New Zealand Ski Tourism Marketing Network

New Zealand Ski Tourism Marketing Network

The Ski TMN was a unique co-operative of New Zealand based regional tourism organisations, ski resort areas, the international airports’ business development units and Air New Zealand.

Australian Marketing

The focus of the Ski TMN was marketing into Australia - mainly the Eastern Seaboard - to encourage more Australians to ski each winter.

Trish’s marketing campaign services to the Ski TMN

As an independent manager Trish provided the Ski TMN stakeholders with services for 12 years including:-

• management of the campaign

  • in both conception and implementation,

• Outputting campaign elements

  • included print, out of office and digital,

• Campaign monitoring & operational adjustments

• Website management and content development

• Hosted visiting media programme

• Stakeholder management and administration

• End of Campaign Reporting

Sales conversion opportunities were provided by Ski TMN partners (including Air New Zealand) but the Ski TMN website was simply the repository for those offers allowing for the consumer to click through to the provider to transact the offer. The website wasn’t itself transactional.

Some years the budget approached $1 million and Trish managed the budget to ensure it was spent, as per the agreed plan.

Marketing campaign Success indicators

For this macro-destination campaign, the indicators of success included:

• The successful implementation of the agreed campaign elements, within budget.

• Increase in Australia holiday category arrivals into gateway airports.  In the ten years from 2005 to 2015 arrivals into the South Island gateways grew from 15 000 to over 100 000 (ski season months only).

• Traffic to the campaign website and landing pages.  For the calendar year 2015 web traffic increased fourfold compared to 2011.

• Positive indications from ski area partners as to their Australian patronage.

• The core Ski TMN partners remained largely the same during this period and they re-committed annually to the subsequent year’s campaign.

Paid Media/advertising strategy

The strategy was to reach the target markets, through mainstream lifestyle media with high circulations (the newspapers had good circulations at the time) via placements in the relevant travel sections (usually a weekend paper). This was complemented by a robust online presence.

Public Relations

To augment the consumer communication there was an active hosted media programme. By the nature of this particular campaign, media were hosted in one year and their articles were published in the first half of the next year.