CMO50

25

CMO50 2020 #25: Brent Hill

  • Name Brent Hill
  • Title Executive director of marketing
  • Company South Australia Tourism Commission
  • Commenced role November 2015
  • Reporting Line Chief executive officer
  • Member of the Executive Team Yes
  • Marketing Function 55 staff, 5 direct reports
  • Industry Sector Travel and tourism
  • 2019 ranking 24
  • Related

    Brand Post

    It’s been a year of firsts for South Australia Tourism Commission’s Brent Hill as he’s worked to lead his team, organisation and the wider SA tourism sector through bushfires and then a global pandemic. He says one of the most unusual tasks was doing ads to say the opposite of what he’s usually paid to do.  

    “But probably the most memorable first is that I’ve never shot a TV ad before during a bushfire crisis – literally with smoke from flareups still tainting the air. But it paid off in spades with a really authentic, genuine ad campaign that did its job,” Hill says.  

    Getting through 2020 has taken a huge dose of resilience for all of us, but arguably Hill and SATC have had it harder than many. “The team have had, like many, a rough time,” Hill says, highlighting the transition to working from home as COVID lockdowns struck a tough ask. “Being honest, I think we struggled to really gel and maintain morale. Productivity was amazing, but we lost a bit of our culture.  

    “But I’m so proud of my team, they’re fighters and they have always found a way to deliver. Today, morale has dramatically lifted, which is a testament to the team’s support of each other.”  

    Also driving the team forward are SATC’s commitment to creativity, a proactive mindset, the ability to push past resistance, challenge and not settle, Hill says.  

    Innovative marketing 

    Even before we all had to cope with COVID, the horrific Australian bushfires last summer had devastated the Adelaide Hills and Kangaroo Island. Within a matter of days, Hill and his team produced #BookThemOut, a campaign that became an emotional rallying cry for the whole state. Aired within days of the fires in mass media including press wraps, Australian Open tennis TV and outdoor signage, the hashtag and campaign led to both regions booking out, restoring their tourism trade.  

    SATC also chalked up 942,000 visits to southaustralia.com from January to the end of February, a 59 per cent increase on last year, driving 197,000 leads to operators, also up triple digits. This led to 38,000 travel partner leads generated and over 7000 Instagram posts made using the #BookThemOut hashtag. Webjet was up 56 per cent year-on-year, Expedia sold 3049 room nights, Kokumi KI reported bookings flooding in, and the Kangaroo Island Cup went from 2000 attendees in 2019 to 5000 in 2020, generating massive income and bookings. The PR generated reached even further - 22.1 million Australians, with an ASR of $8.1 million.  

    “We had brought these businesses back from the brink. It is the campaign I am most proud of in my entire career,” Hill says.  

    Business smarts  

    A major strategic change for the SATC this year, meanwhile, has been development of storytelling and video content, replacing straight text and printed material. As consumers have responded to and sought out this form of communications, particularly through the crises, Hill has restructured his team, recruiting for new roles such as digital content producer.  

    “Rather than just put text on a page about road trips, we specifically now commission visual artists and our in-house team to go on the road to film, share and then promote their work through digital and social media,” Hill says. “Tourists are engaging with our content in much bigger numbers, and the audience is diversifying. Once the domain of ‘grey nomads’, the road trip content is being consumed by millennials through to Gen X audiences, adding significantly to our reach and visitor economy.”  

    Total cost savings are also in the vicinity of $200,000 per annum from peak figures. “We now have far more contemporary comms, specialist skills in-house and measurable results,” Hill says.  

    This capability came to the fore as part of SATC’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  

    “As international travel was curtailed, I switched to promoting domestic tourism heavily. Then, as domestic closed down, the team again pivoted to intrastate marketing, using innovations such as campaigns suggesting Airbnb locations as work from home spaces in our ‘Work from Here’ campaign to provide some form of revenue for accommodation providers facing mass cancellations,” Hill says.  

    “Then, with all travel banned, half the team made ads advising against travel. The rest of us got to work on a complete pivot - if we couldn’t bring tourists to South Australia, we’d bring South Australia to them.”  

    The result was SATV. This new content platform showcased the tourism industry and was very much about helping them survive. First cab off the rank was ‘Virtual Tipjar’, which saw tourism operators film content onsite, posted to SATC’s Facebook Live and websites. Consumers stuck in their homes could watch and tip the operator.  

    SATC also created ‘moments of calm’, longform slow video content that appeared on feeds, contrasting with the carnage everywhere else on social media and the news. Another initiative was ‘Flexi tourism’ partnerships with the likes of TripAdvisor and Webjet offering flexible terms and conditions to ease consumers nervous about booking once more.  

    With restrictions easing, a recovery campaign, ‘Welcome Back’, was created. “Part of our brand DNA is to be responsive and tonally correct. Never before have we been so challenged, but the response from potential customers and tourists was immense,” Hill comments.  

