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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 Comments

  As 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.

• Uncategorized

  Marketing your small tourism business in the 21th century: #3 Monitor and Respect Tripadvisor

  03.29.08 | Permalink | 2 Comments

  If you run a tourism business, and especially if you run an accommodation business, you need to know what people say about you on Tripadvisor. A lot of operators do this already, but I’m amazed at how many don’t. You’ll probably find that most reviews are very positive. (Tracking Tourism blog did some research).
  But some ratings might not be positive. Some might even be unfair. Tripadvisor gives you the ability to respond to any review, positive or negative. So you have a change to provide your side of the story and turn a bad review in an opportunity to show you care about your customer.
  I’ve seen some very bad management responses. They often read like retaliations. I’m sure it made the operator feel better for a minute, but I don’t think they understand how it will only make things worse. This is one example I found:

  Either you have never been a guest and grudging on behalf of someone else. Whatever are your reasons, let me tell you something, no one gets rude for no reason. If you push anybody to extreme, then be prepared to be pushed back. Hopefully, we live in a world of sensible people, I didn’t say saints. If your expectation are right, you will always get what you paid for. As someone said, “there are no FREE bananas”

  Who knows, maybe the guest was completely unreasonable. But consumers don’t know that, and this kind of response won’t make them excited about a possible visit.
  Good responses I’ve seen show empathy with the customer and demonstrate actions to avoid these situations in the future where necessary. The best responses I’ve seen include invitations to make up for it (when something obviously bad happened) or new policies based on the feedback. Here’s a good example:

  Based on the review we have implemented the following changes:
  1. Put larger desks in our corporate friendly rooms.
  2. Increased the higher voltage bulbs in these rooms.
  3. Had our wireless provider fix the errors.
  I will like to thank you for your feedback and will like to offer a free night stay at our hotel to change your experience.
  Sincerely,
  GM

  I’m not suggesting to hand out free stays to anybody who complains on Tripadvisor. The bottom line is that you can make a bad review into an opportunity to show future readers you care about you customers and are willing to address feedback. And if you follow rule #1, Tripadvisor will be one of your best marketing vehicles. Maybe there is such a thing as “free bananas” after all.

• Uncategorized

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

  03.25.08 | Permalink | 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.

• Internet, Marketing, Travel & Tourism

  Marketing your small tourism business in the 21th century: #1 Be Remarkable

  03.20.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  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:

  • #1 Be Remarkable
  • #2 Get your website in order
  • #3 Monitor and Respect Tripadvisor
  • #4 Encourage Your Customer to Share their Experiences
  • #5 Find your target audience and join the conversation
  • #6: Be found in Search Engines

William Bakker's Destination Marketing blog