Cape Town Tourism partners with Rocketseed for success

The global recession has had a significant impact on travel and tourism industry throughout the world. Shrinkage in global travel tourism market simply means fiercer competition so more targeted and effective marketing campaigns and prudent spend is required, not only to maintain, but also to grow, your market share.

As one of the leading lifestyle and event destinations in the world, Cape Town plays in the big league and is constantly up against the large marketing budgets from other 1st world and emerging market cities. But Cape Town, in addition to its natural beauty and diversity, over the next 18 months, has more good news and event information to publish than arguably any other lifestyle destination in the world. Just think about some of the events which will be hosted in Cape Town in addition to the normal heavy schedule:

• Indian Premier League T20
• Nations Cup Cricket
• Tri- Nations
• British Lions Tour
• FIFA 2010 draw
• IFIFA 2010 world cup training camps, friendlies and official fixtures

As you can well imagine, to mount a global awareness campaign highlighting all of this could be very costly. But, in what is arguably a first in any Tourism industry, Cape Town Tourism has partnered with Rocketseed to help drive global brand awareness of Cape Town as a Lifestyle and Events destination of choice, by using the marketing force of its membership and a marketing channel they already own – email!

Consider the numbers:

• Cape Town Tourism has over 2500 members who offers hospitality and tourism services.
• So these members will have over 5000 people that actively communicate by email to business recipients.
• Typically these recipients are international customers, prospects, agents, tour operators (and these recipients have a global reach too as they act on behalf of multiple countries).
• Each of the 5000 email users will publish their membership affiliation and CTT news releases on every one of the 30 emails they send, every day, as a combined marketing force.
• So, Cape Town Tourism and its members will be able to secure over 54 million headline exposures for their press resleases to a targeted audience over the course of one year by inserting them dynamically into their members Rocketseed branding using our RSS feed facility.
• By using Rocketseed, Cape Town Tourism and its members are able to measure and track the success of this campaign, knowing exactly how many exposures and, in fact, click throughs achieved – to the members’ websites, members’ listings and the News section on the Cape Town Tourism website.

An example of what a typical Cape Town Tourism member’s email, who has joined this campaign, will look like with the RSS feed of news headline and CTT logo on it:

Not only is this true leadership through innovation, it also shows how businesses and marketing bodies with common interest and objectives can use technology to unite around a very important common cause, and drive a joint campaign irrespective of the fact that in many cases they are competing in the same markets.

Rob Love, MD of Rocketseed SA, commented “not only are we proud to be associated with this campaign but we are also excited to provide the software and support that enables this unified industry campaign which according to our knowledge is definitely a World first. We want to congratulate Cape Town Tourism and their executive on their foresight and leadership through innovation. It simply shows that South Africa and its people can lead the way in the world, including the fields of marketing and technology.”