BESydney
Bid. Connect. Inspire.
Backed by government, industry and academia, BESydney’s purpose is to pitch Sydney as Australia’s home of global meetings. Recognising the true value to a host city and participants alike, BESydney promotes the opportunity to exchange extraordinary ideas through collaboration, igniting genius and experiencing a challenging meeting of minds, with the beautiful and culturally diverse Sydney as its background.
As the specialist bidding services organisation responsible for attracting global meetings to Sydney, their global team partners with clients and other key collaborators to win a range of global meetings for Sydney and Australia.
Designated as the official convention bureau for the city of Sydney, BESydney works to attract interest from organisations and associations looking to create conferences, conventions, trade shows and incentive programs.
The BESydney team identified that the face of their business, their website, was lacking efficient and effective means of attracting that interest. As a not-for-profit company with a focus on value creation and offering free and unbiased services, BESydney must partner with businesses that understand their operations.
Pepperit was initially approached by BESydney to assist in auditing their newly designed website and associated marketing efforts.
Through a partnership built on trust and reliability, that scope has expanded to include the development of marketing messaging, as well as guides and training in a range of marketing disciplines. And more recently, we have had the pleasure of working directly on two international bids to assist in securing these pivotal meetings for Sydney and Australia.
When we were asked to tender for Australia’s premier business events convention bureau, we jumped at the opportunity.
We love Sydney, we love events and we love campaign marketing. Plus, we got to work with a passionate team who excel at what they do. Primarily engaged to audit and report on BESydney’s website and search engine optimisation (SEO) activity, we set about reviewing the site and the opportunities for improving its performance in search rankings. What followed was a 56-page report on prioritised recommendations for improving the website’s performance in relation to search.
This is a popular service we provide many clients as it is a thorough audit of the full site, using reliable tools to identify issues and opportunities. Presented with specific actions to easily pass on to a web developer or often, action at the client-level, it’s a great checklist the BESydney team used to ensure their website became its best self.
True to providing all the support required, we never just dump a report and run. We spent considerable time presenting our findings, discussing options for a plan forward and providing the necessary customised training and advice. We were also able to help BESydney with actioning some of our recommendations on their behalf to make immediate improvements.
Once the website was performing well, BESydney asked pepper to also undertake a social media audit which then informed the new social media strategy we wrote. Incorporating many targeted international locations, the social strategy focused on the incentives aspect of the business. All BESydney’s social content aims to inspire and educate incentive organisers about the raft of benefits associated with arranging their event in Sydney.
Approaching the marketing aspect of incentives and large convention bids that BESydney oversees requires a two-fold strategy: messaging around the purpose and conversation of the event and the destination-focused piece that speaks to ‘why here’. Aspirational imagery and video are not difficult to come by for a destination like Sydney. However, central to the messaging is finding ways to convey interesting bite-sized pieces of content, which was great fun uncovering.
From here, we then had the opportunity to work with the team in developing the social media strategy. This included reviewing and recommending the direction of content for some of BESydney’s social media campaigns. We also developed social media training guides and templates that could be used by the team as needed.
Following our support for the international bidding activities engaged by BESydney, the team identified an opportunity for pepper to provide additional support on other bids.
BESydney generates around $210 million in direct revenue each year and 235,000 delegate days. As the BESydney team provides support in bidding for a range of global meetings to be held in Sydney, there are varying degrees of involvement they have, depending on the bid’s budget and resources. The team required a document that would support associations with smaller bids, providing a guide on how to successfully promote a bid and win events for Sydney.
After our initial work in website and search optimisation, BESydney saw an increase in web traffic from many international markets within a two-month period.
On BESydney’s social channels, we gained significant increase in engagement on Facebook and grew their audience as well. Feedback from the team continues to be that the guides we developed for both internal social media use and bid marketing are being implemented, teaching existing and new team members. We just love hearing from happy clients.
We’re proud of our ongoing partnership with the team at BESydney and are looking forward to continuing to support the team with marketing their brand to the world, as well as participating alongside them when the next international bid arises.
- Digital marketing guide
- SEO report
- SEO execution
- Social media training
- Inhouse Marketing workshops
- SEO training and support
- Social media campaigns
- Social media audit
- Social media strategy
