Australia's Gold Coast drives 100%+ higher tourist engagement with Sitecore

The Gold Coast’s largest economic driver is tourism, attracting 11 million tourists a year and generating AU$7 billion. Competing national and international destinations were eating into the family destination’s market share. EGC needed to increase demand, arrivals, and spending for the region’s accommodation and entertainment venues, theme parks, tour operators, restaurants, and professional support services. Aiming to double the region’s economic impact over the next 10 years, EGC wanted to appeal to a wider range of audiences, convert interest into bookings and revenue for local businesses, deliver a visitor-focused digital experience, and give marketers control of dynamic content, segmentation, and personalization.

EGC worked with Sitecore solution partner PING Works to develop a modern, flexible, future-proof digital experience platform to enable EGC to expand its reach and appeal to new audiences. EGC's new environment seamlessly integrates Sitecore's composable solutions with third-party data warehouses, applications, aggregators, and services, on the Sitecore Experience Platform. With Sitecore CDP and Sitecore Personalize, EGC is analyzing customer data to define and deliver personalized content and offers that appeal to broader visitor segments, such as couples and friend and business groups that can take advantage of mid-week opportunities.

Using the composable SitecoreAI DAM (formerly Sitecore Content Hub), EGC has given its non-technical marketing and sales professionals one governed place to develop, manage, and publish digital content. Faster access to trusted, approved assets has driven a 174% increase in goal completions. EGC can receive a wide array of asset types and formats from hundreds of diverse sources, standardize them for consistency and quality, and distribute them with confidence to thousands of EGC members, press, government, and tourism entities.

By managing 45,000 digital assets in one place and reusing content across campaigns, EGC’s Sitecore-powered website is broadening audiences and increasing tourism to the city. Website traffic is up 48.5%, mobile traffic is up 70%, and visitors spend 17% more time per session. Local businesses have seen revenue-generating opportunities increase 164% year-on-year, and the conversion rate has increased 119% for visitors booking accommodation, attending leisure and business events, and visiting local restaurants and bars. New site visits are up 52.5% and goal completions have increased 174%. These gains are helping raise the destination’s global profile ahead of the 2032 Summer Olympics.