Tourism NT helps tourists imagine, plan and book vacations with Contentstack

Every hour spent creating content, and every visitor click, engagement and booking are critical for Tourism NT as a Destination Marketing Organisation at the heart of the region. The organization is tasked with promoting once-in-a-lifetime experiences—like camel riding, swimming with crocodiles and other adventures—to draw Australian and international tourists to the Territory.

The agency’s website content strategy is built around three customer journey stages: Dreaming, Planning and Booking. “Dreaming” consists of offering inspirational articles, videos and influencer content that captures the imagination to draw travelers into the conversion funnel. Once engaged, “Planning” content, including pre-built itineraries and individual activity details, helps educate visitors for easy bookings. To support “Booking”, Tourism NT creates a seamless offramp to industry and partner sites, where visitors can easily complete their purchases.

Behind all of the booking options is an ecosystem of vendors offering unique deals and content, as well as a team of content creators who curate articles and ideas to optimize trips. The team must accommodate frequently updated offers from partners, flight specials and unique holiday packages, composing the perfect offers to entice tourists to visit the region. The agency needed a solution to help tie all of these components together and deliver content more seamlessly to potential visitors.

“We have a mix of creators, partners, content, and offers, so we need the ability to make changes and respond quickly,” says Jonathan Rossiter, Digital Manager at Tourism NT. “We want to support our wider marketing team to publish to our website easily. We also need to integrate a variety of external data sources to pull in new content and deliver it seamlessly on our site.” 

Complexity can’t get in the way of the organization’s key success metric: lead generation. This requires quality experiences that are tailored with the latest, most relevant content for each user, to simplify trip planning and reduce friction in the conversion funnel. Tourism NT realized that to optimize lead generation, the organization needed to redevelop its website and replatform its content management system, reducing the operational complexity behind content delivery.

“We wanted to empower our website contributors with a first-class editing experience so they could submit content directly to increase efficiency and reduce costs,” says Rossiter. “That was why we decided to shift to a headless CMS that leverages composable architecture, helping each team create the elements they are responsible for, leading to more consistent page experiences with minimal oversight.”

Tourism NT chose Contentstack as the foundation for its digital redevelopment, shifting from publishing static pages that were hard to update, to dynamic pages that are assembled on-demand on edge servers.

By distilling content into reusable components, the agency has simplified content development for internal non-technical users and regional business partners, and streamlined content reviews and publishing. 

“When we previously published content, pushing a piece live took up to two weeks from the approved draft to final publication,” says Rossiter. “With Contentstack, we’ve cut that to 5 minutes. It’s made every step, including reviews and publishing, much simpler and gives us more control over the final experience.” Rossiter also notes that these experiences can more easily be pushed to multiple channels using the headless CMS.

Engaging with global audiences is easier with language and localization capabilities enabled by a connector for GlobalLink from Contentstack Marketplace. The company can push content into its localization platform directly, have local teams confirm that content meets quality standards and is regionally relevant, and, once translated, make the content instantly available to online audiences.

Additionally, new workflows made available with Contentstack limit the components that specific content creators can make changes to, placing guardrails on editing so that the agency can reduce risk of downtime due to user error. Enabling creators to edit components–rather than pages directly–also creates space between development, localization and publishing processes to help ensure high-quality experiences through better oversight.

Contentstack eliminates technical barriers between third-party content creators and the Tourism NT site. A growing catalog of APIs, connectors, and integrations within the Contentstack Marketplace enables partners using a wide range of content creation and publishing platforms to leverage content, future-proofing Tourism NT’s backend, workflows and partner ecosystem.

Since deploying Contentstack, Tourism NT has:

• Reduced go-live time for new content from 2 weeks to 5 minutes 
• Enabled non-technical and third-party partners to contribute directly to new digital experiences, accelerating time-to-market for new offers
• Composable content made information available quickly across the website, email marketing campaigns, newsletters and digital advertising
• New pre-packaged itineraries help visitors book a complete travel experience quickly on third-party sites
• Future-proofed backend by boosting the ability to integrate with third-party platforms