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Marketing, Travel & Tourism
Marketing your small tourism business in the 21th century: #7: Get your content our there
I posted about the importance of a good website. But you have other options to connect your content with potential visitors. Instead of bringing people to your website, bring your content to the people.
There are plenty of places to do this. Most DMO’s offer a listing program where you can describe your business to potential customers on a dedicated page on their website. A DMO website is a good place to start because this is the place where you can find people who are already expressing interest. At Tourism BC, we offer our HelloBC listing program at TourismBC.net.
And there are other places. Yahoo travel allows you to add your hotel or attraction. Free. Google offers you the ability to provide them information about any business for Google Maps. Free.
There are more places, including dozens of online directories. You don’t have to go crazy because some will be more relevant to your business than others. Some are free, some will charge you. You’ll have to decide for yourself and be careful where you spend your money.
A good rule of thumb is to look at the traffic the website generates and the relevancy to your business. High traffic and high relevancy is where you want to be. But check the content on tourism related websites first. The content should be relevant and accurate.
If you’re charged for a listing, it’s important to measure the results. Directly, by measuring the incoming visitors to your website (available through your website analytics). Or indirectly, by asking your customers where they found out about your business.
At Tourism BC, our listings are very detailed and often a consumer won’t visit an operator website because the information is all there. So we can tell operators how many times the listing was viewed on our websites.
The next logical step is to send your inventory out into the world. This is more complicated and could involve changes to the way you run your business. So we’ll leave that post for a later time.
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Internet, Marketing, Travel & Tourism
Marketing your small tourism business in the 21th century: #6: Be found in Search Engines
04.26.08 | Permalink | 4 CommentsThe first 5 topics have been focused on giving people a remarkable experience, encouraging people to talk about it, and give resulting interested consumers access to your website to close the sale.
And how will people find your website if there’s mention or link to your website? A Search Engine of course. Travel planning starts with a Search Engine. People don’t even bother remembering URL’s anymore (in the Japanese subway, they now advertise Search Terms instead of URL’s). You need to be found in Search Engines. The art and science of making sure you have good placement in Search Engines is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Paying for those little ads on the side of the results is called Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
The most important thing is when somebody searches for the name of your business, your website has to show up high. Start by testing this out. Just search for your name and check if you’re in the top results. Make sure you also check for other ways people might search for your name. Also search for your name plus the name of your city or community. Unless you have a common name, your business should be #1, #2 or #3.
If you don’t show up at all, you have a big problem. And if you don’t show in the top 5, you still have a problem. In most cases it means your web professional hasn’t considered Search Engines when building your website. For a list on how to make your website Search Engine Friendly, check our these guidelines from Google’s Webmaster Central (or send the list to your web professional). Start there, and in a later post I’ll share what else you can do to improve your SEO. If you can’t wait, check Search Engine Watch.
The second thing you can do in Search Engines is pay for placement. Create an ad in a Search Engine for specific keywords and you pay each time somebody clicks to your website (Pay Per Click, or PPC). Managing PPC campaigns is a specialist skill, but if you stick to the basics, you can experiment with this yourself. You can manage you Search Engine Ads in Google, Yahoo and MSN through self service and a credit card. There are four core tactics to consider; the keywords you target, your bid, the copy of your ad, and your landing page.
My recommendation is to start very specific and slowly broaden things out. Start with very specific keywords. If you are ACME Golf course in Someville. Target the keywords “ACME Golf” and “Golf Someville” for example. Don’t target “Golf”. If might drive a lot of traffic, but it will also drive up cost and it’s unlikely they will convert into a visitor. Choose the geographic area where your ads will show carefully. Where does your typical visitor come from? Start there. Be carefull how much you bid, and set limits so you don’t blow through your budget. And most of all, monitor the results. What’s working, what’s not working, and adjust frequently.
You probably realize that it can get complicated and time consuming quickly. So think twice before you engage in this and consider hiring a professional to manage your SEM. It’s worth it.
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Marketing, Travel & Tourism
Marketing your small tourism business in the 21th century: #4 Encourage Your Customer to Share their Experiences
04.02.08 | Permalink | 6 CommentsAs I mentioned before, word-of-mouth has always been the best marketing vehicle in travel. But unlike mass media, it has been invisible. Not anymore. People are now sharing en-mass on message boards, blogs, review sites and social networks. So this is part where we’ll save you some time and money by encouraging your customers to share their experiences online so you can reap maximum bennefits generated by word-of-mouth.
In #1 Be Remarkable I explained that you first need to give somebody something worth talking about. In #2 Get your website in order we gave consumers a place to go after they hear about you. In #3 Monitor and Respect Tripadvisor we took care of Tripadvisor, the most important place for you to invest your time. Now let’s encourage consumers to share and save you some time.
