VisitCanberra
Tourism Mentoring Program for Operators in the Australian Capital Territory
The Opportunity
We were approached by the team at VisitCanberra in November 2020, to develop a series of modules to include in their 'Tourism Reboot' tourism mentoring program.
Our training modules were strategically designed to not only educate but inspire and empower participants to take action to develop and market their businesses to drive demand for not only for their experiences, but to work more collaboratively as a destination to drive increased visitation and yield for their region.
We mentored 142 participants (SME businesses and national capital attractions) from February-May through this Program, with representation across all industry sectors.
Program Scope
We took participants on a deep dive to understand how to navigate the current economic climate surrounding COVID-19, and how to prepare their experience and marketing strategy to restart in a changed environment.
The Program not only covered all of the 'How To' basics of key digital marketing platforms, but showed participants how the relationship between their experience, their visitors, and strategic marketing tactics come together to achieve business objectives, and can drive real growth & sustainability, which is of particular importance in the current economic climate.
Program Methodology
Marketing + Enrolments
VisitCanberra promoted the Program via their industry communication channels and managed the applications/enrolments.
We published a pre-program survey to gather insights from the participants on key issues/challenges they faced in marketing their business, which helped us to refine our learning materials and concepts to ensure the operators could have all their questions answered.
Marketing Modules
The Program consisted of 5 Marketing Modules to be delivered over a 3 month period (March-May 2021).
We worked closely with the team at VisitCanberra to refine the training topics covered in the Modules to ensure key skill gaps were addressed.
The Five learning Modules covered in the Program were
- Tourism Landscape, Best Practice Tourism Marketing + Ideal Customers
- Creating Exceptional Experiences
- Website Marketing Strategy
- Social Media Strategy
- Reputation Management, Customer Advocacy + Location Based Marketing
Program Facilitation
- All of the modules were delivered via an interactive 1.5 hour live online webinar, which were facilitated fortnightly.
- All webinars were recorded, so those participants who couldn’t attend the workshop or webinars live could watch the replays.
- We facilitated fortnightly Zoom Calls (between webinars) to give participants the opportunity to ask specific questions about the implementation of their learnings.
Mentoring + Learning Materials
- Bespoke learning materials (workbooks, templates and Marketing toolkit) were created and supplied to support the key learnings in the webinars and aligned to VisitCanberra marketing activities. Each Module consisted of a set of Tasks, which were practical actions that each business could implement straight away
- All learning materials (including recorded live webinar + replay of the live workshops) were made available to participants within 24 hours after each module.
- Local tourism business case studies were used throughout the webinars, making the learning materials as relevant as possible for the participants
- A private Facebook Group was used to further engage participants and enable them to ask and receive support during the Program, and then a further 4 weeks after the final webinar.
Results
A post program survey undertook by VisitCanberra highlighted that the program received a very high level of satisfaction from participants with 95.2% stating they their level of satisfaction was either Good or Excellent.