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Annakaisa explains that in her role as Digital Manager at Visit Finland, her work focuses on digitalisation, recovery and resilience of the Finnish tourism industry.

Her background in the likes of Red Bull and Finnair has helped her to apply some of the learnings when it comes to digital transformation in the tourism industry in Finland.

The core role of Visit Finland is to build demand and preference for Finland. However, as digital continues to evolve, so too do the needs and priorities and increase the needs around data, sustainability and digitalisation come into play and have to be prioritised as part of building a pathway for growth going forward.

It's worth noting too that Visit Finland forms part of Business Finland, allowing a cross-sector exchange of knowledge and capabilities to the benefit of this core aim in tourism.

What are the strategic focus areas when it comes to digitalisation?

1. Digital accessibility - being able to find and discover Finnish tourism experiences are essential.
2. Online bookability - being able to book and convert visitors must fulfil discovery.
3. Competence & knowledge - building competence is key.

When we look at the Digital Customer it is clear that Visit Finland plays in the dreaming and planning phase of the customer journey, but we also can't ignore the importance of supporting the industry to perform better and be found in different online channels, the key to conversion.

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Visit Finland Data Hub

This database allows Finnish travel companies to register and add marketing content re-allocated to their company, services and products. This is the hub of all marketing, where company content and material can be surfaced everywhere. It's important to highlight that this is a database for marketing content.

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The other component is the interface where this marketing content can then be pulled by third-parties to surface this content in other environments.

So how does DataHub work?

1. Businesses can enter their details to become visible in Visit Finland's digital channels, as well as all the third parties using the API to do the same.
2. Companies can update this whenever there are new content features so that the image of the companies remains updated all the time.
3. It's also key to distributing brand content across the many channels, such as:
4. Visit Finland - featuring this content as the main driver of content on the site.
5. Finland Travel Pros - for B2B training of professionals.
6. Campaign Databases - marketing teams internationally can leverage the content.

Just looking at how this surfaces on VisitFinland.com we can see how this database content surfaces alongside editorial content. This allows a balance of rich, curated and inspirational content alongside product content which helps make such feature content actionable and discoverable.

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Bookability & Distribution

Annakaisa explains that this is a particularly difficult topic for the travel industry to get their head around owing to the incredible fragmentation of the digital distribution environment. To address that, Visit Finland has worked hard to develop a three-step approach to addressing these issues, including:

1. A guidebook to booking engines and inventory management
2. What tech suits my business needs
3. What are the top tech used in Finland
4. What integrations are available
5. Playbook for digital sales and distribution
6. How to build my channel strategy
7. Which channels can bring me revenue with the best profit
8. Distribution channel catalogue
9. Catalogue of channels with demand for Finland
10. Most important attributes and APIs

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Competence & Knowledge

This is a never-ending process, where Visit Finland has found its own pathway forward:

1. Read - Digital accessibility on own channels
2. Website
3. Channels
4. Google My Business
5. Allocated resources
6. Steady - Digital bookability
7. Products in DataHub
8. Online booking channels
9. Marketing in digital channels
10. Analytics & KPIs
11. Competencies & C-Level support
12. Go - Data driven, multi-channel marketing and sales
13. Optimise actively own channels vs. other channels
14. Optimise actively marketing activities
15. Data & analytics
16. Digital channels and tools within strategy
17. Digital activities designated in budget, targets and resources

As they look forward now, the key focus is on digital distribution - one of the biggest challenges which risk weakening the impact of all our marketing efforts is not being able to reach a huge percentage of the market because of our focus only on driving direct bookings.