Tripadvisor is also the obvious starting place to ask your customers to share the great time they had at your business. And when I say ask, I don’t mean ‘bribe’. In the transparent online world, unethical behaviour will get caught (and punished). Some ideas are to mention Tripadvisor on checkout, or add a simple “Share your experience with us on Tripadvisor” on an invoice or receipt.
Tripadvisor is used at the end of the purchase cycle, when a consumer is close to a purchase. It’s the last check to validate what they’ve learned about your business against consumer reviews. That means a consumer found out about you someplace else, earlier in the purchase cycle. In traditional marketing, this can be a newspaper article or a guidebook. There are social networks who tailor to consumers earlier in the purchase cycle, allowing you to use your past customers to create awareness among others.
In the 21th century, this might be a specific special interest website where your target audience shares experiences, based on the business you run. There are also destination specific websites. Our HelloBC Blogs section for example. How do you find the networks most relevant for you? Ask you customers, and see if you can find a pattern. Or Google around and see if you can find a place where your target audience ‘relive and recommend’. And when you find it, encourage your customers to share. -
Marketing
The Future of Marketing + Advertising
03.24.08 | Permalink | 6 Comments
Paul Isakson summed up what I believe is true in 91 brilliant slides [link in case you can’t see the embedded slideshow].
One quote stood out:“We’re not in the business of keeping the media companies alive, we’re in the business of connecting with consumers. –Trevor Edwards, Nike’s corporate vice president for global brand and category management”A little googling lead me to the following very interesting NY Times article called The New Advertising Outlet: Your Life.
There’s another great quote in there from Stefan Olander, global director for brand connections at Nike:We want to find a way to enhance the experience and services, rather than looking for a way to interrupt people from getting to where they want to go. How can we provide a service that the consumer goes, ‘Wow, you really made this easier for me’?What he’s saying is “how can we be remarkable?”
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Internet, Marketing, Travel & Tourism
Marketing your small tourism business in the 21th century: #1 Be Remarkable
I like to investigate research, make observation and detect patterns to develop theories, create models and build strategies. But I’m very aware that a lot of people who read my blog are running a business and would like to know: What can I do today? So here’s the first post in what I hope to be a series about marketing your small tourism business in the 21th century.
1) Be remarkable
The title might not suggest it but this has everything to do with online marketing. Because it starts with the basics. In order to market something, you need a product. And when you have a product, the way to market it in the 21th century is through word-of-mouth. It’s nothing new. Travel has always been about word-of-mouth marketing. But in a Web 2.0 world, word-of-mouth is amplified through review websites and social networks.Tourism operators often offer ordinary products because conventional wisdom tells you that ordinary is safe. Serve to the lowest common denominator and nobody will complain. Maybe. But people don’t talk about something ordinary.
They forget ordinary.
What people talk about are things that are extraordinary. An extraordinary experience. Extraordinary customer service. Extraordinary value for money. Extraordinary weather.
Extraordinary experiences are remarkable experiences. A remarkable experience is something worth making a remark about. That’s why you don’t hear anybody talking about the restaurant with average food. You hear about good food or bad food. Good customer service or bad customer service. Good weather or bad weather.I stayed in a hotel in Berlin that was too expensive for what it offered. But the breakfast buffet was unreal. Guess what I tell anybody who asked me about my trip? “You should have seen the breakfast buffet!”. A couple of years ago I visited the sunshine coast with my father and sister. We never bothered to book a place to stay. We ended up at a B&B in Madeira Bay that was full. But the owner offered us her own bed and slept on the couch herself. She was super nice and treated us like family. I’ve been back twice, and so has my sister, and a few of our friends.
As a tourism operator you have a huge opportunity. An opportunity to be remarkable. Because people love to talk about their trips. And people love to hear about other people’s trips. And not just over a dinner party anymore. But via email, on a blog, on Facebook, on Flickr, on WAYN, on Tripadvisor and dozens other social networks. Read by millions that look for the extraordinary.
So be remarkable, and do it in a positive way. It doesn’t have to be hard. Start by investing in customer service. And do that little bit of extra that make something say “wow”. Achieve that and they’ll do the marketing for you.
I recommend reading online marketing guru Seth Godin’s books and blog to learn more about being remarkable. I recommend Tourism BC’s Superhost programs and workshops to become a customer service wizard.
It’s easy for me to say. But you can start being remarkable today.
Marketing your small tourism business in the 21th century:
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Internet, Marketing, tourism bc, Travel & Tourism
And the winner is….
