Empower your Travel Industry Sales with airSlate SignNow's Digital Transformation Solution

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hi I'm Liz Ward uh CEO and co-founder of Navi digital and tourism tribe and in November 2023 I had the privilege of doing the keynote presentation at the Australian business Excellence conference in Sydney and in this presentation I spoke about digital transformation through the Australian tourism data web house which I had the privilege to lead the startup of quite a long time ago and also be its CEO for 10 years so what I'd like to do in this um presentation to you um is to step through what I covered and I hope that you find it interesting so the title of the presentation was seizing the moment the imperative of digital transformation and uh with a by line of strategies for for businesses of all sizes but I think a lot of us are still wondering what exactly is digital transformation are we talking about digitization what's digitization versus digitalization well digitization is taking something that is analog to digital for example scanning documents um and turning them into Data into a digital format digitalization however is about taking new tools and implementing them into Old business models to create greater efficiency uh it could be things like a um resource planning tool that's introduced into the organization that is going to help people to be more efficient and also produce some really good reporting but it doesn't disrupt or doesn't um is isn't part of a project that is about changing uh the business model as such digital transformation however is much broader than that it is strategic it is usually organization wide and in fact can also be industrywide um and it takes a change effort across the whole organization it does leverage digital technology and often involve digitalization and possibly even digitization as well it will reshape an organization it is a significant change within an organization it will reshape its culture it will um mean that customer offerings that are going to better meet the needs of of your changing customer and also your stakeholder expectations um those customer offerings will will change in most cases often this can be having to change the customer offerings is is sometimes the cause of looking for digital transformation and it can also um be driven by a need to stay competitive as well it must result in better outcomes for customers and this this this Central focus of the customer I think is critical in the definition of digital transformation and better outcomes for stakeholders as well and It ultimately must also result in measurable improved value for the organization or the industry I think something I think a a really defining point in digital transformation besides being very customer focused in terms of better outcomes and to make the business more resilient is to can to know that often digital transformation comes from a trigger a trigger that the organization might be under threat of you know maybe losing its customers because of a change in the marketplace um or the stakeholders or shareholders are forced upon the organization um a change that is industrywide um or maybe it is an opportunity maybe somebody with great vision has seen the opportunity it could be an entrepreneur or it could be some leaders in the organization um to ensure that the business remains more relevant and it's those triggers of looking for those better outcomes that should drive the digital transformation we shouldn't be doing digital transformation just for the sake of Technology now if I could tell you a bit of a story about digital transformation and this is digital transformation before before we even use the word digital and it was during the era of the interweb in fact and in the late '90s I was privileged to be asked to project manage the startup of a thing we later went went on to call the Australian tourism data warehouse as I said we weren't even using the term digital at the time now the Australian tourism data warehouse was the brainchild of some of the um CEOs and leads in marketing in our state tourism organizations in Australia and Tourism Australia so State tourism organizations are entities of the state governments and territory governments and um of course Tourism Australia is the is the federal Agency for tourism in Australia and what they did is They seized on an opportunity in the late 90s they knew that this thing called the internet was going to transform marketing and information distribution and consumer behavior in the marketplace and they said what can we do that is going to be a fantastic uh create fantastic asset and be a change agent for the tourism industry to help them be able to adapt to the internet and to take advantage of it bearing in mind that tourism industry is comprised um 90% small businesses and micro businesses and 5% medium businesses and so the concept was that if we could create a really high standard and consistent standard of we called it data today we would call it content that was in a central location it was the single source of truth about the thousands and thousands tens of thousands of great tourism businesses that exist in Australia across all of our regions like accommodation and um tours and attractions and events and the destinations themselves if that content was in fantastic shape and distributable through verified websites tourism websites wouldn't that be a great thing for the industry if they only had to provide the information once yet it was distributed across these um great platforms that consumers would use so we really initially what we were talking about was if we could get it onto australia.com and the state tourism websites they were already doing some form of web they had websites at the time with content in it but everything was different and it was invariable levels of quality so if a consumer was to go on to