    “Google and Facebook confirmed in studies our share of voice grew, while every website metric, from visits to page views, dwell time and leads generated, also lifted considerably. And, importantly, the day restrictions eased, we tapped into this audience, growing bookings and tourism revenue, beginning with intrastate and with borders opening, to interstate audiences.”  

    Customer-led thinking  

    Significant long-term technology and data investment has been critical to supporting all of SATC’s efforts. But while the SATC prides itself on innovation and market leading use of tech, if the industry is not being developed in concert, it risks significant drop off in conversion through poor customer experience at point of booking.  

    To counter this, Hill introduced a grant program initiative at the beginning of the COVID19 pandemic providing for 600 tourism businesses to receive direct digital training.  

    “While not traditionally within the scope of the marketing team, the need was obvious, and the end benefit of improving customer engagement and increased conversion was realised,” he says.  

    Engaging three facilitators to deliver the training, tourism industry participants completed a 12-week program with key objectives including improving the customer’s booking experience, operators’ websites and social media presence, as well as connecting in to SATC’s SEO and digital programs for better ROI and data sharing. The program from conception to commencement of the course was delivered in three weeks, through an intense cross-functional collaboration with Destination Development, Executive Services and Industry teams and the in-house Digital Development team.  

    In all, seven in 10 operators watched all the live sessions, 64 per cent completing them on time. Eighty per cent then joined closed group sessions to share their experiences and learnings and assist with cross-functional development.  

    “The $200,000 cost is arguably some of the most valuable spend we allocated all year, given the flow on effect for our customers – tourists to South Australia,” Hill says.  

    In terms of digital and data in action, Hill points to a recent digital partnership program launched with RAA Travel as a successful initiative in the last year.  

    “Once they’ve decided on where they want to go, the customer / tourist typically then wants the best deal possible. But they get bombarded with a plethora of offers, many for places they are unlikely to stay in,” Hill says. “We realised we could add an extra layer of assurance and convenience to the customer experience by partnering with an online travel player to fulfil a personalised deal.”  

    The initiative with RAA involved mass reach digital advertising via social media and programmatic display ads, promoting travel offers in SA which were available via RAA Travel. High traffic pages on southaustralia.com were given RAA Travel CTA banners, to drive results. But the most significant customer experience element was the use of personalised digital advertising in the mix, Hill says. This process delivered customised content based on a user’s interaction with southaustralia.com, such as ‘food & wine’ and ‘nature’ and connected them to travel offers that matched.  

    “Rather than simply providing a ‘one size fits all’ approach to deals, we were putting in front of people deals for regions and accommodation types we knew the customer was interested in, based on our long-term audience management - a first for the SATC and our partner, RAA,” Hill says.  

    Once the customer was re-directed from southaustralia.com to RAA Travel, they were also not presented targeted offers as landing pages on RAA’s website were fully customised.  

    And it worked. According to Hill, the economic impact equated to a 7.5:1 ROI, generating over $500,000 in direct revenue for RAA travel, and 7118 leads to RAA’s website during the campaign period.  

    Commercial acumen  

    It’s just one of many examples showing how connected SATC’s initiatives are to generating a commercial return for the travel and tourism sector. Since 2014, the SATC’s stated stretch Visitor Economy target was $8 billion.  

    In September 2019, Hill and the team launched an extensive Spring / Summer domestic – Interstate and Intrastate campaign that got the market talking, In all, 1215 articles were recorded with an ASR of $2.6 million and reaching 12.3 million Australians.  

    “The response to the campaign was enormous. September through December were record months for occupancy in Adelaide city, achieving 84 per cent, 90 per cent and 89 per cent respectively, and October’s occupancy was the highest month recorded in 10 years,” Hill says. “During this time, the number of rooms grew 2 per cent, so demand was matching the increase in rooms.”  

    Total growth in visitor expenditure was +13% year-on-year, with interstate expenditure up 19 per cent, 6 per cent ahead of the national average. “Quite simply these were the best results we’d achieved in our history,” Hill says.  

    Overall, the SATC marketing team measures its direct commercial impact also on website visits and leads (direct bookings) to operators. For the FY ended 30 June 2020, website visits topped 7.4 million, up 37 per cent and leads hit 1.04 million.  

    “What this demand created by my marketing team translates to is the now-changing face of Adelaide,” Hill concludes. “The $330 million Adelaide Skycity project, $42 million Oval Hotel, $150 million Crowne Plaza, $15 million uber-luxury Sequoia and $140 million Sofitel project all due for completion within the next few months demonstrate the confidence in the tourism economy that the demand had generated.  

    “No doubt the challenge due to COVID19’s impact is to fill these new hotels, but the proposition I can now go to market with is contemporary, vibrant, luxurious and exciting, and different to what the market has ever seen before. I’m up for that challenge.”

    Share this article