Remember our call for a video host? Well, here’s our first video. Watch our youtube page for more videos by Chris. Have a cool BC Ski video yourself? Submit is at hellobc.com/skivideo. You can win a ski or snowboard package.
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Internet, Marketing, tourism bc, Travel & Tourism
Gotta Ski BC Facebook Application
Today we launched Tourism BC’s first Facebook application. I’m very excited about it. Our team has done a great job at packing lots of information and functionality into a small space. Snow heights, new snow, places you’ve skied, places you want to ski, looking at where you’re friends have been, comments about current conditions, photos, it’s very impressive. I think it’s useful and fun for all ski and snowboard enthusiast. Go check it out for yourself.
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Internet, Marketing, Travel & Tourism
Canada-e-Connect
We finished Canada-e-Connect yesterday. I had a great time at the conference. Jens and his team did a fantastic job putting it together. The speakers were excellent, the award show very cool (and short). It was nice to take home the Gold metal for best innovation in the public sector for our HelloBC Blogs website. The people attending diverse and from all over the country. I’ve met a whole range of new and interesting people. The Tips from the T-List book turned out great, although I probably would have run a spell check over my entries if I would have know (oops, blame it on my Dutch roots).
The thing that I’ve taken away from the conference is that the ongoing evolution of the internet and impact on our culture, consumer behaviour and travel and tourism is something that requires consistent attention and should be an ongoing priority. -
Internet, Marketing, Travel & Tourism
What’s the point of a campaign website?
10.17.07 | Permalink | 2 CommentsI don’t get it. Why do so many destinations build specific websites for specific campaigns? Are they seriously thinking that consumers are only interested in the content specific to the campaigns theme? Let me give an example. Queensland has a campaign called Outback Holidays. It has a campaign website with a unique URL; adventureoutback.com.au. It has a lot of content about the Outback. This Dinosaur Trails information is really cool, for example.
Queensland also has it’s regular consumer website, queenslandholidays.com.au. It’s a great website with a lot of great information. But is doesn’t have the nice Dinosaur page I found on the campaign site. But it DOES lists all kinds of tourism operators including Lark Quarry Dinosaur Trackways, also very cool. This information didn’t make it on the campaign website though.
There is a link buried somewhere on the campaign website to the main website, but good luck finding it. I’m picking on Queensland because I happen to know their website well, but it happens everywhere and I-don’t-get-it. My assumption is that there is some co-op marketing deal where partners who buy in are featured exclusively on the campaign site. There’s probably also an agency involved who produces content exclusively for the campaign site.
Imagine Amazon building a campaign website to promote the new Harry Potter book without any references to its main website or other products. And you can only buy the book on the campaign site, and the campaign site is completely disconnected from the main Amazon website. It would never happen because it doesn’t make any sense.
I’m sure there are a lot of things we can do better on our website (and I’d love to hear it), but when it comes to campaigns, I think we’ve figured it out. Campaigns motivate a consumer to start learning about or planning a trip to British Columbia. There might be a campaign landing page to follow through on a specific call to action, but after that, we put the consumer at the best place of the website to start planning their trip. And what do we see? Somebody that responded to a golf message could be looking at our ski pages next, or at a spa operator, or whatever else is relevant and of interest to that consumer. Just because the consumer responded to a golf message, doesn’t mean she’s not interested in anything else. Limiting information based what motivated the consumer to visit is a missed opportunity. -
Marketing
No more mass advertising
I’m having an interesting Facebook wall-to-wall debate with my friend Liddie about mass marketing. I’m going to post my latest rant here for everybody to enjoy. Feel free to join in.
Mass advertising is like flinging things at a wall and hoping something will stick. That makes it too often an annoying, intrusive, obnoxious, irrelevant, unwanted waste of my time (with the exception of the mini-wheats commercial, they should make a show out of that).
Consumers go through every means to block, skip or ignore commercials. If I’m not looking for dish washing soap, I don’t want to hear about it. Companies should focus on creating great products instead of trying to sell crap with interruption marketing. People will tell each other about great products, that’s how you generate awareness.
Look at the fasted growing brand in the world: Google. Never ran any mass advertising campaign. Second fasted growing brand: Zara. Also no on mass. Fifth fasted growing brand: Starbucks, virtually no mass. Third and fourth fasted growing brands: Apple and Nintendo. They do run mass but that’s not the reason for their success; iPod and Wii are word-of-mouth phenomenas and so are Google, Zara and Starbucks.
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William Bakker's Destination Marketing blog
William Bakker is Chief Strategist at Destination Think!. These are my personal thoughts.
