Destination Barrington Coast

The Barrington Coast spans 10,053 km² and boasts a world heritage mountain range at its highest point.

At the Barrington Coast’s southernmost tip, you’ll find Hawks Nest and Tea Gardens; less than 2.5hrs drive from Sydney’s northern suburbs. A further hour north will bring you to Pacific Palms, Forster-Tuncurry or Gloucester. Travel westwards to the highest point of the Barrington Coast and explore the ancient Gondwana Rainforests of world heritage Barrington Tops.

Barrington Coast is famous for their forests, waterways and beaches. It has 15 national parks plus 63 state forests, nature reserves and conservation areas. The lands are watered by 38 rivers including the only double delta in the southern hemisphere and the state’s tallest single drop waterfall at 200m. This location also enjoys a pristine triple lakes system and over 190kms of absolutely stunning coastline.

The destination name is inspired by the Aboriginal description of the region - “the place where the leaves touch the waters from the mountains to the sea.” Formerly recognised as Great Lakes, Manning Valley and Barrington Tops, the overall brand campaign aimed to strategically reposition it within a broader destination framework. By incorporating the surrounding regions, the destination brand of Barrington Coast was conceived, marking a significant evolution and expansion beyond its previous identity. The next step was to create a website and engagement strategy that promoted the newly conceived destination.

• Inspire, exhibit, and enable immersive experiences that foster meaningful connections with people, places, cultures, and communities within their source markets.
• Enhance the overall volume, duration of visits, and spending of visitors year-round.
• Promote a more widespread distribution of visitors across the entire region.
• Cultivate a strong preference for Barrington Coast within their source markets.
  

Our target audience was diverse, capturing the adventurous spirit across all age groups and lifestyles. This includes women adventure travellers, active individuals aged 55 and above, active families, young adults and event participants.

Blaze your own trail.

‘Barrington Coast is a destination that offers it all.’

Our approach to designing the best website experience for both content and structure was to focus on the ‘Planning’ and ‘Holidaying’ phases. We aimed to give the right information when our audience were either planning their trip or more spontaneously in the region on holidays.

We did this through a combination of collaborating with locals to write editorial content with headlines that attract attention and search keywords, we added a ‘Today’ feature that made suggestions based on the current weather, and we created a bucket list functionality that made it easy for users to ‘save’ ideas for locations to visit for later. We also delivered a suite of high quality awe-inspiring imagery and videos which provided rich visual inspiration that placed our visitors’ imagination in the region, on holidays.

Editorial content

We took an editorial approach to developing website content. Instead of the typical eat/ see/do style of tourism sites, we wanted to authentically connect with our target audience through authentic narratives. There’s nothing like a local’s knowledge – from what to do in Winter in the Barrington Coast to the best spots to snorkel in the region, we leveraged our locals’ personal experiences in a humble but exciting way to provide information and engage our target audience around all Barrington Coast’s offerings. The editorial articles are flexible in format and can accommodate day trips, multi-day itineraries, ‘best of’ lists, seasonal advice, occasion based or articles based on a particular theme or audience. They include images, links to each business mentioned in the article and a map, which encourage our audience to discover more about the Barrington Coast than they would searching on their own.

The Local’s Guide was the hero section on the website and we delivered a content plan structured around the way people do online research. More than 20% of voice search queries are triggered by a combination of only 25 keywords, with the top 3 common keywords in voice search phrases are “how”, what” and “best”.

‘How do I find the best coffee in Forster?’

‘What are the best walk trails in Barrington Tops National Park?’

‘Things to do in Manning Valley in Winter?’

Therefore, the approach was to create occasion-based articles that answer some of these questions with headlines like:

Top 10 coffee spots in Forster

The 5 best walk trails in Barrington Tops National Park

Three events you can’t miss in Winter in Manning Valley

‘Today’ feature

The ‘Today’ feature that appears on all pages in the top navigation bar provides the weather for key locations throughout the Barrington Coast. For each location it provides a simple suggestion for an appropriate activity based on the weather ie ‘Warm and sunny today, a good day for the beach or outdoors’. It then pulls through some appropriate suggestions for things to do for today from the ‘What’s On’ calendar, ‘Explore’ guides, and ‘Locations’ from the directory based on the date and suitability.

Bucket list

A new feature that we introduced was the user-created ‘bucket list’. This allows users to find places or events that they are interested in and save them for later reference. The bucket list is an inspiring and helpful tool in the planning phase, and a useful resource when users arrive as they consult their list for cafés and shops they had marked to visit.

The bucket list feature is also incredibly helpful for data collection as it will require users to provide an email and some additional information about themselves. We will be able to analyse which profiles save which items, and use this information to trigger follow up targeted marketing and communication.

Instant Messaging and Social Media

We also worked with Barrington Coast to develop an engagement strategy that included instant messaging on their website and social media that featured user-generated content. We helped set up systems that captured data and provided automated but on point communication to everyone that visits the website - for example when a user sends a message on the website, by first capturing their email address and, based on their interaction with the website, we were able to send follow up communication on activities or experiences they were interested in.

Promotion videos

To showcase the breadth and beauty of Barrington Coast, we brought to life our three distinct landscapes: Mountains and Hinterland, Rivers and Valleys, and Beaches and Lakes in three videos. We were also able to bring to the forefront local businesses and operators as the facilitators of our narrative; and gave our locals a voice by featuring them and their top tips about the Barrington Coast. These videos appear on the website and social media, and were delivered alongside a suite of stunning photography that showed the variety of the region.