Sri Lanka Tourism digital campaign to kick off in January

By Charumini de Silva

After many announcements of a digital promotional campaign this year, Sri Lanka Tourism finally confirmed that the initiative would take off in January 2018, while noting that it would also begin a two-year marketing program budgeted at $ 20 million.

“We are launching the five-month digital promotional initiative covering our prime European markets including Germany, the UK and France. At the tail end of that, we are positioning a two-year total marketing program in tier I and tier II markets with a $ 20 million budget,” Sri Lanka Tourism Chairman Udaya Nanayakkara said last Friday.

He asserted that during the first year they will utilise $ 10 million for the program and then taper it down to $ 5 million.

The Sri Lanka Tourism chief believes these initiatives will open up modern channels of marketing and promotions, while insisting that the digital component was a vital aspect of the entire initiative.

Although the institute wanted to kick off the promotional campaign, he said due to various reasons it got delayed. “Sri Lanka Tourism has always been following the traditional path for promotions such as B2B or B2C, but now we are venturing into a different level of promotions. The new campaign is pretty much in place now,” he revealed.

Nanayakkara said they would continue country-centric promotional campaigns through public relations (PR) agencies in their prime markets. “We will be positioning market experts where they will be directly employed by Sri Lanka Tourism to position our mission in the prime markets.”

He also acknowledged that there will be an expansion of road shows.

“Today we see that the B2B component, which is very important, is in place and needs to be enhanced gradually. However, the B2C situation that we have to project is more like analysing the buying time of different markets, customising. We have done studies over all these elements. Sri Lanka Tourism will be positioning all those factors in a well-planned manner,” he added.

He commended the private sector’s contribution and said it was well aware of Sri Lanka Tourism’s future strategies.