Digital Marketing Channels and Your Branding

Due to the fast way in which the Internet is evolving, there is now a plethora of digital channels which can be used to hold a dialogue between a brand and a consumer, for example, between your hotel and your future or repeat guests.

The Cluetrain Manifesto written by four visionaries in 1999 (which is now a very long time ago) predicted the Internet would evolve to a point where the consumer holds the "power" and no longer could the corporate world continue to communicate to their markets (the people they wish to interact with) in a push marketing or broadcast manner. How right they were.

The internet has evolved and people/consumers can now be very selective about which brands they choose to interact with; and have the ability to communicate their thoughts and feelings globally. Such mediums on the social web - including blogs, social networks, groups within social networks and video sites - can all be utilised by consumers.

“Travel planning is still one of the leading reasons consumers use these channels. If you want gays and lesbians to find your hotel, attraction, event or tour when they are planning their holidays, you better be going digital,” says gay tourism marketing specialist Dee Farrell.

Ïf you need to assess your online marketing strategy in terms of reaching the gay market, hire an expert to fine tune your campaign and then hirë a content creator to contribute to the blogs, video channels and Facebook and Twitter accounts you’ve established.” Dee@PeacockTourism.com.

Edited from Wikipedia and comments by a Digital Marketing Maven

Creating Events Creates Tourism: Tasmanian Case Study

Tourism operators and community leaders have banded together in Tasmania to create a big revenue generator across the state. The highly successful, 16-day TASPride festival repeats itself in November, and it should not be overlooked as a marketing campaign tactic.

Other regions of the country, and other countries with tourism operators eager to participate in events reaching the gay and lesbian travel market, please take note.

TasPride Festival - 31 Oct. -Nov. 15 2009

The biggest celebration of 2009 for the GLBTI community in Tasmania will be taking place right across the state for two weeks from Saturday 31 October to Sunday 15 November. This is a great period for revisiting (or trying Tassie for the first time) the great state of Tassie. This year the program will include touring options, sample itineraries and special offers for the GLBTI community visiting their shores.

Don’t miss out on the TasPride parties, including the legendary opening night Halloween Party, the film festival, cultural celebrations, live music, theatre and cabaret, community events, the family day picnic - to name a few!

If you're a tourism operator with accommodation, tours, outdoor trips or other, and you or your travel industry association want help in planning an event that gains traction with the lucrative gay travel marketing, go to the experts at Peacock Tourism Marketing. They have tons of experience in both Australia and North America.

What Every Tourism Operator Needs

It's not too late to be up and running with a re-imagined website, accompanying blog, maybe a brand marketing video by the end of the year.

In Part I of an article titled What Every Tourism Operator Needs, you'll learn the first steps to a successful marketing strategy. There are way too many bad websites for good hotels and too many who don't have a blog yet!

By the time you're ready for Part 2: Essentials of Social Media Marketing, you should at least be familiar with the latest marketing channels, Facebook and Twitter. Don't worry, we can walk you through the process and make your staff experts in a jiffy.

Tourism Operators Need Marketing Help - and it has to be savvy as well as a smart value. That's what Peacock Tourism Marketing delivers. A long, accurate drive down the marketing fairway.

Are you connecting with you customers?

With the economy still slow and travel even slower are you taking the opportunities offered by the internet to engage your existing and potential customers?

• Are you engaging with your customers?
• Do you have a twitter account?
• Are you checking for reviews on your business?
• Do you actively seek reviews?
• Are you on facebook?
• Do you have a mailing list?
• Privacy policy on your website?
• Links to things to do from your website?
• A secure booking system?
• Youtube account?
• Using google ads?
• Using yahoo ads?
• Engaging with local travel media for reviews?

While money is tight all of the above things you can do for a small cost.

Rainbow Tourism can assist you with any of these and you will be suprised at how little this costs. Contact us now.

If you want reviews of any services let me know in the comment section.

Sales Channels Matter

An interesting item in the April Seekom newsletter highlights some interesting research results presented at the No Vacancy conference in Sydney.

Some very interesting statistics were provided by Hitwise and Expedia. Hitwise provided figures showing that approximately 70% of all accommodation bookings are made via an aggregator or sales channel, and 30% are made directly with the operator. This ratio is expected to reduce to 60:40 by 2010. Further, of those clients who book directly with a property, 75% found the property as a result of a search of sales channels. Expedia stated that for every booking they provide a property, on average a further 1.8 bookings will be made direct with the property after having been found by the client at Expedia.

These figures highlight 3 important facts:

• Sales channels play a huge part in helping your customers find you. They act as a search engine, however have a major advantage over Google in that they provide the customer an indication of availability.
  
• Bookings will not be made on your website if you cannot provide your customer with the same deal they found at the sales channel and provide them with instant confirmation. Failure to provide this will cause the customer to return to the website of the sales channel where they may, or may not, still elect to book your property.
  
• The more bookings you receive through your website as the result of having been found initially on the website of a sales channel effectively means you are paying your sales channels a lower commission rate than you may have realised.
  

