputation beyond the state’s boundaries as somewhere where people want to come and have a holiday,” Mr Chidlow told Business News.
In the year to June 2013, the total visitors to Western Australia’s north-west accounted for 6 per cent of the state’s total, with 16 per cent of WA’s total interstate visitors heading to the region.
Mr Chidlow said there had been solid growth in visitor numbers during the three years of the campaign, and Australia’s NorthWest was already planning a campaign next year using the traction generated by the Characters of the Kimberley.
“We’ve done it for the last three years and each year we’ve seen considerable growth in those metrics that we base the success of the campaign on,” he said.
Australia’s NorthWest Tourism is one of five regional tourism bodies in the state, and receives the majority of its funding from Tourism WA, as well as support from local government in the Kimberley, its membership base, and occasional corporate partnerships.
Tourism Council WA chief executive officer Evan Hall said good destination marketing could make a difference to the relative success or failure of a tourism strategy.
“The most successful marketing campaigns are absolutely clear on their target market and what they’re trying to achieve,” Mr Hall told Business News.
Mr hall said using social media for digital marketing was becoming more prevalent, not just for destination marketing, but across the industry.
He said the council itself ran three levels of digital marketing workshops across the industry and changed the content every two months or so to keep up.
Mr Chidlow said the campaign used Facebook as a medium to promote conversations and engagement with consumers.
“From the comments there is no doubt that the Kimberley is highly regarded as a very desirable tourism destination within Australia,” he said.
