With 37km of spectacular coastline, Rockingham is treasured locally for its safe, calm waters, pristine beaches and abundance of aquatic activities. Unfortunately, it has also developed something of a bad reputation, which often overshadows the amazing opportunities the township has to offer. Tourism Rockingham is a non-profit organisation that was established in 1970, with the mission of promoting and supporting Rockingham’s tourism and hospitality attractions and events for over fifty years.
Over the last decade, Tourism Rockingham has worked closely with the Tourism Council of Western Australia, Destination Perth and the City of Rockingham to rebrand Rockingham as Perth’s preferred coastal destination. As part of this ongoing mission Tourism Rockingham & the City of Rockingham formulated the Tourism Destination Strategy 2019 – 2024, which included the redevelopment of the existing ‘Rockingham Visitor Centre’ website along with detailed marketing campaigns carried out in conjunction with Destination Perth and the Tourism Council of WA.
Tourism Rockingham had traditionally relied heavily on commissions from accommodation and attraction bookings for revenue, both through the website and through the Visitor Centre. They were looking to move toward more of a Destination Marketing model and were aiming to better utilise their online presence to bring value to their members (and hence increase the value of their membership).
While several target audiences had been identified in the 2019-2024 Strategy, COVID-19 threw the priorities of Tourism Rockingham into disarray and the focus quickly shifted to local tourism. Shortly after we took on the Rockingham project we created a landing page for the ‘Rediscover Adventure’ campaign, which included an Instagram competition and downloadable deals booklet curated by the City of Rockingham.
Some of the features we developed for this project included:
- Interactive map showing all of the amazing stuff in Rockingham
- Tasteful and subtle promotion of members throughout the site
- The ability to feature different campaigns (e.g. Rediscover Summer)
- Integration with the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse
- An accommodation booking module that synced with other platforms
- An online membership portal to help reduce administrative overhead
- Dedicated pages promoting Rockingham as an event destination
- Integration with an email marketing platform to help build subscribers
- Integration with Instagram to display the #rediscoverrockingham hashtag
The site has also been created to be translation ready, however due to the limitations on international travel in 2020/2021 the decision was made to postpone implementation of translations to focus on developing content targeting local tourism instead.
