Murray Digital Platform

Marketing

Given the Murray’s shared location, across two state tourism bodies, the need was identified to bridge the gap as visitors to the region do not follow the Local Government Area (LGA) boundaries. With each state required to support their own operators, there was a need to provide consumers with a cohesive travel planning tool that breaks down the political boundaries and incorporates operators from both sides of the river’s borders.

The overall intent of MRT’s regional digital platform project was to help increase overnight visitor expenditure across the Murray River region of Australia.

This was achieved by;

* Building a regional digital solution that helps travellers plan a journey across the entire region on a single website and facilitates ‘live’ bookings across the entire region.

* Building new tourism websites for participating destinations that: (a) reflects their destination brand and communication objectives; (b) increases exposure for local operators and experiences; (c) enables travellers to book ‘live’ accommodation and receive instant confirmation; (d) serves as a call-to-action for marketing activities managed solely by that destination; and (e) responds to the viewers’ device, enabling a single website to be managed that is applicable to desktop computers, tablets and mobiles (negating the need for destinations to manage a “mobile-friendly” website or app and a second desktop website).

* Investing in a user-friendly content management system for all websites linked to the platform, ensuring MRT and participating destinations are able to update and change content as-needed, without having to invest in additional specialist skills such as web developers or designers.

* Integrating the platform with the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse (ATDW) to feed listings automatically into the platform and to the Murray Regional Website and all destination websites.

* Provide opportunities to educate industry on (a) value of having a digital presence; (b) online inventory management and ‘live inventory’; and (c) packaging.

The Murray Digital Platform was developed by Murray Regional Tourism during 2015 in conjunction with seven destination partners being, Albury Wodonga, Deniliquin, Gannawarra, Sun Country, Swan Hill, Greater Hume and Corowa.

The websites associated with the platform are:

The platform provides significantly improved accessibility to tourism information at a Murray regional and destination level. It also provides a more consistent and cohesive digital presence for the entire Murray region. The platform provides consumers with a cohesive planning tool where they can now access tourism information for the region easily, regardless of the location of the business and with each destination site linking through to the Regional site providing the user journey.

The platform provides a robust digital framework for tourism businesses and destinations which enables them to better promote their tourism assets in a flexible and consistent manner.