Most digital marketing goes wrong in the gaps. The website says one thing, the social feed says another, the ads point somewhere that doesn't quite deliver, and nobody is watching the reviews at all.
Corinna Wilderness Village sits on the Pieman River at the southern edge of the takayna/Tarkine, about as far from a marketing department as you can get in Tasmania. There is no mobile reception and no Wi-Fi, which is rather the point. What there is, is one of the most distinctive places to stay in the country, and a guest base that consistently says so.
The work we've done with Corinna over the past two years hasn't been a campaign. It has been a holistic system: a website that supports the offers, content built once and used everywhere, advertising timed to the booking cycle, and a reviews and listings operation running quietly underneath all of it.
This case study covers:
Corinna Wilderness Village is a remote eco-tourism village in Tasmania's wild west, built on the bones of an 1880s gold rush settlement. It is the only surviving remote area historical mining settlement in the state.
Guests stay in restored miners' cottages and eco-cabins, eat at The Tarkine Hotel, and reach the place by crossing the Pieman River on the Fatman Barge, the only cable-driven vehicular barge in Tasmania. The other signature experience is the Arcadia II, a 1939 Huon pine vessel and the only Huon pine river cruiser still operating anywhere in the world.
Corinna holds EarthCheck Assessed certification, and the absence of connectivity is treated as a feature rather than a limitation. The audience is largely interstate, skewed to Victoria, and mostly couples travelling as part of a longer Tasmanian itinerary.
The first conversation was about promoting the winter deal, so that is where we started. Auditing the website surfaced the real issue quickly: there was no destination. We built a dedicated Winter Deal page so people could understand the offer, see what a stay involved, and book from it. Suddenly there was somewhere for social posts and advertising to go.
That small fix set the pattern for everything after it. Fix the destination before you buy the traffic.
Corinna's Facebook following was its most underused asset. We built a set of content pillars around what guests genuinely talk about, the walks, the kayaking, the wildlife, the history, and the feeling of the place itself, then started posting consistently against them.
Consistency did most of the work on Facebook, which carries the longer history pieces and guest storytelling for an older, more local audience.
Instagram needed more than consistency. It had been receiving nothing but cross-posts from Facebook, which is not really using the channel at all. With Corinna's core audience sitting at 35 and over, Instagram is where the business reaches the younger end of that range and builds recognition well before anyone is ready to book. So we now write for it deliberately as the visual channel, planned on the same fortnightly calendar as Facebook but never a duplicate of it.
The next step there is Reels. Short-form video is the most effective way to reach a younger audience and the local Tasmanian market in particular, and it is a focus for the period ahead.
The winter deal audit opened into a wider review. Rather than push for a rebuild, we worked within Corinna's existing platform and went through the site from top to bottom on visitor experience: layout, hierarchy, page structure, and the path from arriving to booking.
Alongside that came the search and structural work: page titles and descriptions rewritten against target terms, heading structure corrected sitewide, and dedicated pages built for the two seasonal drivers, the Winter Deal and Fungi Month. Fungi Month has since become a genuine shoulder season attraction, with expert-led packages selling out.
This is the piece we've leaned on hardest over the past twelve months. We set the blog up within the existing platform and committed to a consistent publishing schedule, now twelve articles deep.
The purpose is structural, not decorative. Previously the homepage was ranking for terms it had no business owning, Lovers Falls being the clearest example. Purpose-built articles on Lovers Falls, the individual Tarkine walks, getting to Corinna via the Fatman Barge and what to pack give those terms a proper home and widen the range of searches the site can appear for.
Each article is written to be reused. One blog post becomes social posts, newsletter content and ad copy. The autumn campaign, The Wilderness Is Calling, ran exactly this way: a hero awareness ad, an activity ad and an accommodation ad, backed by six organic social posts and a campaign article on the site, all carrying one message at one time.
Corinna's guest turnover is high compared with a trades client, which makes reviews and listings unusually valuable here. So this became a major part of the retainer rather than a box tick.
Using BirdEye, we optimised the listings from top to bottom: name, address and place details made accurate and consistent, photos and images added, Google Business Profile posts published regularly, and Corinna added to additional directories it wasn't listed on.
The second half was reviews. Corinna already earned reviews organically, which is a strong position to start from. The gap was replies. Responding to reviews signals to Google and the other platforms that the business is active and attended to, and it is one of the more reliable local search signals available. We put a review request and response process in place and have worked it steadily since.
The system is what makes this hold. Each month: the fortnightly social calendar is produced and scheduled, blog content is written and published, advertising runs against wherever the booking cycle sits, and site maintenance and optimisation continue in the background. Work coming from the Corinna team, a website tweak or a Fungi Month update, slots into the same rhythm. We've also produced advertising to support Corinna's PR activity.
None of it is dramatic. That is the point. The results come from the cycle repeating rather than from any single campaign.
The clearest results sit in reviews and local search, which is where the most deliberate system was built.
Of those, 197 were five star and 24 were four star, with only four landing below three stars. Booking.com contributed 126, TripAdvisor 53 at a 4.9 average, and Google 46. All three platforms are now running above their lifetime average of 4.6, which means the current period is actively pulling the long-term score up rather than holding it steady.
The Google Business Profile work shows up as demand rather than vanity. In twelve months the profile generated 38,200 impressions, 5,700 website visits, 3,900 direction requests and 957 phone calls. For a property four hours from the nearest capital city, direction requests and calls are about as close to booking intent as a free listing gets.
Corinna now holds position one for its core commercial terms, including accommodation Corinna, Pieman River cruise, Fatman Barge and Tarkine Hotel. Organic search delivered 37,836 sessions over the past twelve months. The blog is doing the job it was built for: widening the range of searches the site can appear for, rather than leaving everything on the homepage.
Consistent posting added 1,800 followers across Facebook and Instagram, roughly twenty per cent growth on where the channels started. Instagram in particular has gone from an afterthought fed by cross-posts to a channel written for in its own right. Advertising has run efficiently throughout, with the Stay 3 Pay 2 winter campaign reaching 22,774 people for 1,325 link clicks at 15 cents each.
The most recent twelve months sat slightly below the twelve months before them on total sessions. That prior year was an exceptional one, up more than four times on the year before it, so it is a demanding comparison. The two-year trend is the fair way to read this, and it points firmly upward.
The interesting part of the Corinna work isn't any single tactic. It's that the website, the blog, the social calendar, the advertising and the reviews all point the same way at the same time, and keep doing it month after month.
That's harder than it sounds and it's why the reviews result matters most to us. Two hundred and twenty five reviews at 4.8 stars isn't something you can buy or campaign your way to. It comes from a genuinely good business, plus a system that makes sure the good experiences actually get recorded, answered and seen by the next person searching.
Thanks to the Corinna team for being excellent to work with, and for running somewhere worth writing about. If you have a business that deserves better than a pop-up, let's have a chat.
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