«
»

Uncategorized

Marketing your small tourism business in the 21th century: #2 Get your website in order

03.25.08 | 10 Comments


This topic probably needs more than one post because I receive a lot of website related questions from tourism businesses. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that when you operate a tourism business that doesn’t rely on walk-by traffic only, your website is your most important marketing vehicle. Your website has to be up to snuff. I’ll try to keep it simple.
First of all; hire a professional, or a company who build websites. There are still people who think that buying a copy of dreamweaver or frontpage will save them a few bucks by building a website themselves. Please don’t. You’re busy enough already. A simple way to find the right company or professional is to look at your colleague’s websites and get a recommendation.
You first need to think about what you want to achieve with your website in a way that you can measure; sales, transactions, customer emails, phonecalls, etc. The more tangible the better. This is your objective. Your exact objective depends on your type of business. But as a tourism business, I think in most cases you should go for the sale.
There are 4 main aspects to building a website; visual design, content, usability, technology. Most people focus on design and technology (because its fun). Instead, you should worry about content and usability (not so much fun). Content is what your website visitors need, usability is organizing content and providing the functionality to make things easy for your website visitors. The design should reflect your business (if you run a flowery B&B, your website can be flowery as well). Finally, technology is what enables you to deliver everything above.
Your web professional(s) should be competent in all areas. But you’re the expert of your business and should know what content is needed to turn a website visitor in a customer. In general, people don’t visit tourism operator websites for the fun of it. Their visit has a purpose. They want to validate their intent to visit your business, sort out the details and hopefully purchase.
Validating the decision is about the excitement of the experience. Consumers want to picture themselves having fun kayaking a river, playing a round of golf or relaxing in the hot-tub of your B&B. Pictures, videos and testimonials are the most compelling ways to achieve this. The details they nedd depend on your type of business and it can include simple things such as opening hours, your location, pricing, policies, etc. Some consumers just want to make sure a business is legit. Providing contact info is often crucial to meet this.
Make sure you get the content your professional need. Don’t just focus on making your website look pretty. It’s about the content. You probably don’t even need a ‘redesign’, you just need better content (ok, I think I made my point). Finally, you need a mechanism to get the sale. If you can offer an online reservation often, great. If you can’t there are other options.
Looking for an example of a good operator website? Nahanni River Adventures won the Canada eTourism Award for best website. It’s a great example of using pictures, videos and testimonials to validate the intent, provide detailed information, and provide a mechanism to get the sale.
I hope to provide a bit more detail in certain areas soon. In the meantime, if you have any questions about any of this, or have anything to add, or need help finding the right online professional, please leave a comment or drop me an email. My email address is under my picture in the right column.

Tags: ,
  • http://blog.highlandbusinessresearch.com/ Vicky

    Great post William and I look forward to the rest of the series.
    I totally agree that getting a competent professional involved is essential. I would also point out that its worth remembering that a website isn’t simply something you buy once and it’s done, never to change again.
    I’ve come across a number of small tourism businesses who aren’t able to update their website, either because the company that made it is not longer in business, or they don’t have a content management system or any spare budget to make updates.
    That leaves them with an outdated website that makes potential visitors run away again in no time at all, because you simply cannot trust a website with last years information.
    I’d always encourage businesses to ask the professionals how easy it will be to update the site and can they do it themselves through a simple content management system. That way they avoid any nasty surprises down the line and they can keep their site constantly fresh and appealing to visitors.
    Thanks and happy website building ;-)
    Vicky

  • http://blog.highlandbusinessresearch.com Vicky

    Great post William and I look forward to the rest of the series.
    I totally agree that getting a competent professional involved is essential. I would also point out that its worth remembering that a website isn’t simply something you buy once and it’s done, never to change again.
    I’ve come across a number of small tourism businesses who aren’t able to update their website, either because the company that made it is not longer in business, or they don’t have a content management system or any spare budget to make updates.
    That leaves them with an outdated website that makes potential visitors run away again in no time at all, because you simply cannot trust a website with last years information.
    I’d always encourage businesses to ask the professionals how easy it will be to update the site and can they do it themselves through a simple content management system. That way they avoid any nasty surprises down the line and they can keep their site constantly fresh and appealing to visitors.
    Thanks and happy website building ;-)
    Vicky

  • http://www.wilhelmus.ca/ William Bakker

    Thanks for the comment Vicky. I completely agree. I try to set 25-50% of the budget for any web project aside for post-launch updates and improvements. We also use as a rule of thumb to budget 20% of the initial investment for ongoing maintenance and updates. Nothing does more harm than an outdated website.