what is now called the visit New South Wales website and look at information about um holiday service providers in say orange in New South Wales because they were going to visit friends and relatives there um and then they were also on the australia.com website they may or may not find the products there and they certainly would see very different um variations in terms of the information presented so it was a great concept but it was about industrywide change and it relied on technology to enable that transformation the tourism ecosystem in Australia is also it's you know like a lot of Industries it has a complex kind of ecosystem or network of actors in it um and so if we look starting from the outside here you've got those stakeholders I mentioned who came up with the idea Tourism Australia and the state and territory tourism organizations further in here we have local government organizations councils and the visitor information centers that they they manage and fund um Regional tourism organizations like trade organizations then we have all of our service providers so this these are the tourism businesses those tens of thousands of small and medium-sized Enterprises and they're very importantly we have the customer The Traveler and what is super important in digital transformation and in conceiving a concept like this is to hold Central in the design and the thinking what is best for the consumer but we also had to make sure that all of the actors um were brought along on the journey if I can just show you um what was aimed to be achieved and and is achieved today so 20 or years on um we see you know the atdw has remained a staple in the industry and has certainly been um not only a fantastic information distribution platform for you know that I think they've got n 60,000 tourism operators are listed in the atdw now the Australian tourism. warehouse but um it's also been a catalyst to enable digital transformation across the industry but just to give you an example here so you can see uh this business in Orange the Orana which is um an accommodation Operator just showing on the atw website it's not a consumer targeted website but you can see their um just a high line of their information there it's a lot deeper than this all of the content that's available and then you'll see it on australia.com as well um we then see it on um visit New South Wales the state tourism website um and then on their Regional tourism website as well orange 360 so you can see that multiple distribution There Yet the operator had has only had to put the content in once and update it annually and as I said it's very detailed what sits underneath this but the flexibility is there for the distributor b australia.com or orange 360 the regional tourism organization to present it in a way that works with their marketing model and very importantly their role in the um travel distribution system as well whether they're more at that kind of early um purchase cycle stage or more in the planning and booking stage will depend on how they present the content and how much of the information they use here's another example as well another one from Orange can you tell I was just there a couple of weeks ago go um so country food TS a tourism um a tour operator and um you can see their listing on the atdw website on australia.com um on visit New South Wales and then on the RTO the regional tourism organization website and the other great thing here in this model is that in all of these websites um one being destination marketing websites we know they play a an important role in travel marketing on average these types of websites get used about 30% of the time in the purchase journey by a traveler uh so they're they're very important to be there and to be well presented um and the other thing is that because these are very industry um friendly websites and government websites they provide direct links back to the business's website with no Commission being taken for bookings um so they're very much a lead generation um website so the industry love that but the value that has been established and that great reputation of the atdw the Australian tourism data warehouse that did not happen overnight and I think with all digital transformation projects it takes time to see that value and the reputation the business as it has been changed due to digital transformation or what's been created due to digital transformation to be acknowledged it takes time to to build that and I think we can relate this to any industry or any project you know what have been the foundations for the projects that you've run in digital transformation um that have have really helped it to build that reputation and value in the case of the atdw when I ref reflect on that um what happened um that caused that that to be that successful brand and reputation to build was that the state tourism or everyone had a role so the the eight State tourism organizations like destination New South Wales for example they really took care of the cultural change in their own organizations like how did they have to change their processes but their culture you can't just change work processes you need to really look at the culture of the organization because it's not just going to be the one team that's affected it's going to be many teams so in this case it wasn't just the teams who'd previously been creating the web pages it was the um marketing teams and the industry development teams they had to be they they had to adapt to this as well atdw what we did is we looked up looked after the upskilling the upskilling of the staff in the state tourism organizations we went on to do some education programs directly to the industry and of course we looked after the technology that was the role of the company that was established in the atdw so you can see already there was structural change we had to have a company for the atw we had to have