Notes

Turkey is one of the world’s leading tourism destinations, attracting approximately 40 million visitors in 2014 and earning $34 billion in tourism revenue. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism is one of the world’s most sophisticated destination marketing operations, consistently producing effective and evocative campaigns. – winning the World Travel Award in 2012 for Europe’s Leading Tourist Board Turkey Home is the country’s most recent integrated tourism marketing campaign – launched in 2014 and rolled out globally - ably uses all of the major digital marketing channels as part of a comprehensive suite of marketing activities to showcase the destination’s tourism product diversity and target multiple niche markets all while maintaining brand consistency across channels. The result is a marketing campaign that is at once flexible and customizable. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism (2015) has articulated one key goal of the Turkey Home campaign is to strengthen the country’s social media communities while building strong visual awareness of the destination. Visual content plays an important role in the campaign and four world-renowned photographers have been invited to participate.
The Turkey Home channel strategy is anchored by a central website with a bold photo and links to each Turkey Home social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram Pinterest YouTube, and LinkedIn. Striking photos with a small label that explains the location and an appropriate appearance regularly in multiple channels, supplemented by channel appropriate content such as retweets, shared posts, and re-grams. The campaign actively integrated user-generated content from a variety of sources. Instagram posts with hashtags #Turkey #Homeof are re-grammed and also featured regularly on the Facebook page and Twitter feed. A streamline mobile app that encourages current or previous visitors to Turkey to upload their own photos of the country with a unique “Home of” slogan. Users can then view what others have uploaded.

Topics Covered: UGC, ICT-based tourism marketing (social media marketing), multi-channel marketing, brand awareness, competitive advantage, global marketing