Welcome to Streaky Bay

With a new financial year upon us, it`s a great time to ask the big questions about your marketing and get yourself in the best possible position for the second half of 2025.

📌 Are we speaking to the right travellers?
📌 Do we have a strategy or are we winging it?
📌 What’s actually working, and what’s just noise?
📌 Do we even enjoy marketing our business? Or is better outsourced?

If you need some help working out what the next step is for your tourism business, we`d love to chat and help.

The whales are making their way back to Hervey Bay!

Our friends at @TasmanVenture are getting ready for another epic whale watching season in Hervey Bay, with tours kicking off on 12 July.

If you`re in Hervey Bay from July - October make sure you go out with the epic Tasman Venture team to see the whales. A mere 40 years ago, before the commercial whaling ban, all populations of humpback whales had decreased by more than 95%. It`s an incredible feat that we are now able to observe these animals thriving once again in their natural habitat.

Learn from agritourism development expert Linda Tillman of regional tourism development consultancy Tilma Group, about how to get started in agritourism (with a focus on lavender farmers).

In this free webinar developed for The Australian Lavender Growers Association, Linda will share on:
→ What types of tourism are permitted on farms and compliance with legislation
→ Who to talk as you explore if agritourism is right for your farm - at Council, in the tourism industry, in agriculture, and other agritourism operators who have had success
→ Designing your agritourism experience to meet the needs of a clear target market/s
→ Business planning
→ Marketing planning

Learnings will be illustrated with case studies from across Australia, and there will be a good amount of time for Q&A.

https://bit.ly/GettingStartedInAgritourism

📸 Bridestowe Estate

Has it been a little while since you`ve given your Google Business profile a bit of love? Here are our top tips on what you should be focusing on.

1. Always request guest reviews on Google; it will add credibility to your Google listing when people search for your business.

2. Respond to your positive reviews! Thank people for their feedback. If you happen to know a personal anecdote about that guest, share that for extra personalisation.

3. Don`t take your negative reviews personally. Take a deep breath before responding. No one wins when fighting fire with fire. Respond kindly and professionally, if it works to add in a clarification on something they said, go for it. But overall, you should remember the golden rule that you`re not responding to just that person; your response is really for the future people considering your business, and they`re taking note of your customer service.

4. Keep your profile updated! Make sure your photos, logo, opening hours etc. are all up to date.

5. Utilise the "announcements" feature. If there`s an event coming up, pop it in there. Sale happening? Add it in there.

A little love on your Google Business account can go a long way!

Water is entering Lake Eyre! 👀

Our friends at @BirdsvilleHotel captured this beautiful shot of the water starting to flood into Lake Eyre recently. To react to this once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, we`ve ramped up Birdsville Hotel`s Meta and Google ads to capitalise on the excitement. The team are already seeing higher enquiries than ever before - the investment in ads is paying off already.

Keep an eye on Birdsville Hotel`s socials over the coming weeks and months as they continue to capture content from the skies.

Say hello to Tasman Venture`s new website 🥳

@TasmanVenture is one of our beloved long term clients, based in Hervey Bay. We head up Tasman Venture`s marketing strategy and execution, across paid and organic social, google, partnerships and design. So naturally, we were thrilled to get to upgrade their website once again.

The brief was to bring their website up to date, make booking tours easier, show off their beautiful imagery and push more direct bookings.

This website redesign included:
✍️ Creating a new website strategy
✍️ Designing a new look and feel
✍️ Rewriting the content on the website
✍️ Building a custom website
✍️ Launching the website
✍️ Creating a suite of "how to use the website" guides

You can check it out via: tasmanventure.com.au

New strategic content for @AustralianAirSafaris - Why The Kimberley Should Be in Your 2025 Plans.

Australian Air Safaris have an incredible array of tours, taking their guests to unique and remote places in Australia. With their longer (and therefore more expensive) tours, destination marketing is important to be able to help their guests start dreaming of the beautiful places they`ll visit.

For this article we worked with one of their pilots, Jacob, to recount first-hand stories of his experiences on tour in The Kimberley. This content will live on their website permanently, and will also be included in their paid social media over the next few months to encourage bookings for the tours later on this year.

Read more here: https://australianairsafaris.com.au/news/the-kimberley-in-2025/

📸 Tourism Australia

In 2024 there were over 8 million "Short-term (less than one year) Visitors" that arrived in Australia!

From that number 3.6m indicated that they were here on holidays, and 2.8m were visiting family and friends 👀

Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)

Recent content written for @FlindersRangesandOutback - Your 2025 Must-Do`s in Flinders Ranges and Outback.

As part of our Flinders Ranges and Outback visitor guide co-op campaign, we created a blog featuring the participating stakeholders. This blog permanently lives on the Flinders Ranges and Outback website, and is currently a part of a paid social media campaign.

We can`t wait to share more about this co-op campaign, but if you`re considering running a similar campaign with your stakeholders this year, we`d love to chat!

https://flindersandoutback.com.au/blog/2025-must-do/

📸 Moolooloo Station

Celebrating these real, raw, and completely stunning regional photography selections.

Feast your eyes on these 42 contemporary photographs who have been chosen by @Galah.Press as the finalists in this year’s $27,000 Regional Photography Prize, Australia’s richest photography prize for regional artists.

The finalists’ work will be presented at the New England Regional Art Museum in Armidale, NSW, in an eight week exhibition from 11 April to 8 June 2025.

The winning works will be announced at an exhibition party at NERAM on Friday 2 May 2025.

📸 Harvest Impression by Sarah Cunningham (entrant)

https://digital.galahpress.com/articles/finalists-announced-2025-galah-regional-photography-prize

Are you due for some new content? Our friend @HeidiWhoPhotos is going on a "regional tour" and is looking for tourism businesses needing new photography.

Heidi will be in the following regions and has a range of packages starting from $500 to update your content for 2025.

22-27th March - Yorke/Eyre Peninsula
4-11th April - Limestone Coast/Riverland/Murray/Coorong
17-23rd May - Barossa/Clare/Riverland/Yorke
19-30th September - Flinders Ranges and Outback
116th November - Kangaroo Island

📸 Heidi Who Photos for Innamincka Hotel

💌 Love is in the air 💌

In a study conducted by Talker Research on behalf of Discover Puerto Rico, it found that 61% of people said that a specific trip "reignited" their romance.

So this Valentine`s Day, here`s to all the tourism operators playing cupid out there. May your pillow always be cold and your suitcase always be the first off the baggage carousel.