Skip to main content

Image l-r: Brianna Delaporte, Jesse Desjardins, Christian Bishop, Quie Ying Morrison, Jenny Lee

The recent ‘Content Challenge – Working together to share our region’s story’ workshop facilitated by MRBTA at Wyndham Resort in Dunsborough was a huge success. VIP guest speaker Jesse Desjardins, Global Manager of Social and Content from Tourism Australia gave the room some serious inspiration and motivation in the social media sphere, whilst the panel and breakout sessions helped to delve a little deeper and answer your curly questions.

Jesse recently completed a research paper on Paul Hogan’s involvement in promoting Australian tourism back in the 80s and what lessons we could apply to promote tourism with social media. He spoke about the unique and incredible interplay of circumstances, politics, and personalities that combined to create a seismic shift in how Australia was promoted and how the key takeaways could be used to create a successful social media strategy.

Some highlights:

  1. Trust and alignment are the key ingredients. Tourism marketing is not one thing, it’s a series of things working together.
  2. Hogan’s persona was infused with abundant authenticity. Showcase your best characters in your business.
  3.  Let the outside in. Find ways to bring the best of your customers’ content into your marketing.
  4. When evaluating any new platforms, ideas or shiny toys ask yourself these two questions. 1. Does it add value to my customers or audience? 2. Can I capture value for my business?
  5. Does your marketing move people to the next step? Everything should demonstrate how it’s moving people along the path to purchase.
  6. Can you do it over and over again? The best ideas are not always the most shiny ones, they are the ones that consistently produce results for your business. TA’s success in social comes doing the same thing incredibly well every day.
  7. Make your staff and your customers the heros. The more you let others carry your messages the further they will take it.

You can read his paper here: http://bit.ly/onetomillions