Tasman Holiday Parks Showcase Real-Life Travel Experiences to Promote Tourism to its 23 Destinations
Tasman Holiday Parks is the owner, developer, and operator of holiday parks across Australia and New Zealand. With more than 3,000 sites across 23 iconic locations (and counting), Tasman Holiday Parks has more than a quarter of a billion dollars in assets managed.
The vision behind the newly unified Tasman Holiday Parks was to create timeless places where guests can find the freedom to stop and relax. From the rugged beauty of New Zealand’s Islands to the sparkling Serpentine Falls of Western Australia, each Tasman Holiday Park is planned with the convenience for guests to eat, play, and stay in comfort.
With Tasman holiday parks, guests can holiday how they want and have beautiful moments knowing that whatever they need is always within reach.
To help bring that in-person experience online, the team at Tasman Holiday Parks looks to user-generated content (UGC), bringing the first-hand guest experience to the forefront of its marketing.
Kate Humphreys, Brand Manager of Tasman Holiday Parks, says that UGC, “Really offers a way to tap into that personal experience; it’s like word-of-mouth. Everyone trusts a review from their friend, and I don’t think there is a price you can put on that.”
“I think more and more, people see past advertising these days. That’s not what customers want; they’re looking for a real experience. If you have happy customers sharing your content, then use it! It has been invaluable to our business. ” – Kate Humphreys, Brand Manager, Tasman Holiday Parks.
Challenge:
Tasman Holiday Parks wanted to adopt a solution for visual user-generated content that would help bring in engaging, authentic content and align its visuals under a new, unified brand. The small team also wanted something that would help them save time as they established the new brand across the New Zealand and Australian markets.
Kate Humphreys says, “As we amalgamated 23 brands into one unified brand, having a visual UGC tool was integral to that process and definitely helped us be more efficient. Not only that, but having a visual UGC tool has put us in a prime position to better connect with our customer, publish highly engaging content, and make sure we’re capturing all those special moments across the parks.”
Solution:
A user-generated content tool that cuts down on time spent searching for and curating content, reduces overall content costs, and helps the team find a wealth of authentic visuals for branded social media channels, web, digital, and print materials. It was also important that our solution gave their team a way to publish more content that accurately reflects the Tasman Holiday Parks experience.
Humphreys says, “Being able to get through such a large chunk of content and pull out the best bits with this solution saves us an incredible amount of time”
“With content, it is definitely about hearing our guest experience. We strongly believe our guests tell the best stories and are our best marketers.” – Kate Humphreys, Brand Manager, Tasman Holiday Parks
Results:
By using Managed Services, the Tasman Holiday Parks team could be hands-off and let the Stackla (Visual UGC by Nosto) customer success experts do the work for them.
Our team set up website widgets, tags, product tags, and filters for content and created specific moderation views for different stakeholders who need to see different types of content. We also migrated content search terms from the old Tasman Holiday Parks branding into terms under the new brand. Additionally, our team took care of the content moderation itself. As of this writing, Tasman Holiday Parks has collected over 3,368 total published assets (2,548 for Australia, 820 for New Zealand), including 146 videos by using Managed Services.
With Automation Rules, they were also able to personalize content by creating filters for specific destinations. They created 30 rules to pull in the specific content needed instead of having to sift through and organize the tidal wave of content coming in from each of the national parks.
Product tags enable the team to place CTAs on user-generated content assets for specific parks and experiences. Visitors to the site can browse the UGC gallery, then immediately click-to-book an experience.
Humphreys says, “We’ve got parks in Australia and New Zealand, and we want to make sure that the types of content we show to those different audiences reflect what they are looking for at the moment.”
Tasman Holiday Parks recently used Direct Uploader, a feature enabling people to upload their UGC directly on the Tasman Holiday Parks site. The team’s first campaign with Direct Uploader was a user-generated content competition titled ‘Moments of Summer.’ It encourages guests to share their summer moments at Tasman Holiday Parks (hashtag #mytasmanmoment).
After launching the campaign, Tasman Holiday Parks pulled in 338 rights-managed pieces of content in just three weeks via Direct Uploader alone. Plus, the Moments of Summer landing page saw the average time on page exceed three minutes! Running this competition enabled Tasman Holiday Parks to acquire loads of customer-led visual content directly on the site and get followers more engaged with the brand.
Next Steps:
The Tasman Holiday Parks team hopes to continue using Direct Uploader to allow guests to upload their content directly to the site with a field for submitting more detailed stories.
Humphreys says, “Part of our brand approach is looking at the individual moments that our guests have on their holiday, where they can focus on the now and embrace the time spent with family in the pool, toasting a marshmallow over a campfire, or reading a good book in the sun. UGC is fabulous for sharing and showcasing those visual moments for each customer. Being able to link up the imagery with a testimonial or a bit of a story is where I see us going with it in the future.”
The team is also implementing UGC into its email campaigns to make its emails more dynamic and clickable for subscribers.
Humphreys says they also plan to become even more personalized with the visual content they deliver to audiences in the future. She says, “As we continue to grow and develop, we will pull into our website specific content for each park. That way, audiences can understand the unique offering each holiday park and destination provides.”