Digitalising Brand India

Rakesh Verma, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Tourism, shares that the government is working on a new portal for Incredible India, which will focus on digitising content and allow the industry to be an active part of it.

Nisha Verma

The Ministry of Tourism has taken a lot of digital initiatives to not only build Brand India, but also promote it in the right way. Sharing details, Rakesh Verma, Additional Secretary, MOT, said, “We have our own Incredible India website and our social media presence that collectively markets India as a destination. We used this opportunity to rethink and recalibrate ourselves. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi has given us the direction that our portal should be one of the top tourism portals in the world. Now, we have finalised our strategy to revamp our digital platform, and will be looking at content services and outreach. Content is the most important piece in our digital marketing. Earlier, we had just one website system integrated to support us, but we realised it is more about marketing, branding, and design.”

Support in partners
He revealed that they now have three partners to support them in digital marketing. “One is the lead agency to give us the branding, the design, and the marketing. Then there is the technology company to provide support at the back-end. The third agency is a production agency to support us in terms of content. We are working with the states and we will partner with the industry to have an automated content management system. Anyone and everyone can contribute to the content, which can lead to the marketing of India as a destination,” Verma said.

He added that they are also trying to put a customer relationship management (CRM) in place by profiling the visitors, followed by personalisation and targeting. “The tools of today allow you not only do mass marketing, but also be selective and customised. We have a strong platform called the Adobe platform, offering hyper personalisation, and the CRM will help us in compiling and making sure that we are effective and targeted. We are targeting that by May 2022, we should launch our new web portal,” he said.

It is time to go digital
Another initiative, Verma said, is that tourism is the ideal sector for digitalisation. “Tourism is all about digitalisation. Unless all inter-related industries — the destination, the attraction, get digitalised, the impact of the destination in the market may not be as good. Hence, the digital tourism mission will look at four aspects. The first is to benefit from India’s status as a leader in the digital world. Second, tourism domain data, where a unified interface will be developed and the data will be available to everyone, and they can use it for their own marketing, research, or planning needs. If someone wants to build solutions, portals, or aggregate platforms, the mission will enable it all. Our timeframe is two to three years, and it will go a long way towards strengthening the tourism sector,” he added.

Benefitting trade
Speaking on how the digital mission can benefit tour operators directly, Verma shared, “I feel that we should provide support to the industry in digital marketing, especially to small and medium-sized businesses. To bring them on board for digital marketing, we will create policies and initiatives for Marketing Development Assistance (MDA) and capacity building and digital skills. The third aspect is we are putting all the marketing material into a digital asset available for tour operators as well,” he averred.

Apart from the content that carries stories and visuals about destination India, Verma said they have a separate section about services. “Hence, in the next set of designs, we will be integrating with tour operators, where they can share everything from people, products or services. It could be circulated to all other members as information on the kind of interest, query or lead that is generated from our website. We will have that factored into our design,” he said. Verma also requested that whatever material is sent by the MOT, the IATO members should circulate it to all members and share whatever contributions, suggestions or feedback that comes from members.