Scott McNab – RealNZ

What frequency have you found to be the most effective for sending EDM’s? Especially when they are part of a wider series.
There is no perfect one size fits all answer here. Things to consider are:

• What resource do you have for email creation and planning?
• Do you have frequent news , updates to share that guests will find interesting?
• Are there different times of the year where frequency should increase or decrease? i.e. during a key promotion vs mid off-season cadence may be very different.
• What automation flow are you executing and therefore what cadence logically makes sense? i.e. a welcome series vs, an abandoned cart will have different number of emails and periods.

Biggest recommendation is to ensure that you’ve set up rules to suppress the total number of emails a single guess might receive in a week. Watch guest behaviour and alter your approach – if unsubscribes are increasing, then consider decreasing frequency.

Eve Lawrence – Haka Tours an Intrepid Company

Are people choosing Haka/Intrepid because of sustainability initiatives, or is it a nice-to-have?
Yes people are ACTIVELY travelling with Intrepid because of our ‘lead with purpose’ mantra and our sustainability initiatives. Intrepid is the world leading and highest scoring travel BCorp (91 points), we have been carbon zero since 2010 and we are seeing a lot of feedback that suggests customers are choosing to book with us for this reason. This is coupled with our foundation partnerships in every country.

Leading with Purpose has economic benefits and it’s something I’d encourage every business to do (with authenticity of course – you have to walk the talk).

Alex Dykman – Maverick Digital

Are you not worried about an audience that is too small when you add a lot of interests to meta paid targeting? Doesn’t this affect the ROI?
Overlaying conscious-traveller mindset targeting with usual demographic targeting will decrease the size of the audience, but it’s all about balance. You don’t want to be too specific to limit ad performance, but you also don’t want to be too broad and potentially throw away impressions on irrelevant audiences. Use the audience size tool in Meta when you’re building your ad sets – it’s a continuum between ‘Specific’ and ‘Broad’. You want to sit in the middle of this dial, slightly towards ‘Specific’ if possible. Add and remove audiences as needed.

Sam Mills – AJ Hackett Bungy

How long would you recommend TikTok videos should be?
Personally, I believe that the length of a video depends on its content. With our videos, our trend is that most viewers watch for the first 7 seconds before they begin to drop off if it’s not their kind of thing. The recipe I commonly use is:

• Create a visual hook within the first 3 seconds. For us, this looks like the demonstration of an activity, creating suspense, or something that shows what they’re about to see is out of the normal!
• Show and/or establish your crux by the seventh second. Give them what they want! I try to make sure my most exciting footage within this clip has been shown by then.
• Let it play out with a clean conclusion and keep it a maximum of 15 seconds. If I have an action-packed video of a triple backflip Bungy, I always make sure to let viewers see the rebound/winching/end of the jump, so it feels less abrupt.

However, If I’m posting something more long-winded (A day in the life-styled video), or meaningful (either a safety-related video or a more ‘hard-hitting’ concept), let it run its course. Maybe it’s a 20-second video. Maybe it’s a 2-minute video. Your audience will always desire different types of content depending on their interest, and some ideas take longer to unpack than others. But if in doubt – 15 seconds or less!

Tim Olson – Maverick Digital

What AI copywriting tool do you recommend (other than ChatGPT)?
For paid tools, both Jasper and Copy.ai are very well regarded but are both significantly more expensive than an OpenAI account. They are both very business focused and will prompt you to define your brand identity and voice to create text that is consistent across all outputs.

For free tools, Google’s Bard (a direct competitor to ChatGPT) has just been updated to their newest Large Language Model and has been significantly improved in doing so.

As we move to AI powered search, how can we prepare our site content so it shows up in guests results?
As these tools are still very much in the experimental stage there is not yet a clear answer on this. Because they are using the indexed content from the search engines, any content that is triggering Featured Snippets or high rankings on the standard versions of the search engines is likely to be prioritised. Because these models favour accurate and informative information, continuing the current SEO trends of making sure that you have fresh & informative data on your websites is going to be the best tactic that you have in the short term until more testing and information becomes available.

Which of them; ChatGPT, Bing, Bard etc. scrapes the very latest data from the internet?
Both of the currently available Generative AI Search tools – Google and Bing – are using the parent companies search indexes, and as such are pulling information from live websites. This means that their answers should always be giving relevant and up to date information. These live datasets however are not used in the normal chat models like ChatGPT or Bard which are using static data.