  • http://www.wilhelmus.ca William Bakker

    Thanks for the comment Vicky. I completely agree. I try to set 25-50% of the budget for any web project aside for post-launch updates and improvements. We also use as a rule of thumb to budget 20% of the initial investment for ongoing maintenance and updates. Nothing does more harm than an outdated website.

  • http://www.untanglemyweb.com/ Fabie

    Nice post William, I totally agree, especially with your “First of all; hire a professional, or a company who build websites. There are still people who think that buying a copy of dreamweaver or frontpage will save them a few bucks by building a website themselves. Please don’t.” I shall refer a few people still in doubt to your post…
    As Vicky also mentioned, there are unfortunately many clients who come to us because they have a website with a very poor content management system that does not allow much in terms of “content manipulation”.
    It is often very delicate to explain to people who have just spent lets say $5,000 on a small business website with no or a very basic CMS that they have to plan for another web budget this year in order to be able to fix what has been sold to them as a “rolls royce” of a site by some unethical web salesperson.
    I am not sure about how it works overseas but in Australia there is no established association that provides accreditation / professional development for web developers. I would be interested to see if you are having the same problem elsewhere.
    Thanks for your post, I definitely got something valuable out of it!
    Fabie

  • http://www.untanglemyweb.com Fabie

    Nice post William, I totally agree, especially with your “First of all; hire a professional, or a company who build websites. There are still people who think that buying a copy of dreamweaver or frontpage will save them a few bucks by building a website themselves. Please don’t.” I shall refer a few people still in doubt to your post…
    As Vicky also mentioned, there are unfortunately many clients who come to us because they have a website with a very poor content management system that does not allow much in terms of “content manipulation”.
    It is often very delicate to explain to people who have just spent lets say $5,000 on a small business website with no or a very basic CMS that they have to plan for another web budget this year in order to be able to fix what has been sold to them as a “rolls royce” of a site by some unethical web salesperson.
    I am not sure about how it works overseas but in Australia there is no established association that provides accreditation / professional development for web developers. I would be interested to see if you are having the same problem elsewhere.
    Thanks for your post, I definitely got something valuable out of it!
    Fabie

  • http://www.wilhelmus.ca/ William Bakker

    Hi Fabie,
    Thanks for the comment. You raise a good point. It’s hard for people to wrap their head around what a website will cost because there’s such a range of options. From a few hundred bucks if you hire so-and-so’s nephew, all the way to tens of thousands of dollars for a full service web development company.
    I always recommend people to talk to their business colleagues in the industry and see if they are happy with their developer and what their challenges are with their website. This is especially useful if you know somebody who understands the subject matter better than yourself. A good website is not necessarily a good looking website. That’s the most common mistake. So you have to to look beyond that and ask questions. Getting a recommendation for a good web developer is the #1 thing people from our industry ask me when they contact me.
    I know of some accreditation and associations for web developers here, but I have no experience with it. Maybe we need a tripadvisor for web developers ;)
    I plan to post a follow-up post about what to look for in a web developer soon so stay tuned.
    Hope all is well down under.
    Cheers,
    William

  • http://www.wilhelmus.ca William Bakker

    Hi Fabie,
    Thanks for the comment. You raise a good point. It’s hard for people to wrap their head around what a website will cost because there’s such a range of options. From a few hundred bucks if you hire so-and-so’s nephew, all the way to tens of thousands of dollars for a full service web development company.
    I always recommend people to talk to their business colleagues in the industry and see if they are happy with their developer and what their challenges are with their website. This is especially useful if you know somebody who understands the subject matter better than yourself. A good website is not necessarily a good looking website. That’s the most common mistake. So you have to to look beyond that and ask questions. Getting a recommendation for a good web developer is the #1 thing people from our industry ask me when they contact me.
    I know of some accreditation and associations for web developers here, but I have no experience with it. Maybe we need a tripadvisor for web developers ;)
    I plan to post a follow-up post about what to look for in a web developer soon so stay tuned.
    Hope all is well down under.
    Cheers,
    William

  • http://blog.untanglemyweb.com/ Fabie

    Oh I *like* your ideas about the tripadvisor for web developers hehe!
    Talking about TripAdvisor, one of my client (a daytime activities company) was not allowed to get listed on TA because they complement their offer by different accommodation packages (they are based out of town). Has anyone ever experienced this and could recommend a way around it?
    Ta :-)

  • http://blog.untanglemyweb.com Fabie

    Oh I *like* your ideas about the tripadvisor for web developers hehe!
    Talking about TripAdvisor, one of my client (a daytime activities company) was not allowed to get listed on TA because they complement their offer by different accommodation packages (they are based out of town). Has anyone ever experienced this and could recommend a way around it?
    Ta :-)


«
»