Tag: Tourism Council WA Conference 2021

Carma’s Wrap-up Of The Tourism Council WA Regional Conference 2021

What A Blast!

This time last week Adam Barrell, Monique Boucher and I were in Geraldton for the Tourism Council WA Regional Conference 2021, where we hosted breakout sessions.

What did we talk about?

Monique and I shared our experience with the Isolation Libation Tours (affectionately known as the ISO Tours) from a year ago (almost to the day!) and the impact they made on her business, those of the producers she featured, and that of her guests. More on that later.

In case you haven’t seen any of the tours, or you’ve forgotten who we visited – there’s some friendly faces in these slideshows:

The Wine Tour kicked it off with 7 venues! Nuts.

Next week we visited the distillers – 6 to be exact.

Then it was brewery mayhem – 4 breweries with 2 beer loving guests.

And lastly cideries (it IS a word) 5 of them spreading from the Perth Hills to the Swan Valley.

My Stuff

I couldn’t plan my words, because I knew if I had a script and I got lost I’d be in more trouble than if I just got up and spoke from the heart about a campaign I knew inside out. Slight panic attack when I realised our breakout was to be held on the main stage – eek!

I most wanted to get across that while much marketing activity is well-planned, well-budgeted and painstakingly produced; no-one planned for the shutdown and reactive campaigns on a shoestring can be just as powerful.

At a conference where you’ve presented on the same stage as the head of Tourism Australia, Tourism WA, and the Minister for Tourism, you know that there’s a lot of talent in the room – but a lot of the attendees are small businesses or solo operators, and they needed to hear about what we did because they could literally pick up a gimbal and go out and replicate it tomorrow. With no budget.

And I hope they do!

If you’re interested here’s a PDF of the slides.

It was so great to be able to include some short videos of the producers and one of our ISO tour guest and current Beer Chats With Brewers co-host, Daniel Rootman to show our audience so they could see that the campaign wasn’t just a hit for Monique’s business, but actually created sales and interest in the breweries, cideries (a WORD), distilleries and wineries.

Barrell’s Bots

In Adam’s session he championed the data capacity and time-saving automation Chatbots offer with practical examples that could be adopted by the tourism industry. RIP his inbox.

Bet he’s scheming up a way to automate his emails now as I know he’s had a tonne of enquiries for building custom chatbots since the conference.

The Journey

We drove up in a Tesla, making the road trip a lot of fun! We stopped to charge the car in Cervantes and had lunch at The Lobster Shack (a must-do) but unfortunately the charging station there was a bit slow.

So that we didn’t run the gauntlet making it to Geraldton on less charge than we’d anticipated, we stopped again in Jurien Bay where we caused quite a scene at the petrol station.

Sufficed to say, they remembered us on the way back home. Ask me about the story and I’ll tell you but for now I think I’ll leave it at that.

I drove The Tez home, and at one point nearly made Adam sick. I’ll leave that there too, lol.

We stayed at The Gerald, which we can recommend. Not just because it’s modern and tidy, but it has 2 bars, and they have over 80 gins. A dent was made.

They also let you eat and drink anything in the minibar for free. How cool is that?

The Conference

The conference was well run and both the attendees and the wider Geraldton community were incredibly welcoming of us Perth & Peel mask wearers.

I really enjoyed hearing about Tourism WA’s #WanderOutYonder campaign and the “Holiday Here This Year” activity run by Tourism Australia. Our formal dinner was to be held outside but the weather had other pans and we ended up in a hanger.

This probably undersells how awesome the hanger looked, and the food was of a high standard. Funny to hear the Gero locals groan “oh, crayfish” as they eat it so often it’s completely lost its delicacy status there. Someone even told me “we prefer marron” to which I had to giggle.

There was an award ceremony, and I’d like to say a big congrats to all the award winners!

While we’re on the thanks and congrats train – let’s extend that to the organisers who made this conference happen in what would have been pretty stressful times. I hadn’t even packed til the day before as I was sure we’d be going into a regional lockdown. They must have had a tough time working and re-working contingencies.

And to those who came up to us afterwards to share feedback on our presentation, massive thanks!

We met some awesome people, and it sure is nice to be able to attend large events again.

May 17, 2021
Tourism Council WA Conference 2021 | Taking ISO Tours On Tour
We’re taking the ISO Tours on tour for the Tourism Council WA Conference 2021

I’m really excited to be sharing our experience of Hidden deTours’ ISO Tours with an even wider audience at the Tourism Council WA Conference in Geraldton next week!

