Destination Marketing Mix

Bundaberg Tourism's destination campaigns are heavily swayed towards digital marketing over traditional marketing.

The significant difference between digital and traditional marketing is how an audience encounters the marketing message. Traditional marketing involves conventional media such as magazines, newspapers, TV, flyers or direct mail while digital marketing involves online technologies such as websites, blogs, social media or email.

The way people interact with brands is constantly evolving, and since COVID-19, digital marketing has only continued to increased in importance. 

Lets explore the digital vs traditional marketing activities we use at Bundaberg Tourism, how they work together and why a campaign may preference one over another.

MEDIA TYPES

Traditional Marketing Media

Traditional media is non-digital marketing, and is what people are generally more familiar with as they have been around for much longer.  Traditional media includes things like TV advertisements, print advertising, radio, cinema and out of home (billboard) advertising.

Digital Marketing Media

Digital marketing utilises online media, including social media, websites, digital ads, search engine results and more.  We classify these into three categories - Owned, Earned and Paid.

Owned Media are the platforms that we have ownership of and more control over. For Bundaberg Tourism, this includes the destination website, our Facebook and Instagram channels, our EDM (e-newsletter) and subscriber database, and SEO and search results from our website. These are the home of our brand, and are the easiest area to make changes to.

Earned media is everything that is outside of our owned media that we haven't paid for and includes reviews from our destination guests, posts about the region on other websites and blogs, and social mentions.  Earned media is Digital PR, in essence. It’s the way the destination brand is perceived on third party sites.  It’s the area that we have the least direct control over, but it can be one of the most influential. 

Paid media is generally the digital advertising that we spend our marketing budget on. Facebook ads, display ads on other websites, native ads that look like articles within other websites, and pay per click are just some of the paid media available.

There is definitely overlap between these areas, such as boosting posts on social to help drive awareness and increase engagement - this is part paid media, earned media and owned media. The most important element is how we apply our strategy across all digital media to leverage the opportunities as broadly as possible.

DIGITAL VS TRADITIONAL - HOW DO WE CHOOSE?

In spite of their differences, digital and traditional media should be used together to make our marketing stronger. What media we choose ultimately comes down to our the target markets we have developed for each campaign. 

Bundaberg Tourism's marketing campaigns are in line with industry best practice - we design them with digital media as the primary activities focused on sales leads and conversions, and then, where budget allows, add traditional media activities as secondary activities focused on brand awareness over conversion within the marketing mix. 

Here are some significant differences that help us to decide what works better for our Destination Marketing Campaigns

Trust
Traditional media are tried and tested media options, that offer high reach and frequency and resonate with our target audiences within our target markets.  These days, however, consumers rely on a website and social media to establish a sense a trust with a brand.  Their engagement with us also helps with word of mouth advertising - the most effective marketing available, and yet the hardest to get and track;

Value
Traditional media has a high entry cost and requires frequent repeats to ensure the best response, where digital media is far more cost effective, both in overall cost and in cost-per-consumer;

Audience
Traditional media reaches a broad audience, while digital advertising allows us to target with much more precision consumers we know are or will be interested in holidaying in Bundaberg.  We aren't just limited to one area either - digital media reaches global audiences;

Data Driven
Traditional media is not trackable, where the analytic tools attached to the digital media we use make it very easy to measure our digital marketing campaigns.  We can see how many people saw our ad, how long they spent on it, and whether they then clicked through to our website.  This gives us a clear idea of where the budget is spent and how much ROI (return on investment) and ROAS (return on advertising spend) is obtained for every dollar spent;

Adaptability
Digital media delivers consumers directly to our website, allowing us to retarget them with further advertising and content to push them closer to conversion.  It also allows us to mix up our campaign messaging or creative quickly and easily if we wish or need to;

Changing Trends
More and more people spend their leisure time online, so digital media allows us to market to them whenever and wherever they may be;

Consumer Engagement
Both traditional media and digital are forms of outbound marketing, allowing us to send our message out to travel intenders. Digital media, however, is also a form of inbound marketing, where our consumers can seek us out and allow us to interact with them.  Inbound marketing tends to provide more willing consumers. 

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