Marketing Greece Presents its Next Steps to Support Greek Tourism

Marketing Greece CEO Ioanna Dretta presenting the company’s plans to the Greek media.

By Nikos Krinis

Improving the demand for the Greek tourism product in order to attract greater visitor spending and overcome seasonality, is among the main goals of Marketing Greece, a private marketing company for Greek tourism.

Marketing Greece CEO Ioanna Dretta.

Launched in 2013, Marketing Greece SA is a non-profit organization and was founded by the Greek Tourism Confederation (SETE), the Hellenic Chamber of Hotels and the Hellenic Association of Communications Agencies (EDEE).

“Marketing Greece is the private sector alliance for the promotion of the Greek tourism product and its mission is to support the implementation of the country’s single national tourism strategy in cooperation with the state agencies,” the company’s CEO, Ioanna Dretta, told journalists during a press event on Tuesday in Athens.

Underlining that Marketing Greece’s activity centers around researching, designing and launching innovative actions to promote the Greek tourism product through wider synergies, Dretta presented the company’s future actions, which mainly center around its destination portal DiscoverGreece.com.

Creating demand for Greece via DiscoverGreece.com

Marketing Greece’s destination portal discovergreece.com.

“We are upgrading DiscoverGreece.com, looking for new ways to showcase destinations and products,” Dretta said.

Available in six languages — Greek, English, German, French, Russian and Turkish — DiscoverGreece.com describes all that can be found (destinations, products, services) in Greece’s tourism product.

“We are making DiscoverGreece.com more informative by offering ideas and tips for destinations in order to influence the traveler more and create demand,” she added.

According to the data presented by Dretta, DiscoverGreece.com counts a digital community of some 1.1 million members developed through its social media channels. Today the portal contains a collection of original content (stories, photos, videos), which over the past few years has recorded 550 million impressions within social media networks, of which 5% (27 million) has actively expressed feedback on the destinations and experiences displayed.

Dretta said that DiscoverGreece.com will be enhanced in order to penetrate demographic groups within Greece’s tourism markets of interest and offer more services and new marketing solutions for the Greek tourism market, focusing on the two-way added value for the tourism product and business. “We will soon announce the company’s commercial policy,” she informed.

Campaigns for destinations

“DiscoverGreece.com is the tool on which we base our campaigns,” Dretta said.

Marketing Greece specializes in designing campaigns that focus on destinations, tourism offerings products and special market segments.

The company’s services are addressed to the entire Greek tourism community, in both the public and private sectors (local authorities, sector associations and businesses), whose activity affects the country’s tourism economy.

The company has already designed and launched a series of promotional campaigns for many Greek destinations including Thessaly, Western Greece, Central Greece, Athens and Lesvos.

Tourism campaign for Thessaly by Marketing Greece.

In addition to promoting and supporting destinations, Marketing Greece is also planning to share its know-how with Greek small tourism enterprises.

“We are planning to launch free digital marketing seminars to small tourism businesses and share ‘toolkits’ with small entrepreneurs,” she said.

Moreover, strategic priorities of the company include establishing a stronger connection between tourism, culture and the agri-food sector; monitoring and analyzing international trends in tourism marketing; and aligning its marketing actions with the strategy of SETE.

Targeting the domestic travel market

Tourism campaign for Lesvos by Marketing Greece.

DiscoverGreece.com’s audience is 70 percent foreign users and 30 percent Greek users.

“A change from our past is that we are now going to target the Greek market as 30 percent of the users of the platform and our social media channels are Greeks,” Dretta said, adding that the latest data is showing a comeback of the Greek domestic tourism market.

Marketing Greece is also in the process of building synergies and partnerships in order to add more content to its portal and is also in the process of creating an image bank of all of Greece’s destinations. The image bank is available to the public – travelers and professionals – free of charge.

Products that spread the word about Greece

Marketing Greece’s storytelling platform: Blogtrotters.

Dretta also presented the company’s products, outlets that aim to get the word out about Greece, such as the Blogtrotters storytelling platform for international digital influencers (travel bloggers, Instagrammers, YouTubers etc).

The company’s most recent product is Wanderlust Greece. Running as a “digital travel show”, Wanderlust Greece promotes content that is based on unedited material and original experiences of hosted foreign and Greek influencers (bloggers, vloggers).

Marketing Greece’s “digital travel show”: Wanderlust Greece.

Marketing Greece cooperates with three PR offices in England, France and Germany, which assist in organizing press trips to Greece (about 120 a year) for foreign journalists, bloggers and vloggers.

Strategic partners of Marketing Greece include Athens International Airport (AIA), Aegean Airlines, the Athens, Attica and Argosaronic Hotel Association and the City of Athens. Marketing Greece has cooperated on many joint campaigns including “I’m An Aθenian Too” and “Speak AΘenian-Be an AΘenian” and is part of the “Athens Tourism Partnership” initiative.