Project Commissioner

Visit Ballarat

Project Creator

Avenue

Project Overview

Keen to cut themselves a bigger slice of the $41.3 billion international tourism pie, Visit Ballarat has invested big energy and effort into destination marketing. One of these efforts is 'Made of Ballarat', the city’s overarching destination brand.

Team

Creative Director - Flavio Argemi Technical Director - Jon Low Strategy Director - Brenton Cannizzaro Web Developer - Tiago Brito Web Developer - Justin Low Web Developer - Dylan Reeves

Project Brief

Develop an engaging and interactive website experience that showcases the Ballarat region to the world, and in doing so highlights not only it's renowned gold mining history, but also focusses on the people that make the city a mosaic of culture and cuisine: the bakers, the barbers, the ballet dancers, and the bartenders. These and other entrepreneurs are the beating heart of Ballarat; they give the city its significance, depth, and value. Together with communicating the cultural mosaic of the city, the website needs to intuitively showcase travel and accommodation information show prospective tourists and visitors can easily plan trips to the region; whether they be Australians or from overseas.

Project Need

Ballarat is internationally famous for its rich gold mining history, yet there’s plenty more to do there than just pan for gold. To help grow tourism in the region, The Made of Ballarat campaign was developed to highlight the many wonderful facets that make Ballarat such a unique and exciting place. A new website was central in communicating these amazing stories and provide a vehicle to easily plan trips to the region.

User Experience

The new Made of Ballarat website caters to all types of travellers, so whether you’re a rigorous researcher or a free floater, you’ll have fun finding whatever it is you’re after… or perhaps discovering an unexpected surprise. User experience was the key driver in the website design and development, with key features being... <b>Putting Ballarat on the map… literally.</b> On the homepage you’ll find an interactive map that not only suggests activities for your stay, but takes care of route planning, too. <b>Plenty to see and do</b> A ‘Things To Do’ dropdown offers recommendations (with plenty of cheeky copy) on what to do in Ballarat when you’re on a date, caught in the rain, or traveling with your four-legged fur baby. <b>Interest-based itineraries</b> Each itinerary has been carefully curated by the Made of Ballarat team to serve a particular interest group. Rather than serve up a boring itemised list on click, we plotted each activity on a map to offer a bird’s eye view of how you’d be spending your time in the city. <b>Social media integration</b> The social feed grid is overdone. (There, we said it.) To show off brand and user-generated content—something we know motivates travel purchasing decisions—we implemented a more elegant storytelling solution. In our very biased opinion, #visitballarat has never looked better.

Project Marketing

With the website just recently launched, Visit Ballarat are now undertaking a comprehensive marketing plan to promote the new website, which covers Above-the-Line and Below-the-Line initiatives. To assist marketing both the new website and the region, the project included the following key aspects: <b>Marketing campaign templates</b> Specific templates were designed to allow strong online promotion of all 'Made of Ballarat' marketing campaigns, which delivers cohesive branding and strong marketing for specific seasonal based campaigns. <b>eDM templates</b> Branded email marketing templates were developed to allow marketing to mailing list subscribers. <b>In-site content advertising for local businesses</b> The website development includes functionality that allows Visit Ballarat to highlight and promote local businesses seamlessly within the website content.

Project Privacy

Best practice privacy procedures were implemented throughout the solution wherever personal information is collected via the website. The full privacy policy can be found at: https://www.visitballarat.com.au/privacy-policy/ No personal information is tracked, with all statistical recording following core Google Analytics integration methods. The website is securely hosted on leading infrastructure that has passed, and continues to be checked, against leading penetration test methods.