How content connected with the beating heart of the travel industry

Communicating Tourism New Zealand’s passion for their country to travel seller clients

Content Workshop / Content Strategy / Campaign Journey / Buyer Persona / Email Automation / Copywriting / Live Action Video

Content Marketing

THE SITUATION

Despite travel restrictions, mid-to-late 2021 was a ripe time to get creative about the revival of international travel. Tourism New Zealand Travel Trade recognised this opportunity, identifying a desire to invest in content that was personal and engaging, to truly connect with travel agents by preparing them to sell trips once more. TNZ wanted to strategically target their largest audience of international visitors by encouraging those selling travel experiences to spread the word about its unique travel opportunities. The strategy was to make sure their audience had everything they needed to get selling once more, and BlueMelon helped them get there.

THE SOLUTION

BlueMelon saw the value and opportunity of marketing on social media during extended isolation periods and government health restrictions – to speak directly to the people TNZ wanted to address. BlueMelon built a targeted strategy, across three key communication platforms to help TNZ re-engage its audience during the pandemic.

Linkedin Campaign

A paid LinkedIn campaign designed to find, attract and reinvigorate travel sellers when the world wasn’t travelling. We designed a set of emotive, inspirational ad placements with targeted messaging for travel sellers, as well as downloadable blogs designed to help up and coming agents sell NZ when the time was right. The ads targeted agents in a variety of regions to join the Travel Trade LinkedIn group, building a more qualified, engaged audience for the TNZ team.

Organic Content For Facebook

A year’s pipeline of creative content in TNZ travel seller FB groups designed to motivate and educate travel sellers – these have a global tone – to help group facilitators populate their pages with exciting, fresh NZ content no matter the region. We kept education and engagement as priorities in our ideation and execution, to drive conversations within the group and encourage learning amongst agents of all tenures, all while keeping TNZ top of mind for when the time comes to travel again.

Email Automation Strategy

A highly personalised email automation strategy. The goal was to truly help and engage travel sellers no matter where they were in their careers. From the fresh agent, to the seasoned expert, this strategy was designed to clean up TNZ’s data lakes and ensure TNZ was speaking to the right people at the right time – with the right message for them. By creating three email flows, each designed around specific personas in the travel selling industry, with bespoke content created for each flow.

RESULTS

The campaign took the Tourism New Zealand seller LinkedIn group from 5000 members to over 12,000 qualified members in just under 3 months. In terms of social post engagement, across our 14 campaigns (which included single image, carousel and video ad formats) we saw over 3000 reactions, and over 9000 visits to the TNZ landing page. The highest performing assets were sponsored post single image ads, with click through rates of between 1.5-2%.

We engaged Bluemelon to help us reconnect with our international travel sellers using new channels and innovative social and email content. We were impressed how quickly Juan and his team were able to understand our business and produce a plan to help us better connect with our audience. The work Bluemelon does is always driven by insights which gave us confidence that every campaign and piece of content we created had purpose and would achieve results. The team at Bluemelon have been an absolute delight to work with. They have a natural ability to create a safe and fun environment that inspired us to be more playful and daring with our content. Since day one we have felt like part of the Bluemelon family.

Julie CoyneDigital Content & Delivery Manager - Trade

We engaged BlueMelon to help us reconnect with our international travel sellers using new channels and innovative social and email content. We were impressed how quickly Juan and his team were able to understand our business and produce a plan to help us better connect with our audience. The work BlueMelon does is always driven by insights which gave us confidence that every campaign and piece of content we created had purpose and would achieve results. The team at BlueMelon have been an absolute delight to work with. They have a natural ability to create a safe and fun environment that inspired us to be more playful and daring with our content. Since day one we have felt like part of the Bluemelon family.