Dolomiti Paganella: A Revision of Their Digital Strategy
In this article, following Dolomiti Paganella's DMO Journey, we'll go over some of the key points of their Digital Strategy provided by Alessandro Altomonte, Digital Marketing Manager.
In this article, following Dolomiti Paganella's DMO Journey, we'll go over some of the key points of their Digital Strategy provided by Alessandro Altomonte, Digital Marketing Manager.
In this article, following Dolomiti Paganella's DMO Journey, we'll go over some of the key points of their Digital Strategy provided by Alessandro Altomonte, Digital Marketing Manager.
Dolomiti Paganella are a small and atypical mountain destination at the feet of the Brenta Dolomites in Northern Italy. Below you can find some of the destination's tourism figures for 2019:
Alessandro describes Dolomiti Paganella as being 'atypical' due to the fact that they are a skiing destination but receive 55% of their overnight stays during the summer season.
We asked him some questions regarding their job at the DMO and about their strategy, so keep reading to find out more about their great work!
In the DMO there are 16 of us and the digital team counts for 4 people. Myself, Valentina, Stefania and Massimiliano. This allows us to be an 80% in-house team, as the 20% left is given to Filippo, our local content creator. Throughout the year, we run meetings to plan our strategy & content.
Once we have done that it's our content creator's turn. Then, we can schedule posts, advertise them and take care of the community and relationship with all of those who engage with us.
At the end of the season, here it comes: Data Analysis!
Before 2019, our DMO was focused on traditional marketing actions like tv, radio, magazine, events. With my arrival, the DMO decided to undergo a big change, investing mostly on social and digital marketing. So, in 2019, we changed from mass marketing to tailor-made marketing profiling 4 different buyer personas. In 2020 COVID-19 hit and we thought there was no reason to spend our budget on new potential visitors. So, instead, we kept our conversation going only with those who already knew us hoping they would spread the word for us.
Below you can see the 4 groups of users which they identified and wanted to target and for which they created specific campaigns:
If you'd like to read more about the different campaigns, you can have a look at their Digital Strategy Report for 2019-2020. 👇
Since our destination became famous, families have represented our first kind of visitors. In the last few years we have been working on finding new types of visitors to grant a safe and better future for our destination. We achieved exactly this with our well known Bike Area, attracting Bikers from all over the world. Now, we want to do the same with Millennials and GenZ which love outdoors life. Even more, we are “targeting” visitors in our destination, because DMOs are used to attract people when they are at home wondering where to go to during their next holiday but, we believe that a DMO has to take care of them even before they become visitors in order to provide them with the best experience of the destination and making them a Dolomiti Paganella Brand Ambassador once back home.
Investing on digital and social media brought to the website new in-target potential visitors doubling website sessions year over year. We have even seen a direct correlation of it with the constant growth of the organic search sessions. For us that means that our digital strategy was successful in nudging people to find out more about us on Google!
DMOs should stop thinking of their video campaigns as a stand-alone video 16:9 of 1 minute. Instagram Stories have proved to have been a game-changer. Nobody watches videos of 1 minute anymore, only if you are Chiara Ferragni, but we aren’t!
What we found successful was developing a series of video pills of 30 and 15 seconds in the 9:16 format which allowed us to be shown constantly on social media feeds with fresh and diverse content. And if you can, Go Live!
If a DMO is searching for engagement on social media it should go LIVE! We did it on Facebook and Instagram with a specific content pillar and it worked very well. We didn’t even need to advertise that content!
Trying to communicate with in-destination visitors has been a big challenge for us. We developed a Facebook Chatbot thinking that it could help the tourists to have an info point in their pocket, but we were proven to be wrong. A tourist will always have a question that a chatbot can’t answer.
QR Codes help! In light of Covid19, people were forced to get used to QR Codes so we gifted every visitor with a key ring with a QR Code to give first hand information.
Talking about Influencer Marketing, we found out that the only way to really influence people is choosing influencers who have chosen to talk about the kind of locations or experiences similar to those that your destination can offer. Then, the key point is making them visit your destination more than once in a year. Only then, you really influence people!
Like we did in 2020, we basically kept on talking to those who already knew us because we wanted to find out if the relationship we had been building during the pandemic would still be there in “back to normal” life conditions. Furthermore, we have found a Destination Content Team to nudge and tutor all the local consortiums we work with to create better quality content for their social media channels trying to be “one destination - one voice”.
I think that if changing the strategy from Mass Marketing to Customer Retention brought us to deliver to each buyer personas the right content, the next step of our strategy should definitely be delivering the right content, to the right users through the right social media platform.
Nowadays Facebook is still in the lead in terms of Social Media ROIbut users are quickly moving to other social media platforms and if you want to keep engaging with Millennials and GenZ, you need to invest properly on Instagram and TikTok (we are already experimenting with it), even if ROI doesn’t come soon after.
During X. Festival, on 30th November, Luca D'Angelo will join the Emerging Trends theme to talk about their project 'Future Lab'.
Furthermore, in a couple of months, you can look forward to the next update on the community, focusing on their vision for 2022.
