Skift Take
Singapore is developing more strategic storytelling, more digital content, and more experiential marketing campaigns to show that the city-state has a dynamic and creative personality.
Editor's Note: Following our previous CEO interview series in online travel, hospitality, and destinations, Skift has launched a new series, this time focused on Chief Marketing Officers.
To better understand the big marketing challenges facing travel brands in an age when consumers are in control, Skift's What Keeps CMOs Up at Night will talk with the leading voices in global marketing from across all the industry's sectors.
These interviews with leaders of hotels, airlines, tourism boards, digital players, agents, tour operators and more will explore both shared and unique challenges they are facing, where they get insights, and how they best leverage digital insights to make smarter decisions.
This is the latest interview in the series.
The Singapore Tourism Board has spent the last few years emphasizing the cultural and creative aspects of the destination to add a new layer to the overall brand story.
Central to that goal, the completely reworked YourSingapore.com website relaunched in September 2014, which to date has driven six times more clicks to the tourism bureau's partners.
Coinciding with that last year, Singapore's most innovative creative talents came together to produce the Singapore: Inside Out project, which we covered last year. The huge pop-up installation welcomed 70,000 visitors in New York, London, Beijing, and Singapore, signaling a new focus on experiential marketing for the bureau.
Lynette Pang, assistant chief executive at Singapore Tourism Board, told us that her office is focusing more on video production, real-time storytelling, user-generated content, and data analytics.
The more digital delivery and data-driven strategy is an effort to rebound international visitation that dipped 3% in 2014 and 1% in 2015. Those drops are attributed to the slowing Chinese economy, significant drop-offs in gambling throughout Southeast Asia, and weak euro.
Following is a slightly edited conversation with Pang. She explains the challenges and successes of marketing a diverse destination with a single voice told by three different sources: the tourism board, destination partners, and consumers.
Skift: What are the biggest trends in digital marketing heading into 2016?
Lynette Pang: In 2015 you saw a lot of brands really going to content marketing with a very, very big focus on video as the language and the medium for entertaining. A lot of our work was video-led and entertainment-led with
