Welcome to the new Southafrica.net!
Access the existing sites at these links:
We hope you like the new site for international travellers to South Africa. We have prioritised this one as the first major overhaul, because driving visits to South Africa is our number one objective, and we believe the coincides with your objectives too.
At a high level, our strategy to meet this objective is to package Destination and Interest into an interactive experience that grabs users’ attention, engages them in wonderful content and gives them an opportunity to act on it.
So this powerful marketing platform is now in place to start generating qualified and measurable leads for the South African travel industry as a whole. Here are a couple of ways in which it has been designed to do this:
- The Trip Planner: A tool that allows users to engage with South Africa places and activities in an interactive way, to help them organise their ideas, and build a wishlist. Ultimately this wishlist can be sent to a travel agent of their choice or our recommendation (Fundis).
- Your Concierge: A product search that allows users to filter product by category and region and send enquiries directly to the South African Travel Industry. Of course this is dependent on getting the whole of the travel industry into our National Tourism Product Database, and we are actively working on that.
- Fundi Enquiries: As part of “Got a question?”, users can find experts in their own regions to whom they can send enquiries – this puts them in touch with someone nearby to them, who has a good chance to convert them to an actual trip here.
- Products on every page: Every article in the site (and there are over 600) has been categorised by the themes it discusses. The website then looks for any products that match these themes and places these products alongside the article. So if a user is interested enough to read the article, there is a good chance that they will notice and click on its related products and send an enquiry.
- Products in the site search: Every search will match not only content, but products to the user’s request. So if they search for “Elephants” any elephant-related accommodation, tours, attractions, activities and restaurants will also appear in the search result
So you can see that we are aiming for the broadest exposure to South African travel products via our platform, and the goal of all our marketing spend is not just to get a user to this site but to drive them all the way through to conversion: An actual trip.
We are going to be closely measuring the success of our assumptions, and tweaking as we go to ensure results are astonishingly good, and we will be sending you information on what is working and how you can participate in this.
However, with all this good news, we have not yet overhauled the Business Tourism and Trade websites but they are priorities for our next phases. So please watch out for them.