How to Promote Australian Tourism to a Worldwide Audience for £70,000!
You’ve probably heard about the “Best Job in the World” offer during the last couple of days. If you haven’t, Experience Queensland are offering the opportunity to live rent free on Australia’s Hamilton Island for a salary of £70k a year.
What’s the catch? For the successful candidate there’s not one, they just need to work a mere 12-hours a month and enjoy the cruises, snorkeling, diving, fishing and weather the Whitsunday Islands have to offer. But behind the offer is an incredible piece of creative marketing which has created a huge buzz both in the media and online. Although having been to Hamilton Island it’s a surprise they really need to promote themselves at all!
Hamilton Island photo credit – kevingibbons.co.uk
Television reports on the BBC has led to media attention from The Independent, Guardian, Telegraph and Daily Mail. But it didn’t end in the UK, this also made CNN news in the US, led to worldwide coverage with media attention from hundreds of blogs (most notably TechCrunch) and created a popular talking point on Twitter and other social media websites.
The £70k salary is already starting to look like a very clever investment, this is the type of publicity you’d generally struggle to create even with the budget of Manchester City’s new owners! If you just look at the SEO value alone it’s a superb achievement to have naturally generated a wide-range of permanent links from such authoritative domains. How do you match that with a link-building campaign? There really is no answer, this type of coverage would normally take years to achieve.
The only thing they did get wrong was to have a website without the bandwidth capable of hosting such a large increase in traffic (reportedly 850,000 visits in one day!), not that too many servers could handle this. They may have to employ a few more people to look through all of those job applications too!
January 15th, 2009 at 8:29 am
Spot on Kev, for all the online and offline media coverage the outlay is minimal compared to the results. Like you say some of the links they will have received are priceless.
I just hope they’re ready for my application – coming soon ;)
January 15th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Is the cost of the campaign really 70K? Unless they have guaranteed that they will hire someone for this position they could simply hire no one or fill the position “internally”… and all of this media attention would cost them a grand total of … nothing!
Brilliant!
January 15th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
This is a good example of how really simple idea can achieve so much in terms of coverage. 70K is nothing compared to what they have done and the fact that now pretty much everyone in th 18 countries targeted has heard of these islands. The most funny part is, and I agree with you, they do not need any coverage as so many tourists go there every year.
January 16th, 2009 at 4:04 am
I want that life so bad.
I live in rainy cold London and I dream of sun and sea.
Dream on I guess.
January 22nd, 2009 at 7:54 pm
It likes Cuil and twitter during their start-up release. They experienced an unexpected and uncontrolled traffic. They should have prepared for that to convert more visitors into possible workers…
March 26th, 2009 at 10:08 pm
Great quality stuff.
February 7th, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Yeah, it is absolutely a piece of creative marketing which has created a huge buzz both in the media and online.