Customer story: Kangaroo Island Tourism Alliance

How Kangaroo Island Tourism Alliance Measures Lead Engagement with Their Marketing Collateral Using Trackable Links

Kangaroo Island Tourism Alliance (KITA) is a membership-based organization that supports marketing and destination management of a 16 km long coastal region in South Australia. KITA’s members, including tourism providers and operators, rely on the organization to market their offers, attractions, and travel opportunities on the island.

Challenge

In order to connect with buyers potentially interested in selling Kangaroo Island as a destination, KITA regularly attends trade shows. There, the organization demonstrates the range of available tourism products to domestic and international travel agents and wholesalers.

In the past, KITA’s marketing department tried various approaches to presenting marketing collateral at trade shows. Naturally, printed brochures were their first choice. While professional and engaging enough, the brochures involved high printing costs. Plus, the organization had no way of tracking lead engagement with them. Were they being read or tossed aside?

KITA eventually realized that going digital would help them save printing costs as well as help use their marketing collateral to analyze event ROI. According to Kylie Bamfield, Regional Tourism Manager at KITA, it was a winding road from print to digital:

We tried Powerpoint presentations that were pretty static and uninviting. I also used Dropbox but I could never really know how people engaged with the collateral, what they did and didn’t look at.

So it was vital for Kylie to find a tool that would help her measure how well her content performed. Not only would it cut printing expenses, but it would also show that the time and effort invested in each document paid off. Plus, their digital collateral had to look professional and engaging.

Search for Solution

KITA started looking for a digital publishing solution and tried a few—from web tools to a whole suite of software. They needed a way to present their content in an interactive format that would stand out at every trade show.

I wanted to be able to put videos and links in, without having to contain all of that in a set of digital documents.

Kylie also wanted to use the new solution as a follow-up tool. Once she showed a brochure to potential buyers at an expo, she was going to qualify leads and send marketing collateral to the most prominent ones post-event. The ability to track how leads interacted with the content would be perfect for measuring the overall effect of the expo.

Together with KITA’s graphic designer, Kylie evaluated different solutions and decided that FlippingBook Online fit the organization’s needs best. It gave their marketing collateral a great look, had the interactive perks necessary to engage a lead, and could be used as a tool for follow-ups and ROI analytics.

Solution

FlippingBook proved to be a great demonstration tool at trade shows. Kylie would use it on her tablet to show available products to travel agents and wholesalers. She could flip through the whole book, present the offers, and zoom in on the ones the buyers expressed interest in.

I was able to enlarge the page, click through to our photo gallery, show them videos. The tool provided me with the ability to be really flexible with the buyer and share any information with them seamlessly.

FlippingBook was also a valuable asset in content distribution. The tool made it easy to share direct links to the marketing collateral with buyers right at the expo or afterward.

Particularly handy were trackable links. Kylie created several links to the same brochure or catalog, emailed them to booth attendees one-on-one, and then tracked their personal interaction with the content. That alone made a substantial difference between the new approach and what the organization had used in the past.

With individual link tracking, I knew when a buyer opened the document and what pages they viewed. FlippingBook also notified me if they haven’t opened it by a certain date. It’s great, because I could then remind them to look at the collateral.

Results

Creating trackable links for each potential buyer has allowed KITA to maximize their sales efforts. Kylie prioritizes high-potential leads and analyzes how they engage with the trackable links shared with them.

Now, I can report back to tourism operators, explaining what products the leads found particularly exciting, when they viewed the documents, for how long, and how operators should engage with them.

Thus, FlippingBook has had an impact on KITA’s post-event campaign. The organization now knows exactly how well their collateral is performing and can act on it. For instance, over 100 views on a piece of content convert into over 100 leads. So product operators can follow up with those leads based on real data, Kylie’s notes, and reports.

I personalize each email to buyers, prompting them to engage with our digital publication. And then I advise the operators which leads to reach out to. I’ve never been able to do that before, because I didn’t know if they’d even looked at the content.

Kylie hopes to continue using FlippingBook as a demonstration, lead engagement, and ROI measurement tool at future trade shows. She now has a template for fast and efficient creation of marketing collateral, so that the documents look their best at every event.

FlippingBook is a novity, but now that we’ve figured out how it works and what benefits it brings along, it can be the cost-saving solution that we need.