About the Market Development Facility
The Market Development Facility (MDF) is an Australian Government funded multi-country initiative that promotes sustainable economic development, through higher incomes for women and men, in our partner countries. We connect individuals, businesses, governments and NGOs with each other, and with markets at home and abroad. This enhances investment and coordination and allows partnerships to flourish, strengthening inclusive economic growth.
MDF is funded by the Australian Government. It is implemented by Palladium in partnership with Swisscontact. In Sri Lanka, MDF works in sustainable tourism, agricultural inputs and speciality coffee, with cross-cutting investments to promote inclusivity and climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Background
The Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau (SLTPB) is the state institution responsible for promoting Sri Lanka as a tourist destination internationally. It aims to position Sri Lanka as a high-value, diverse and safe tourist attraction. The SLTPB achieves this objective through digital marketing and public relations (PR) campaigns conducted globally, targeting key source markets. The outcome of such campaigns must be analysed and measured to understand current trends, gaps/areas for improvement and the impact made on attracting the targeted tourist segments. The SLTPB intends to launch a digital campaign covering fourteen source markets in two phases. The countries under phase one are the UK, Germany, India, Russia, China and Australia while phase two comprises countries and regions including Italy, Spain, Middle East, Scandinavia, Benelux, Poland, Japan and South Korea. A monitoring and evaluation framework needs to be developed for this digital marketing campaign along with an execution plan while building capacity of selected SLTPB staff to ensure continuity of the effort. Operational and strategic recommendations are also to be provided along with the monitoring framework. Market intelligence gathering to support proactive marketing planning and investment decisions will be conducted for all the markets under phase two of the campaign to strengthen market-based decision-making and campaign planning. Through this initiative, the SLTPB will be able to establish a campaign performance, measurement and optimisation framework for marketing campaigns, measure their impact and gather market intelligence to be able to engage in a journey of continuous improvement.