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Thursday, 25 October 2018 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
By Charumini de Silva
Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau (SLTPB) will make a fresh allocation of $ 350,000 for a marketing campaign to be launched from January next year to capitalise on Lonely Planet’s rating of Sri Lanka as the number one country in the world to visit in 2019.
“We are planning to roll out a fresh marketing campaign with an investment of $350,000 on Lonely Planet’s media platforms from January onwards for a period of three months,” SLTPB Managing Director Sutheash Balasubramanium told journalists in Colombo on Tuesday.
He said the campaign would go on all Lonely Planet media platforms, including electronic, print, website and social media platforms.
“Lonely Planet has a tremendous reach and the right positioning. We are leveraging on this ‘Best in Travel’ announcement because it goes up until end 2019. So we can really use this opportunity to increase our brand visibility to gain greater profile and traction with international tourism trade and media,” he added.
Balasubramanium also revealed that this was an additional budget SLTPB had to allocate for this year’s tourism promotion. “The Lonely Planet campaign was something that was unexpected. The investment is a combination of Tourism Development Levy (TDL) funds, Embarkation Tax and a mix of all other funding sources,” he said.
Further, it was pointed out that SLTPB hoped to include the Lonely Planet promotion campaign in its other campaigns in the near future.
“The brand identity campaign is now set to get off ground and will be launched on 5 November at the World Travel Mart (WTM) in London. J. Walter Thompson (JWT) is doing the first phase which is the brand promotion and we will soon call for tenders for the second phase,” he added.
SLTPB has awarded contracts to selected digital media agencies to launch the $3.5 million digital campaign in five key source markets in China, India, the UK, Germany and France, where the six-month promotion will be rolled out.
In addition, given the substantial feedback received for the CNN advertising campaign, he said they were considering extending the campaign by another two months.
“CNN did some independent surveys and was pleased with the feedback received. We reached far above the average level feedback; I think that was one of the reasons for us not being on their platform for a long time. We had a fairly good impact and that is why we were looking at going all over again,” he added.
Balasubramanium was optimistic about unveiling the global campaign early next year in a bid to boost more high-end visitors to the country. However, if the global campaign gets further delayed to get off ground, he said SLTP would consider an advertising campaign similar to CNN on other international TV channels.
When asked if the SLTPB had done any analysis on return on investment (ROI) of the promotions it had rolled out over the years, Balasubramanium said it was very difficult to observe, but with the digital promotion this would be possible up to a certain level.
“People might use it to come this year or to come next year, so it is really difficult to quantify. But in the long term, it should have positive results, if not then you’re not doing something right. In terms of digital platform marketing, you can see a little more feedback because of the engagement with the sharing, comments and likes and there is a mechanism to monitor the number of visits to the platforms, thus it complements for us to make a better judgement,” he added.
Sri Lanka aims at attracting 4.5 million tourists by 2020. The island nation has attracted 1.73 million tourists at the end of September this year and expects to attract 2.5 million tourists by end of this year, while generating $4.5 billion revenue.