In this article, following Dolomiti Paganella's DMO Journey, we'll go over some of the key points of their Digital Strategy provided by Alessandro Altomonte, Digital Marketing Manager.
Dolomiti Paganella are a small and atypical mountain destination at the feet of the Brenta Dolomites in Northern Italy. Below you can find some of the destination's tourism figures for 2019:
Alessandro describes Dolomiti Paganella as being 'atypical' due to the fact that they are a skiing destination but receive 55% of their overnight stays during the summer season.
We asked him some questions regarding their job at the DMO and about their strategy, so keep reading to find out more about their great work!
In the DMO there are 16 of us and the digital team counts for 4 people. Myself, Valentina, Stefania and Massimiliano. This allows us to be an 80% in-house team, as the 20% left is given to Filippo, our local content creator. Throughout the year, we run meetings to plan our strategy & content.
Once we have done that it's our content creator's turn. Then, we can schedule posts, advertise them and take care of the community and relationship with all of those who engage with us.
At the end of the season, here it comes: Data Analysis!
Before 2019, our DMO was focused on traditional marketing actions like tv, radio, magazine, events. With my arrival, the DMO decided to undergo a big change, investing mostly on social and digital marketing. So, in 2019, we changed from mass marketing to tailor-made marketing profiling 4 different buyer personas. In 2020 COVID-19 hit and we thought there was no reason to spend our budget on new potential visitors. So, instead, we kept our conversation going only with those who already knew us hoping they would spread the word for us.
Below you can see the 4 groups of users which they identified and wanted to target and for which they created specific campaigns:
If you'd like to read more about the different campaigns, you can have a look at their Digital Strategy Report for 2019-2020. 👇
Since our destination became famous, families have represented our first kind of visitors. In the last few years we have been working on finding new types of visitors to grant a safe and better future for our destination. We achieved exactly this with our well known Bike Area, attracting Bikers from all over the world. Now, we want to do the same with Millennials and GenZ which love outdoors life. Even more, we are “targeting” visitors in our destination, because DMOs are used to attract people when they are at home wondering where to go to during their next holiday but, we believe that a DMO has to take care of them even before they become visitors in order to provide them with the best experience of the destination and making them a Dolomiti Paganella Brand Ambassador once back home.
Investing on digital and social media brought to the website new in-target potential visitors doubling website sessions year over year. We have even seen a direct correlation of it with the constant growth of the organic search sessions. For us that means that our digital strategy was successful in nudging people to find out more about us on Google!
DMOs should stop thinking of their video campaigns as a stand-alone video 16:9 of 1 minute. Instagram Stories have proved to have been a game-changer. Nobody watches videos of 1 minute anymore, only if you are Chiara Ferragni, but we aren’t!
What we found successful was developing a series of video pills of 30 and 15 seconds in the 9:16 format which allowed us to be shown constantly on social media feeds with fresh and diverse content. And if you can, Go Live!
If a DMO is searching for engagement on social media it should go LIVE! We did it on Facebook and Instagram with a specific content pillar and it worked very well. We didn’t even need to advertise that content!
Trying to communicate with in-destination visitors has been a big challenge for us. We developed a Facebook Chatbot thinking that it could help the tourists to have an info point in their pocket, but we were proven to be wrong. A tourist will always have a question that a chatbot can’t answer.
QR Codes help! In light of Covid19, people were forced to get used to QR Codes so we gifted every visitor with a key ring with a QR Code to give first hand information.
Talking about Influencer Marketing, we found out that the only way to really influence people is choosing influencers who have chosen to talk about the kind of locations or experiences similar to those that your destination can offer. Then, the key point is making them visit your destination more than once in a year. Only then, you really influence people!
Like we did in 2020, we basically kept on talking to those who already knew us because we wanted to find out if the relationship we had been building during the pandemic would still be there in “back to normal” life conditions. Furthermore, we have found a Destination Content Team to nudge and tutor all the local consortiums we work with to create better quality content for their social media channels trying to be “one destination - one voice”.
I think that if changing the strategy from Mass Marketing to Customer Retention brought us to deliver to each buyer personas the right content, the next step of our strategy should definitely be delivering the right content, to the right users through the right social media platform.
Nowadays Facebook is still in the lead in terms of Social Media ROIbut users are quickly moving to other social media platforms and if you want to keep engaging with Millennials and GenZ, you need to invest properly on Instagram and TikTok (we are already experimenting with it), even if ROI doesn’t come soon after.
During X. Festival, on 30th November, Luca D'Angelo will join the Emerging Trends theme to talk about their project 'Future Lab'.
Furthermore, in a couple of months, you can look forward to the next update on the community, focusing on their vision for 2022.
Dolomiti Paganella are a small and atypical mountain destination at the feet of the Brenta Dolomites in Northern Italy. Below you can find some of the destination's tourism figures for 2019:
Dolomiti Paganella are a small and atypical mountain destination at the feet of the Brenta Dolomites in Northern Italy. Below you can find some of the destination's tourism figures for 2019:
Dolomiti Paganella are a small and atypical mountain destination at the feet of the Brenta Dolomites in Northern Italy. Below you can find some of the destination's tourism figures for 2019:
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