shareholders agreement like the it it was a complete rework of how things had be done but really what was the underpinning success in this was was the ability for collaboration to be happening all the time so between tourism austral and the eight State tourism organizations and at all levels so at a board level CEO head of marketing data entry teams um that collaboration we found the models to make that collaboration happen and that was absolutely key and is very important in digital transformation projects because you are going to get that cross functional team um interaction and data sharing that has to occur this gave me pause to reflect on what are the Hallmarks of successful transformation from my experience and I wonder if you can relate to these things i' say the top one is cultural change second one is upskilling new skills have to be learned new knowledge has to be shared collaboration data sharing so that openness that transparency not being scared of sharing data or reports the only way it will be successful and something that I became very familiar with and really developed it within my own skill set as as a leader in this digital transformation is facilitative leadership so allowing people to um really be be able to communicate and put their needs forward be heard and facilitate through to Solutions as opposed to getting log jammed on you know issues that people just didn't want to budge on um I think that was something I became very it became a very important tool for me as a leader in this project um to get all the actors to keep moving forward something that I think in a in a industrywide project or even a large found is when the value and brand reputation of atdw really started to take hold it came from the ground up and what I mean by that is that once at a Grassroots level the players in the tourism ecosystem like the visitor information centers and the regional tourism organizations once they were contented to start to use the atdw then things really started to move so they had to buy into it and had had to want to use it why would they want to use it um once the number the critical mass was there so once critical mass started to happen um in other words we had the businesses listing all of their information and adding images video Etc then visitor information information centers and Regional tourism organizations wanted to use it and use it for the efficiency that it brought in getting good quality content onto their websites so the value grew as the number of businesses grew the number of businesses created critical mass which motivated these players here to want to use it and that created this circle um very positive Circle that caused growth because the more Distributors they were the more tourism operators wanted to join globally um the atdw Australia is envied for having the atdw I have spoken to um a lot of international um tourism organizations over the years who've wanted to have a conversation to understand how we implemented the atdw what were the things that we did that made the implementation successful and you know now they're very proud in terms of you know atw's got this massive number of listings and images and lots of Distributors and you know it's it's it's something to be really proud of and these other countries look at it and say gosh we'd love to do that how did you do it and the I mean I take them through it but really the headlines are these success factors that really worked in this situation first one was taking the people at all levels in the stakeholder organizations on the journey from the beginning of the project the second one was ensuring that all the way through the design of the platform and then any iterations or um improvements that we made never did deviated from its core that we protected the single source of proof of Truth for for the content and we therefore also protected that high quality data standard that was sought at the beginning but what was also very very important was that we enabled customization for the stakeholders and also for the Distributors so you've got these different stakeholder organizations so South Australia may have different needs in terms of the information that they want to pull from the industry to present on their website than say Victoria does so we had the core but then we had additional pieces that we could add on to that and and that was critical in keeping the stakeholders um a you know moving forward with the project and being willing to fund it and support it the other one that I think was really important was holding Central to our decision making so when the arguments were happening about which direction we should take or what um improvements we should prioritize um coming back to what is best for the customer that traveler that was that Central decision making criteria that allowed for rational discussion and put aside what often were personal views it allowed objectivity so recognizing your customer and their needs and getting people to agree at the beginning of the project that that is the most important facet to consider um I think is critical and that's what entrepreneurs do so entrepreneurs serial entrepreneurs will create business models or services or products that service the customer better than the competitors do and then they keep just improving and improving and improving to better meet customers needs so what we were doing was challenging the stakeholders who in fact were public servants to think like entrepreneurs and they loved that and they enjoyed shelling chall challenging themselves to do that and fourth and I use the a lot in um stakeholder Management in my work and my business is to keep steering the stakeholders back to that unified Vision so we set out to create and distribute a standardized source of truth about all of the Australian tourism industry just keep bringing them back to that because that also allows objectivity when you've