On one of our recent trips to Port Fairy, we got the chance to sit down with Jenny Madden, the Coordinator of Corporate Business & Tourism Development for the Moyne Shire Council and discuss the impact of the new brands and website have had on the 7 council-owned and operated caravan parks.
Video Transcript
Can you tell us a bit about your role at Moyne Shire Council?
My role is as coordinator of Corporate Business and Tourism Development.
So, in essence, what I do is oversee our six Moyne Shire caravan parks that are located throughout the region and also oversee the visitor information centre and am involved in the development of tourism strategy in the region.
What was the main driver for modernising each of the parks’ brands?
The main reason when I started in this role, there hadn’t been work really done on the marketing and branding of our caravan parts for quite a long time.
The previous website was 15 years old at least and it was non-interactive. It wasn’t very engaging for customers and also not really customer-friendly. There was nowhere that you could go from the website that linked through to the caravan parks.
So it became really important to me to actually refresh the brand to revitalize our caravan park image. And not only that but to actually identify out each of our six caravan parks that have their own unique identity and to create that into individual websites.
Each of the parks now have their own web presence, what positive impacts have you seen from this?
The impacts have been fantastic.
Obviously, number one I think that we just have a fresh and professional image. As a result of the videography, the photos, the ability to interact, to inquire or make bookings through our web sites, we’re seeing more clips and we’re seeing more customers come through.
We’ve been able to introduce online bookings to particularly out to larger parks, at this stage. And we’re seeing increasing numbers of visitors. We’re starting to see increasing occupancy and that’s obviously going on through to revenue.
But ultimately, at the end of the day, to me, it’s about the professionalism and look of our parks and the ability to be able to sell an experience through our website to potential visitors to our region.
What do you see as being the biggest challenge marketing a tourism business in your region, and how are you trying to tackle this?
It’s that we have a lot of visitors coming along the great ocean road, but they come down to the Twelve Apostles and they do a day trip and they turn around and go back to Melbourne. So part of our challenge is to get them to come into our region and stay. They may stay for one or two nights. So here I’m talking about an international and interstate travelers. So our challenge is to get them to stay in our region longer.
The increasing competition. We are in the tourist area here. So there is increasing competition in the holiday accommodation market. And I think aligning with that challenge is the level, particularly in the caravan and camping industry the level of amenity and facility that’s offered and changing customer expectations.
I think we’ve got to be always looking at what is it that our customer want and making sure that we’re evolving to suit the customer needs.
What do you love about working in the tourism industry?
I love the industry because of the people that work in it, it does tend to attract people that are really passionate about the region, about their business, about what they do. And it’s great working with passionate and motivated people.
You never know from one day to the next what’s going to happen. And I think that’s pretty exciting. I like that.
Check out the work we did for Port Fairy Caravan Parks.
Propeld worked with the Moyne Shire to create a suite of seven highly engaging caravan park brands and conversion focused websites.
Explore what we achieved for them and how.
Websites
Branding
