Among countless destinations in the meetings and events industry, visibility is a key competitive advantage. Meeting planners do not have any chance on the market unless they separate themselves clearly from other destinations. We live in a period of inflation of convention bureaus, operating in a very competitive environment and facing a number of challenges driven by rapid digitisation. The nature of work as we know it today is not comparable to the work ten years ago.
The Slovenian Convention Bureau has recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. It connects 60 partners and represents Slovenia as a MICE destination around the world. According to the international expert public, it performs its work in a superior way. It is one of the most active Convention Bureaus in Europe, which is particularly famous for innovative content and digital marketing.
According to the discussion with representatives of the Slovenian Convention Bureau, we looked the behind the scenes of its story of success. In different areas, the office is an innovator that shows the way to other destinations. The key is the right choice of marketing tools that the Slovenian Convention Bureau enlivened with a creative charge, strong analytics and a clear brand strategy.
The creation of the pillars of the Slovenia brand was developed systematically. The design process was carried out by the Irish agency Soolnua, who carried out an in-depth study on the basis of the “Slovenia Meetings” brand in order to identify the key competitive advantages of the destination. The results of the research have led to the construction of three key pillars of the Slovenian congress offer PLACE, PEOPLE and PURPOSE. It is a combination of thinking about how we see the destination ourselves and how foreigners see us.
All stories are powered by unique Slovenian energy manifested through a personal approach, which is naturally calm and unpretentious, but highly effective.
In this way, the Convention Bureau achieves outstanding results, and in particular builds good relations with potential event organisers in Slovenia.
This is also the basis for communication based on communication strategies, which can be summarised in the following points:
- Slovenian Convention Bureau as a source of credible information
The key competence of the bureau is the preparation of credible, high quality content for its partners and potential clients. As a rare source of independent information, this feature perfectly matches the new media reality in the world. The great advantage of such thinking is the effective construction of customer relationships, which can not be replaced by any other marketing tool in the field of B2B marketing.
- Big data marketing
Since the Meetings industry is active in the organisational market, collecting customer data is the first step to successful marketing. The Slovenian Convention Bureau collects customer information at all points where it is contacted. It follows the GDPR legislation. The database is the basis for developing own communication channels and various forms of direct marketing.
- Digital marketing system
Content marketing is the basis for the entire digital marketing ecosystem in the Slovenian Convention Bureau. This includes an advanced website, responsive design, thorough analytics and social networking. The web portal is the central communication point of the bureau.
The web portal www.slovenia-convention: the digital anchor for communication is visited daily on average by 150 congress organisers.
- Social media marketing
Social networks and content marketing are today a winning partnership as they are congressional storytelling boosters for Slovenia. Surprisingly many destinations in this area are completely passive or even inactive. The Slovenian Convention Bureau, however, achieves exceptional results in this field.
There is also a need for a smart specialisation. The Slovenian Convention Bureau is focused on the marketing of products that are strategically compatible with the destination. If you know your target group very well, many more effective marketing channels are available today, that are driven in direct, guerrilla and digital ways.
We can say that the Slovenian Convention Bureau is a creative hub driven by innovation and based on openness, inclusive community, connectivity and involvement in different local and global, political and social networks that think along the same lines. This already ranks it among the modern convention bureaus that have stepped in to phase 4.0.
