As restrictions begin to ease around Australia, the recovery of Australia’s business events industry will be led by domestic activity – by businesses and organisations choosing to hold events at home in Australia. Stay tuned as Tourism Australia, through Business Events Australia (BEA), adds a focus on boosting desire for domestic events – details will be outlined in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, as our international borders remain closed, BEA continues to maintain presence in key international markets through customer engagement and a content-led media buy. These efforts seek to remind planners and decision makers of what Australia offers as a business events destination in preparation for when planning of international events resumes.

Our recovery plans continue to progress so keep an eye out for updates in upcoming newsletters. For now, see what we’ve been working on below, and be sure to keep sending your news and updates to bea@tourism.australia.com and contact us if you have questions.

Follow Business Events Australia on Instagram

As part of a new content strategy, which includes a greater concentration on owned communication channels, to maximise “dreaming” opportunities for international customers while borders are closed, Business Events Australia has launched its official Instagram account, @businesseventsaustralia. Tailored to the incentive market, the account will share destinations, experiences and bespoke touches to inspire future incentive trips to Australia. Follow us and tag your Instagram posts with #MeetinAus to allow us to repost. The account provides another platform for industry to reach a highly targeted international customer base – share your content and ideas by emailing bea@tourism.australia.com.

Diving into Business Events Australia’s new creative strategy

Business Events Australia’s creative strategy is undergoing a comprehensive review; we’re using the COVID-19 pause to develop a new strategic approach to make Australia stand out and optimise our brand positioning during the pandemic recovery period and beyond. While the new strategy will continue to focus on the incentive and association sectors and those aspects of Australia which make us unique and highly desirable – people and place – we’re looking to reinvent how we communicate these messages to make decision-makers stop and take note. While it is still early days, the emerging tone is both a departure from expectation and an unmistakeable nod to the laidback sophistication of Australia today.

Keeping customers in touch with Australia

While global travel is paused, we’ve continued to feed Australian insights, expertise and inspiration into key markets via our ongoing media buy. As international trade media report higher traffic while the world is at home, strategic content is keeping Australia top of mind to position our industry for recovery and helping to offset the pause in our usual distribution activity. Tourism Australia’s General Manager of Events, Penny Lion has shared her thoughts on the challenges of 2020 in CMW magazine in the UK; we’ve been popping lists of the best Australian movies, books and more into the inboxes of North American planners with Prevue; we have shared a love of Australia with in M&IT in the UK; and we’ve put a spotlight on how an Australian-founded critical care conference with a global reputation is innovating in the time of coronavirus through Meetings International.

Industry engagement during COVID-19

Throughout the pandemic, engagement with Australian industry has been essential to understanding how businesses have been impacted, and to help guide Business Events Australia’s strategy to support industry recovery. Alongside this, we’ve been offering our strategic and practical perspective to industry webinars including for cievents, the Tourism and Transport Forum and, most recently, Saxton’s The State of Events session. We were also pleased to support Meetings and Events Australia’s MEALIVE industry awards night recently, through sponsorship of the Outstanding Contribution Award. Congratulations to Trevor Gardiner from Centium Software, who was the recipient of this year’s award, and all of the night’s other award winners. During recovery, working closely with industry will continue to be critical – presenting a collective, focussed showcase of the best of Australia to international decision-makers will maximise our resources and our impact in what will be a crowded market as destinations look to simultaneously recover.