got all these varying and competing um you know you know needs and and debates that are going on um continual Evolution so critical it's never done digital transformation is never done you know but good thing about digital transformation is it's an opportunity to really shake things out and do things better for the customer in a strategic way but then beyond that you're always going to be needing to keep evolving the core and in atw's case um we saw you know great improvements like multilingual content for you know adapting to the changing international travel markets to Australia um four or five years ago they did something really smart they integrated content with with Google business profile very important listing platform for businesses of all Industries but for the tourism industry as well so that was a great efficiency gain for the tourism operator they update their content in the atw they then don't have to separately do that in Google business profile so that was fantastic accessibility data has been quite recent so in Queensland it's the year of accessible tourism it's a high focus across all of the states so that has been brought in as data fields so that uh that can be recorded which is very useful for publishing for the accessibility market and then the other one it's a real growing Trend in tourism is people looking for businesses that are green and are respective of the environment and culture community so environmental and sustainability credentials they are now able to be included um in a profile of an operator so these are these are great evolutions of the core but what's really important is is that the core has been protected um and so even though there were opportunities to do some fantastic stuff when I was CEO of the atdw you know we did some we we we engaged a online booking platform that would take on the atw content and make available a simple entry point online booking and what we call sort of channel manager distribution um Channel technology for small businesses in tourism now we could have built that we looked at doing that but that would have distracted us from the core we were about the content and the apis to distribute the content yes we could contract somebody to have the license to do that piece around the online booking but we never compromised the core and it also stopped the risk of the the shareholders having to go deeper into their pockets to do ancillary work which was um very important to keep them trusting what we were doing Redevelopment there's going to be an a a complete Redevelopment it is in a lot of ways a digital transformation of the atdw itself is is happening presently with this Redevelopment and it's being led by new trending technology so some of the things that are going to be Paramount in the new platform is analytics and Reporting and artificial int elligence which is going to bring more efficiencies and time saving to the tourism operators as they are creating their listings but once again the original vision of the platform is being protected being preserved um because it still works and it is still needed so what's happened with the atw is it's not only been a great asset to create greater exposure for tourism operators and it's been very efficient ient and you know costs have been shared and we've got this great standardized quality data it's also been a catalyst for tourism operators to have an appetite for digital transformation now we know this in my businesses in tourism tribe and in navi for digital direction for all other types of businesses where we provide support training and do work for small businesses to help them with digital adoption digitalization digital transformation um we know that the tourism industry has a preparedness for transformation and the HW has been a catalyst for that um the three areas that are just such incredibly um compelling um current trends in digital technology and I think the most compelling trends for small business that compared to anything else I have seen in my career are analytics Automation and artificial intelligence these three Technologies really were the realm of big business in the past but now they are absolutely accessible and affordable for small businesses and all siiz businesses need to be looking at making use of them in their work in their marketing in their processes what I'm going to do is share with you just a couple of examples that um talk to small businesses um and our experience in helping them to use these tools and I'd ask you to think about for your own organizations are the teams and staff in our organizations taking advantage of these tools and how could we app apply them because I think we all need to be thinking about these things and it will be analytics automation AI if you're looking at a digital transformation project if it's a organization or industrywide standardized reporting for example whatever the project is I would be pretty certain that these three technologies will be required in there to create the change that you're looking for so the first example I'm going to give you is a small business um on the Murray River um called Murray River paddle Steamers and my business partner has been working with them um to for them to bring analytics into their business so they're a successful business they've got a number of vessels they run a lot of cruises they're a great tourism business but they came to us saying how do we do better how do we improve our website what should we do about our website you know we we're going to rebuild it and we went hang on a minute um what are your analytics telling you I don't know what does that mean and so this is a a great example of where small businesses and it even larger businesses haven't been starting with the data to do their decision making and it's right sitting under our noses all businesses all small businesses since the roll out of Google analytics and roll over to ga4 