What you need to know

• Tourism NT is boosting its first-party data capabilities, with the goal of improving customer experience, along with personalisation and media optimisation.
• Its internal marketing automation capabilities, and its performance marketing, which are already well regarded, will be improved by putting a CDP at the heart of the stack.
• The organisation has hired CHEP Network as its new martech partner, and CTO Mark Gretton says there's work to be done on the attribution front delivering the kind of value exchange that will encourage consumers to stump up their first-party data.

Tourism NT is boosting its analytics capabilities and shifting the emphasis from third-party to first-party data in the coming years. It is adding a customer data platform (CDP) to the heart of its marketing technology stack. It will also shift the focus from adtech to martech, says Kristie Beattie, director, digital and data for Tourism NT who now has a new technology partner - CHEP Network - to help with the journey.

According to Beattie, the key priority for Tourism NT is to grow the visitor economy in the NT. "That means getting more people travelling to the NT, spending more time here, and hopefully also coming back for a return visit. From a marketing point of view, that's really about driving demand and also showcasing what the NT has to offer. And that's both for international and domestic tourists," she says.

Beattie says the team puts equal weight on International and local visitors. For now, domestic visitors are the majority, due to the last residual effects of Covid lockdowns and travel bans.

The work is also collaborative. Like other state and territory Tourism bodies, the NT team works closely with Tourism Australia.

"Tourism Australia, they're the inbound tourism. They market externally to bring tourists to Australia, and that's when the state tourism organisations, such as Tourism NT and TA, step in and try and get a portion of that market share. We collaborate with them, and we definitely work closely with them," she says.

Tourism Australia's research also supplements the work of Beattie's own research team. "There is a lot of collaboration when it comes to trade, nurturing operators, getting them trade-ready, and promoting them across the various assets and campaigns."

In addition to brand, research, creative and campaign collaboration between TA and TNT (both domestically and internationally), there is regular sharing of knowledge and ideas on digital, and tech, initiatives, trends and changes, she said.

As to the role of technology, Beattie tells Mi3, "We use analytics platforms, experimentation platforms, and data management platforms. And data management platform was something we saw a huge amount of positive results with, especially in paid media.

"We've been able to use the data we had stored, usually captured through either our own owned channels or through a well-established data Partnerships Program. We would activate those data segments within our paid media campaigns."

More analytics is now heavily embedded across the organisation, says Beattie. "Everybody is skilled in analytics and they're able to track their campaigns."

There is also a performance executive and a performance team working with marketing teams, and with Tourism NT's external media agency Atomic 212 to track and optimise.

Adtech has been a key priority for the last two years according to Beattie but the focus will broaden in the coming years. "Moving forward, across the board, we're looking at performance more broadly across our own channels then optimising - so conversion rate optimisation, for example."

There's also a shift in emphasis from third-party to first-party data. "We are keen to embark on the CDP journey. That will build better data resilience and privacy controls, and continue driving paid media performance programs," says Beattie.

She also sees the opportunity to enhance the personalisation and experimentation capabilities of Tourism NT's own channels such as its website and email database.

"We want the CDP to be the centralised brain [in the stack], the centre of intelligence, and for it to push data and segments to those more downstream platforms, such as the email sending platform."

Rationalisation

Despite the decision to bring on a new CDP, Beattie, like many of her peers is focused on rationalising the tech and extracting maximum value.

"We didn't want to over-invest in any stack that was going to make it hard to deliver ROI. When we were evaluating the responses for this program we wanted something that was definitely best -in-class, but also fit for purpose. We wanted to ensure there wasn't too much duplication across the platform. That's why the strategy of having a centralised CDP really resonated with what we were looking for," she says.

The organisation also has a new tech partner to help it on the journey. As Mi3 Fast News reported last week, Tourism NT has selected CHEP Network as its martech services partner following a competitive selection process. The partnership, set to last for three years, will see CHEP Network providing services such as behavioural analytics, personalisation, experimentation consent management, marketing automation, and the activation and facilitation of data partnerships.

According to Chief Technology Officer CHEP Network Mark Gretton, the agency is technology agnostic, and he confirmed the firm does not take commissions or accept marketing co-op dollars from the vendors. Nevertheless it has strong capability in platforms such as Adobe, Salesforce, Tealium, Braze, Google and Optimizely which looks like a set of suppliers closely aligned to the Tourism NT roadmap. Beattie declined to name the vendors involved.

As to the kinds of challenges ahead, Gretton tells Mi3, "I think with tourism in general, there's an attribution challenge in terms of proving the value of the marketing dollars you spend. Particularly with the changes in cookies and [any] ability to track custom behaviour. So there's an attribution problem that over time needs resolution."

Tourism NT was also a big DMP (Data management platform) user historically, so helping the agency to evolve that kind of personalisation capability across its network is a key priority for CHEP. Gretton also expects the teams will work closely together to enhance downstream experiences for tourism retailers and service providers.

Building, not beginning

Happily, it's not a matter of starting from scratch.

"They have some really good in-house marketing automation capability. I think when it comes to  the more complex journey personalisation setup, [the question for CHEP is] how do we help augment their teams and execute more sophisticated experiences?" Gretton says.

Such a strategy relies on more first-party data, but that needs to be further collected, which means consumers need to be willing to share. It's a problem common to many of the state tourism organisations, as well as to Tourism Australia.

Per Gretton, "What is the value exchange for data? [Beyond that] what is the ambition for personalisation in both the anonymised and  the unauthenticated and authenticated states?"

But of course, challenges are just opportunities in reverse. "There are opportunities across both of those areas to improve information and the value of the experiences you provide people," he adds.