Tourism Internet Marketing and the Power of Home Page

Starting marketing online can be pretty overwhelming, even more overwhelming if you have already started and want to refine your direction. What's best for our tourism businesses? Travel review sites like TripAdvisor? Google AdWords? Internet marketing? YouTube? Fb? Twitter? You will get the point.

A lot of tourism professionals tourism content marketing I talk to say to me "I know there is so much potential to promote my online businesses but where do I start? It always seems like there is certainly some new fad arriving on the scene that everyone says will be the silver bullet"

I acknowledge 100% with this and I am sure you do to, so what to do about this?

Within my online marketing I have started with a simple strategy and worked at putting it into place, piece by piece, and not moving on to the next stage until the previous stage has already been completed.

Here is an outline of my strategy during the last 2 years:

1. Merchandise to market online (What you are selling)

The ideal way to consider good thing about developments in online travel is to have a tourism product that customers will book online. This can be a tour, activity or experience, inside my circumstance we developed one hiking tour to sell in the Christchurch day tour market. Before you brain off to every corner of the internet to promote your business you need something to sell.

2. A unique "online friendly" brand.

The net is a very packed place and you need to stand out from your competition. The way I have gone concerning this is by developing a web friendly brand with personality. My HikingGuys brand has recently been developed specifically for online advertising the "Hiking Guy" character developed to give it a genial and personal feel. After all, on vacation like clients want to feel like they are approaching to meet friends.

3. Blog based website.

Along with the development of open source content management systems (CMS) this space has truly altered in the past few years. Our websites need to be easily up-to-date, google search friendly and affordable to host. I use an open course free CMS called WordPress, we have only had our Wordpress site up for a few months now and we are now on the first page of Search engines for many of our keywords and this hadn't occurred in several years using our old site. Much more on websites in later posts.

4. Online reservation (How you are selling)

This is key to success in online marketing for our tourism businesses. By so doing we want people to book and pay for our product online. Naturally we will receive email inquiries from potential customers and this is an important part of the sales process nevertheless the ultimate aim of our online marketing is to have customers book and pay online.

5. Get travel reviews posted (TripAdvisor)

Almost 100% in our customers who book online explain to me they booked because all our great reviews on TripAdvisor. If you asked me what the solitary most important aspect to the growth of our online sales within the last 12 a few months I would say TripAdvisor, without a doubt. Many of us recognize the value of TripAdvisor but how many of us are positive about getting reviews posted from clients?

Important Stipulation:

Transformation work unless we are doing an outstanding job and your clients love our work. Especially with the growth in online review sites, no amount of marketing can overcome a poor customer experience.

For an example of how I am implementing the above strategy look into HikingGuys. co. nz Like anything at all in business, this is an ongoing process and I still have a lot to learn and much more to do, but subsequent the above strategy we have seen significant development in online bookings in the last 2 seasons.