From humble beginnings, to a campaign that reached the hearts of Perth people (and beyond) who were unable to venture out – to reaching over 91,000 Facebook users, the ISO Tours were fun (sure) but they also had a lasting impact on Hidden deTour’s business and Monique’s personal brand.

I think that’s the most interesting part. Actually there’s two ‘most interesting parts’

One:

As a marketer, sometimes we lose sight of one of the main goals of marketing – easing the path to purchase.

We get bogged down in metrics we can measure. Sales (when it’s not technically our job to sell) and brand messaging.

People now feel like they know Monique. They aren’t Googling tours, they’re calling her and excitedly shouting “Mon!” at her over the phone, and on the street, like they are old friends. Why would they want to tour with anyone else than their old friend Mon?

We forget part of easing the path to purchase is simply zigging – being noticed! Which in this case was standing out by doing something completely opposite to the others, being reactive. Which brings me to point two.

Two:

Not all successful marketing campaigns require strategy. THERE! I said it.

Monique and I could not have planned this campaign. Well, we could have planned something similar, but it never would have taken off…this campaign was successful because it was in response to our situation.

In our short lockdown there were phone conversations about what people were missing out on, online chats with producers who were wondering what the future held for their businesses, and we all had a lot of time on our hands and not much to fill it with (except anyone trying to work from home and home school children – props to you, you talented weirdos) but most brand and businesses took time off.

Nothing wrong with that!

Zigging

It’s hard to keep going amid a sea of refunds, re-booking questions that you can’t answer, and general feelings of dread while the money stops coming in and the bills keep coming.

Even if you could “pause” your business (I’ve heard this term used although I must say I don’t really know how you pause a business…) simply taking some time off is certainly understandable and probably very healthy.

Instead, we did 4 ISO Tours over 4 weeks, creating a total of 20 broadcasts LIVE to Facebook.

It was a hit!

The producers loved it because they were reduced to takeaways only (in the beginning limits even applied to the amount of alcohol you could buy at a time), not offering tastings, square metre restrictions, sign-ins, sanitiser and a lot of confusion and worry. We asked people to pre-purchase the products we’d be tasting and many people did – one group drove around in front of us during the Bickley Wine ISO Tour and stopped at each winery to get takeaways before we got there and went home to watch the re-play.

So this did result in actual sales for our venues, what a win!

Punters loved it because they were feeling a bit cooped up and they could experience a very organic feeling tour with an experienced guide who clearly knows her venues well – and the relationships show through. This is part of what made this such a long-term success, if Monique was an average tour guide this wouldn’t have done such wonders for her business – but you really get to see what it’s like being on tour with her.

The press loved it because there was nothing for them to talk about. No events, no sports, no movies…nothing. So we got pretty much covered by all media in the beginning (this changed as the lockdown restrictions progressed, but we’d already been noticed by then)

Check ’em out

You can see the tours on Monique’s Facebook page, and they’re also on IGTV and the Hidden deTours YouTube channel.

Here’s a quick snippet from one of our slides just to show you the imprint these tours made on Facebook, from a page that at the start, was at around 1,800 likes.

ISO Wine Tour – Bickley Valley

We visited:
1. 1. Tonon Winery & Vineyard
  2. Fairbrossen
  3. Carldenn Homestead
  4. Plume Estate
  5. Myattsfield
  6. Hainault Winery
  7. La Fattoria
ISO Distillery Tour

We visited:
1. 1. Old Young’s
  2. Swan Valley Gin Co.
  3. Sin Gin
  4. High Spirits
  5. Wandering Distillery
ISO Beer Tour

We Visited:
1. 1. Nowhereman
  2. Bright Tank
  3. Seasonal
  4. Blasta
ISO Cider Tour
1. 1. Roleystone Brewing Co (at Raeburn Orchards)
  2. Naked Apple Cider
  3. Core Cider House
  4. Carmel Cider Co
  5. Funk
Tourism Council WA Conference

So we’re off to tell a room full of tourism conference attendees about our tours – how it worked, why we did it, and how it’s had a lasting effect on the business.

In essence – taking our tours on tour!

We even get to road trip with our pal Adam Barrell of So Media Group, who’s going to speak about using Chat Bots in tourism marketing. I’ve seen a sneak peek of his slides and they are KILLER – so if you’re heading along to the conference make sure you sit in on Adam’s breakout (don’t worry – it’s not in the same session as ours so you can do both)

So I’ll be OOO next week as I soak up the conference vibes and stress about not being nervous until I get super nervous.

After it’s all done I might share the slides with you all if there’s interest.

PS – the shirt I’m wearing in our photo from a year ago in the feature image of this post? I can wear it as a dress now – just sayin’
April 29, 2021