SAT is the government agency tasked with defending South Africa’s share of the global tourist market and helping to expand it to create much-needed jobs. It has embraced online as a strategic part of its advertising and marketing strategy over the past 10 years to drive interest in the country as a preferred leisure destination. SAT makes a significant investment in online marketing each year, speaking to a global audience and focusing especially closely on 11 countries, forming its core markets.

Recognising that social media is an important element of today’s online landscape, SAT started to investigate ways of using social media to understand and serve its market better. It realised that social media is a massive potential store of information about tourists in South Africa as well as those considering a trip to the country.

Mqondisi Gumede, online marketing specialist at SAT, says that social media is an ideal platform to listen to conversations taking place in the target market, comprising of travellers in South Africa. Social media lends itself well to marketing something as personalised as a holiday experience, he adds. “Marketing South Africa as a destination is best done through visuals and audio – social media helps us to do that in a manner that is cost-effective and easy to customise for the person we are engaging with,” Gumede says.

SAT asked its digital planning and buying agency Acceleration Media to help it to extract more value from social media. The tourism body realised that there would be an opportunity with social media to track tourists as they move around the country, from the moment they set foot in OR Tambo International Airport.

Acceleration Media are authorised Radian6 resellers, where Radian6 is an online reputation management (ORM) platform, which SAT use to listen in on tourists’ conversations about South Africa across social media platforms such as Twitter, Web forums, blogs, public Facebook pages and more.

ORM tools such as Radian6 provide organisations with a platform for monitoring, measuring and engaging in online conversations in real time, says Diane Charton, managing director of Acceleration Media.

For now, SAT is mostly using Radian6 to listen for mentions of South Africa in a tourism context, but in future the organisation is also likely to use it to measure and analyse buzz about South Africa and to manage real-time responses across key social media channels, she adds.

One of SAT’s strategic initiatives has been to join a few tourists with high levels of social media activity and influence on their journey as they travel around South Africa to understand their experience of the country.

This has provided a wealth of information about areas such as their first taste of the country when they touch down in OR Tambo and move through the immigration queues, the attractions that they enjoy the most and the sort of content they are sharing with their social media contacts. These insights into what is important to tourists are informing SAT's marketing activities.

It also gives the agency some insight into the country’s weak reputational areas so that it can address them through its marketing campaigns. Perhaps the most important insight Radian6 has given SAT is just how effective visitors to South Africa are as marketers for the country, Gumede says.

The information SAT harvests from Radian6 helps it to measure awareness and sentiment towards South Africa’s brand as a tourist destination, says Gumede.
Increasingly, SAT is also using it to respond and engage with people looking for tourist information about the country and to connect them with suppliers and service providers. Information gathered through Radian6 is also being used as content for SAT online and offline marketing campaigns.

“The growth of the tourism sector is a strategic priority for South Africa, but the country is competing with many better-funded countries for tourists in the midst of a global economic downturn,” says Charton. “That means that SAT needs to exploit the latest marketing technologies to stay ahead of competing destinations. Social media is becoming a key part of the strategy because it is a great way to gather a wealth of high-quality data about the target market that it can use to shape our marketing strategies.”

In future, SAT will draw on the data it gathers through Radian6 to engage more proactively with visitors in South Africa and potential tourists, says Gumede. As such, Radian6 will help SAT to engage directly with people who have a real influence on perceptions of South Africa as a tourist destination and to reach out to potential tourists more cost effectively using low-cost social media platforms.

Adds Gumede: “With Radian6, we are able to listen to our market and understand just how well we are doing at eliciting our desired response from our audience. We first spent a lot of time listening and were slower to engage, because we want to take part in the conversation in a way that is meaningful for both SAT and our audience.”

Social media is rapidly becoming a mainstream marketing channel for SAT, as is demonstrated by the fact that the US office’s Facebook page alone already has more than 100 000 fans and other offices are now starting to enjoy similar popularity.