Melbourne & Royal Brunei Airlines

#MelbourneTouring

Melbourne & Royal Brunei Airlines

In November 2013, five travel bloggers embarked as part of the #MelbourneTouring campaign on five different road trips across Melbourne and the state of Victoria, covering a variety of themes such as culture, adventure, cuisine, history and nature. This #MelbourneTouring campaign was a partnership with Tourism Victoria, Royal Brunei Airlines and Four Travel.

The objective of this campaign was to highlight the multitude of attractions in Victoria. One of Australia’s smallest states, Victoria offers a myriad of opportunities in a very compact and accessible area. Whether its deserts, alpine ski resorts, mighty rivers, great lakes, wildlife, or the unparalleled spectacle and beauty of the world-renowned Great Ocean Road, Victoria is all about quality experiences. Many of the state’s regional attractions, including valleys of vineyards and international surf beaches, are less than a two-hour drive from Melbourne.

The bloggers flew from London to Melbourne and back with Royal Brunei Airlines. On their way back, the bloggers stopped for two days in the Sultanate of Brunei Darussalam, where they had the opportunity to experience the attractions of this little country on the island of Borneo in Southeast Asia. From here, the bloggers returned to London on the inaugural Royal Brunei Airlines Dreamliner 787 flight! For this purpose, the secondary hashtag #RBbetterfly was used.

The bloggers who participated in this project were:

Keith Jenkins – Velvet Escape
Abigail King – Inside the Travel Lab
Sarah Lee – Live Share Travel
Paul Dow – TravMonkey
Niamh Shields – Eat Like a Girl

A multi-faceted campaign

The bloggers explored Melbourne for several days before embarking on five different road trips across Victoria. From the start, the level of engagement was high. Melbourne is ‘hot’ and that was quickly apparent from the responses from the bloggers’ followers. In addition, many locals joined in by commenting on and sharing the bloggers’ photos. Tourism Victoria supported the campaign by avidly amplifying the bloggers social media content across their social media platforms and blog. The bloggers were also interviewed about their first impressions:

During the road trips, the bloggers shared a multitude of different experiences through their social media channels.

Selection of photos uploaded by the bloggers.

Some social media stats during the Melbourne/Victoria phase of the campaign:

more than 200 photos uploaded to Instagram
30 million social media ‘opportunities to see’
reached 1.5 million social media accounts
advertising value equivalent of USD 600,000 (calculated by BrandsEye)

The bloggers also participated in VIE, the Tourism Victoria Managers’ conference in Melbourne where they spoke about the campaign and their impressions.

Upon their return home, the bloggers began publishing their posts (24 posts have so far been published) on their respective blogs. In addition, they also wrote a tailored piece for a special ebook titled “Five Melbourne Journeys“.

Royal Brunei Airlines coverage

Coverage of the Royal Brunei Airlines service and inaugural Dreamliner flight from Brunei to London chalked up 0.3 million ‘opportunities to see’ on social media, reaching 1.4 million accounts on Twitter alone. This part of the campaign helped to play a role in creating awareness of this new service and aircraft. The bloggers also published a variety of posts about Brunei, promoting it as a stopover destination for travellers from the UK to Australia, as well as their experiences on board the brand-new Dreamliner.

This campaign was unique in the sense that it combined two destinations and the launch of a new aircraft. It also led to the creation of a broad variety of content: social media photos and short videos, blog posts, an interview video and an ebook (that is downloadable for free). It was also the first time that iambassador worked with an airline in this capacity. Here’s what Royal Brunei Airlines had to say:

We were delighted with the results from the joint travel blogger #MelbourneTouring campaign with iambassador and Tourism Victoria. Through the powerful social reach of the iambassador bloggers, the campaign met all of its objectives and got people talking about Royal Brunei Airlines, Brunei and Melbourne as destinations. Most importantly, we saw an increase in Melbourne online bookings made in the United Kingdom compared to the previous year, which can be directly attributed to the blogger campaign. Based on the results we are aligning our marketing strategy towards building connections and customer engagement through blogger campaigns and will be looking to continue working on other campaigns with iambassador in the future.

– Adiel Mambara, Sales and Marketing Manager UK