TiCSA ran a webinar on 2026 marketing trends with Hannah and Liz from Medium Order. It was an hour long. If you run a tour, a cellar door, an accommodation, a restaurant, or any kind of visitor-facing business in South Australia, here is what matters. (Scroll down for visual slides that I used to post a Carousel on Instagram.)
The headline
Authenticity is now the premium. AI-generated content is flooding every feed, and audiences have turned on it fast. Coca-Cola released an AI Christmas ad last year and got dragged for it. Sales dropped over the period. The word “slop” entered the Macquarie Dictionary awards because of how much lazy AI content people are sick of seeing. What this means for a tourism business is simple. Content that is visibly made by a real human, for a real place, is now the thing that stands out. Not polish. Not production value. Real.
Vertical video is not optional
Reels are 50 percent of all content consumed on Instagram. YouTube Shorts serves 200 billion videos a day. The average human attention span is now under nine seconds. If you are still posting single still images to your grid once a week, you are posting for a feed that no longer exists. The fix is not a bigger camera. The fix is more video, shot on a phone, shot often, and edited loosely. Rough is fine. Rough is actually better than slick right now, because slick reads as produced, and produced reads as sponsored, and sponsored gets scrolled past.
Your staff are your best asset and you are probably ignoring them
Posts from employees get twice the click-through rate of posts from brand accounts. Only 3 percent of employees actually post, and the ones that do drive a 30 percent lift in total engagement for the brand. People trust people. They do not trust logos. The takeaway is not to hand every staff member a script. Scripts are obvious and they kill the thing you wanted. The takeaway is to find the one or two people on your team who are comfortable on camera, and build a simple weekly rhythm where they share something real from the day. A behind the scenes moment. A guest story. A first pour. That is your content strategy.
The metrics changed and no one told the CFO
Likes and follower counts are dead as measures of performance. What matters now is saves, shares to DMs, watch time, and replies. If someone sends your reel to a friend in a private message, that is worth more than a hundred public likes. If your reporting still leads with follower growth, update it. If your board still asks for follower growth, educate them. The platforms are ranking content by private engagement now, and so should you.
Communities and ambassadors beat influencers
Influencers still work, but the shift is toward smaller creators on sustained partnerships instead of one-off big names. Even better, the trend is toward brand ambassadors. Real customers who already love the business, brought in and celebrated. User-generated content outperforms influencer content on trust every time. The job is to find the people already advocating for you and make it easy for them to do more of it.
Online and offline have to marry
Consumers, especially the younger ones, want real world experiences. Meetups, activations, events. But the online community is how they find the offline moment, and the offline moment is what they document and send back online. One feeds the other. If your content strategy is only digital, you are missing half the loop. If your events are only physical, the same.
Blogs are not dead. They are how AI finds you
This one caught me. AI search engines like ChatGPT and Google’s AI overview pull answers from somewhere, and that somewhere is increasingly well-written blog posts that directly answer real questions. If a visitor asks an AI “best family-friendly wineries in the Barossa,” the AI is quoting someone. Make sure it can quote you. Write the blog post that answers the question clearly, in plain language, and keep it current.
What I would do on Monday morning if I ran a tourism business in SA
Pick one staff member and start filming them once a week on a phone. Stop booking big annual shoots and start booking smaller, more frequent content days. Audit your last ten Instagram posts and ask how many are reels. If the answer is under six, that is the first fix. Write one blog post a month answering a real question a guest has asked you. And stop measuring likes.
The short version of the whole webinar is this. The audience moved. Trust moved with them. The brands that will win 2026 are the ones that sound like a human wrote them, look like a human shot them, and behave like a business that actually talks back.
If you run a tourism business and any of this resonates, here is what I offer.
A $100 Adelaide Reel is the foot in the door, one vertical-first reel built for the feed that actually plays. An employee-led content day where I come on site, find the person on your team who belongs on camera, coach them, and hand back a bank of content shot on a phone that looks like a human made it, because one did.
Ongoing podcast and content partnerships for operators who want a monthly rhythm instead of a one-off. And if you are reading this overwhelmed and not sure where to start, book a free call – 15 minutes on WhatsApp video where I tell you what I would actually do first.
Email [email protected] or call / text 0429048917
