The deluge of information sources for travel planning and the ease of technology in facilitating sharing have resulted in National Tourism Organisations (NTOs) such as Singapore Tourism Board (STB) losing ground as consumers seek opinion from online travel forums and experienced travellers.

The surge in digital usage especially on mobile also meant that STB’s digital presence needed to be readily discoverable and easy to navigate.

Hence, yoursingapore.com needed to evolve from a one-size-fits-all directory of events to a catalyst that encourages social sharing through delivering inspiring experiences to users in different stages of their travel planning.

As our target audience seek different types of content from various platforms at each stage of their travel planning, the potential of yoursingapore.com would be best optimised during the travel planning stage by providing content to engage, validate and inform prior to booking. It would hence become a secondary source to validate and crystallise travel plans delivered through multiple POVs – or ‘voices’ that connect STB with their target audience rather than create and push.

Like music, we focused on key elements that everyone could relate to such as colours, textures and icons, and distilled them into active experiences to drive emotions and participation. Ultimately, we wanted the new yoursingapore.com to be a personal, engaging and genuine experience for users.

The new yoursingapore.com site obtained third-party endorsements through curated or co-created content from notable editorial partners. We leveraged various content platforms such as editorial and user-generated content as well as social media and travel review platforms to bring richer stories and recommendations.

We saw a significant 19% increase of site traffic generated from social networks. While this indicated our social strategy was effective, it also decreased the reliance on paid search and paid media to generate traffic (as compared to the old site); hence creating a sustainable source of traffic and dialogue on the site.

The KPIs of the new site focused strongly on visitor engagement and visitor advocacy. Visitor engagement measures the interactions visitors have on the site in terms of click-throughs to deeper content tiles and performing activities like site search and downloads. Visitor advocacy measured the number of times visitors share yoursingapore.com content on their social platforms as well as interaction on STB’s and partners’ social platforms. Since site launch, visitor engagement increased by 164% and visitor advocacy increased by 99% compared to the old site.

To increase discovery and facilitate ease of use, a dedicated mobile site was also developed to optimise the functionality, readability and loading time for users.