Digital prowess keeps NSW on top

Opening the minds (and wallets) of travellers to the beauty of NSW can be a big task, but Destination NSW has a few online strategies to back them up.

Ensuring NSW holds onto its spot as favourite Aussie state to visit, Destination NSW’s websites, Sydney.com and Visitnsw.com, are ranked number one among Australia’s State Tourism Organisations, attracting 46% of all website traffic in this sector as at April 2015.

Sydney.com alone receives almost one million visits per month and boasts industry-leading conversion rates.

According to Destination NSW’s ceo Sandra Chipchase, tourism operators of all sizes must regularly review and adapt their practices to take advantage of the new ways that travellers consume media and how they plan, book and share their travel and event experiences.

“Our Sydney.com and VisitNSW.com websites give travellers the ability to research more than 17,000 tourism operators and book direct from our site,” she said.

“Of every 100 visits to the Destination NSW’s consumer websites, 20 convert into leads for industry – that’s a rate well above the average tourism industry visit/lead conversion rate of 4%.

“We know travellers comparison shop and ‘multiscreen’ across several devices. Over 60% of all website traffic to Destination NSW websites now comes from mobile devices, with 42.3% generated from smartphones and 18.24% from tablets. Adapting our online content for easy mobile consumption has certainly helped increase bookings.”

Destination NSW has also achieved significant social media success with its Sydney Facebook and Google+ pages both securing two million followers in May 2015. The Sydney Facebook page reaches over 12 million people per month, while the Sydney Community on Google+ has been recognised by Google as one of the largest destination-specific communities in the world.

Chipchase puts Destination NSW’s social media success down to the constant updated stream of both still and video content featured on the sites.

“Tourism and destination marketers at the forefront embrace an always-on digital strategy, continually feeding travellers’ demands for more information, more content and images, more video, whilst enabling consumers to book instantly and easily,” she said.

Destination NSW’s digital innovation has recently included a number of industry firsts, including becoming the first Australian tourism organisation to join Instagram’s brand new advertising format, Instagram Carousel to bring images of NSW to Instagram feeds of more than five million users across the country.

Destination NSW was also an early adopter of Twitter’s new Periscope App when it used the app to live stream the ‘lights on’ moment of Vivid Sydney, the world’s largest festival of light music and ideas.

“The traditional travel planning cycle has been well and truly changed by mobile and digital technologies. It’s vital for destinations to continually innovate their online presence to reach holidaymakers and maintain relevance,” Chipchase added.

“Destination NSW is constantly looking for new ways to inform and inspire international and domestic visitors to achieve the NSW Government’s target of doubling overnight visitor expenditure by 2020. Digital innovation will continue to play a key role in our success.”

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Email the Travel Weekly team at traveldesk@travelweekly.com.au

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