it's really um stoked the fires for a lot of businesses to go well I wasn't really using Google analytics before what is it how should I use it um which is great it's a great trigger but um just the case study with them is with some really kind of preliminary uh research using Google analytics for scroll tracking um to have a look at how users were scrolling through the website um what we noticed was that the rate of scroll through was very low for this particular website and we were able to use those insights then to immediately improve the user Journey on the homepage header so what we started with didn't look like that um it was a bit left to uh the imagination and the Curiosity of the user rather than a nice clean layout to help the user through their Journey on the website we also tagged with a unique um tracking URL uh their Google business profile and so what we were able to do is get insights that revealed that um 50% of the organic traffic was coming from it so you know that's up here um so that revealed um that this was a very important um important platform for them and that it needed to be optimized and it really LED them to think about their their local presence on local search terms um we added the percentage conversion um to the Google analytics 4 report um so that we could see from the different platforms what was the conversion um rate so that sales rate on each one of these um sources um so we could see here say from um organic search 2.65 from Google business profile uh 3.87 um from email 3% now they didn't even know these numbers before what it highlights is if they're getting 3% conversion of email marketing it really now what they're looking at at well is how do we optimize that so they're using to make their marketing decisions they're now using analytics and that's where we all need to get to uh the second one is Automation and what I'm talking about here is email marketing automation now most businesses don't think about their website as a sales tool they think about it as a information tool um not really as a sales agent and that's what we get businesses to do think about how are you nurturing people through from the various places that they come onto your website through convers through nurturing and conversion and one of the tactics to do that is to create email marketing Automation and a lead magnet so A beautiful piece of content on the website for those 95% of people who aren't ready to buy or book from you but they you want to stay in contact with them you want to get their email address and so what we've done is been able to teach at scale small tourism businesses so we've had a hundred people in a New South Wales program an online program and they've successfully doing this where they use um tools like um canva.com and chat GPT and very lowcost email Marketing Systems to be able to implement a lead magnet onto their website a beautiful download able brochure um like the ones you see here um so in exchange for the email address and to be able to then generate automated email sequences that happen while they're asleep um to be able to nurture them through and what it's doing is it's cutting down that drop off rate where previously on average 95% of new users would leave the website it reduces it down to hopefully about 70% or 65% it's a numbers Gap and it builds for them their their contact database we've seen amazing work done I can't believe this like some of these operators that I wouldn't be able to do that I can't create a six page brochure or eight page brochure like that but they've done it using great lowcost and free tools like cana.com and chat GPT for the copy and then the last one just to mention is chat GPT for artificial intelligence every time I deliver a workshop or we do train training we make sure that we show instances of how to save time using chat GPT the the types of demos we're doing is you know using it in your content marketing for creating blogs and social media captions email marketing content marketing planning create me a schedule based here's my here's my customer Persona put that into the prompt here's um what's important to me this year uh here's what else is going on feed at the prompts now develop me up a draft marketing calendar or social media calendar repurposing of content this is so powerful we have to be repurposing content not just doing it from scratch every time for each platform and um chat GPT is great at that so is the um magic um studio in Cana customer service use it there for draft email responses for doing unique personalized responses to reviews and customer feedback for research doing competitor analysis doing your own website reviews on your own website so chat gp4 the one you pay for you can search websites live we're using it a lot for that and then things like Excel formulas cleaning up data sheets fixing fixing code fixing code that you've developed like it's amazing for that uh and things like rostering as well so that leads me to the end of what I shared in my presentation I hope that you found that useful for me um the important things that you know when I was putting that presentation together that it really made me think about was that um at the heart of it all when it comes to digital transformation is a very human factor one is about getting great outcomes improved outcomes for your customer um and it's about the culture and bringing people along on the journey in a digital transformation be they your stakeholders um staff like that human element is so important and I don't think we can ever never forget that even in a very high tech customer service environment or Hightech uh Team environment culture we have to have high touch as well so we need to integrate that human factor all the time so I hope that that's been useful and um please comment and let me know if you found that helpful and what your digital transformation project is and how it's going thanks