Destination of Choice: South Australia

Adelaide, Kangaroo Island and Barossa in South Australia are not commonly considered as holiday destinations for Indians. Awareness of this region was amplified when Adelaide hosted the India vs Pakistan match during the ICC World Cup 2015. The challenge before The Practice was: To leverage the momentum from the World Cup match to drive more  visitors to South Australian destinations and to position the region as a destination of choice for Indian tourists.

The impact of our sustained online strategy attracted a 71 per cent increase in fans, 18X spike in organic reach and a 10X jump  in organic engagement.

At first, we developed a message map, which helped us to zero in on unique offerings of five key destinations. Under our Strategic Media Relations program, we drew on opportunities like the shooting of a popular Hindi TV series at Adelaide, Baross and Kangaroo Island to attract arrivals; and announcements of SATC investment programs in India to target trade and financial media. In two years, we had organized 11 familiarization trips for the media, which included National Geographic Traveller and Times Life. Our strategic brand positioning solution translated into 170 stories for our client garnering over 1.4 billion impressions and AUD 8 million in PR value.

Our Stakeholder Engagement program focused on deploying key social media influencers in the lifestyle and cricket space to reach our target audience comprising of honeymooners, independent travellers and cricket enthusiasts. We executed three influencer campaigns over two years, which led to 30-50k likes per post and over 400 million media impressions. The main objective of our Digital Engagement campaign was to boost engagement for each post on the official South Australia Facebook page in India. The impact of our sustained online strategy attracted a 71 per cent increase in fans, 18X spike in organic reach and a 10X jump  in organic engagement.