This is something we know from the Rainbow Tourism business - we work on a higher ratio than 1.8 bookings for every booking from us. We know from our experience that if you are listed on the Rainbow Tourism website - which focuses on gay and lesbian travel you will receive at least 5 bookings for every booking we send you.  This ratio is even higher if you have a direct link form our website - which we now have a special US$100 offer .

So if you contact us to help you build your sales channels simply and easily.

Need more website visitors? easy trick to help.

I haven't made a post for a long while, as I have relocated from Tauranga New Zealand to San Diego California and married my Yank. So Hi Again :) if you remember I do SEO, or make websites findable in search engines.

All website names are fictitious, just for examples. and I don't know this area myself, so I'll probably say something wrong, but you should get the idea.

I have a quick easy tip to help your website rank better in search engine results without spending more than $20.

Lets say you would like to attract more international visitors, we'll say Americans, since I'm one now, I'm and expert on how they search :).

Most website names (domain names/urls) are the name of the business right... which is fair enough if it's a great big internationally known business, but often the business names, won't mean much to an American couple, looking for a place to stay near Sydney. Australia.

Say you have a lovely private bed and breakfast, in Edgecliff, which according to google maps is close to Bondi Beach in Sydney, and your website name, is www.koalaB&B.com.au or even KoalaHouse.com.au the chances of our America couple finding your lovely B&B is pretty slim right?

Did you know that a website can have more than one domain name? well your website can have several domain names...it your host allows it... now don't get rid of your original domain name, you want that for a quick easy domain name for business cards, and to tell people over the phone, but consider buying another good keywordy domain name, that is especially for search engines.

If you read the post I made back in Nov 07, you would know that Americans search for Bed and Breakfast rather thanB&B or the other options, read about in the reference at the end of this post. And the cheapest place I know to buy a .com domain name is godaddy.com.

now look at the words on your home page of your website, let’s say you have written you have a private bed and breakfast situated between bondi beach and syndey

So the red bold words are great keywords, so think about and what sort of domain name might suit, it doesn't matter if it's long or has hyphens, remember you aren't going to use this domain name for anything else, just to get people to your website nothing else.

Start searching for a secondary domain name at godaddy.com, they only cost $9.99 USD per year and when you have one you can live with buy it, and have your web designer park the name over your original domain name to your website

When thinking what words to use, think about the sort of thing, that someone that doesn’t know about your business, but would want to stay there or use your service, just might search for, like this one looks like it's available because it's so long.

www.bed-and-breakfast-near-bondi-beach-sydney.com

Now you might think this is overkill, but think about it, if this long name got you just 1 visitor that stayed for 1 night, once a year, it has paid for itself. And depending on what other words you have on your home page, a domain name like that would quite possibly get you many many visitors.

And lets face it, if it didn’t work at all, you have only lost less than $20, 2 tiny ads in the newspaper probably costs about that much.

Reference: What people from various countries search for when looking for a B&B,

http://tourismoperators.blogspot.com/2007/11/how-to-tell-if-your-seo-has-done-there.html

Cheers Lynny
lynny@canzdesign.com
SEO Services

What are your web plans for 2009

With the travel marketing been tight in 2009 it pays to think about your marketing strategy and in particular your online presence.

Some things to consider are:

a) Do you know how your customers find you?

b) Is your website working for you?

c) Can customers book on your website and receive immediate confirmation? Or are you still doing the email tag - with customers booking more last minute accommodation you will be missing out to your competitors who have instant confirmation.

d) If you sell other tours - why not sell them online when customers book your own travel product. Or include a summary of ideas and suggestions for booking with your email confirmation. 

e) Do you have an email newsletter or blog yet?

f) Can you update your website easily?

g) Are you using PPC (pay per click) advertising? Are you paying too much per click? Or paying for irrelevant clicks or missing out on clicks with the wrong key words?

There is a lot more but these are just some of the simplest things you can do to improve your online performance in 2009.

Rainbow Tourism can assist you with managing your online presence as we have a large number of partners who offer great value for money. Contact us and we can give you some ideas and quote for different services we can offer you.

Good ideas from Google and Webmaster Tools

The following post from Google is an example of some quick tips for to check how to make your website work better in google and other search engines.

Quick and easy tips for the holiday rush

There is some great tips in there in particular the tip to check how your website looks in other browsers is important. You can check what browser your visitors are using in your website statistics.

Here are some other thoughts if you are using google analytics then you can create a segment view for each browser type. This is very helpful as it can alert you to potential problems with browsers.

One simple things you could do is to sign up and review your site in the key web search engines - these provide tools for problem urls and give you clues to fix up problems and put in appropriate redirects.

• Google webmaster 
• Live Search Webmaster 
• Yahoo Site Explorer

The above three are the key search engines - you may want to also identify other specifically targeted sites of interest to your business.

This is something that a good SEO specialist will do but once set up is something you should be able to manage simply and easily - contact us for more help.

Customer Service - the tale of two phone companies

Last week I received two phone bills. One from Vodafone as expected and one from Optus not expected. The way the companies handled the matter is an example of how to win a customer loyalty and how not to.

I had reason to call both companies. 

In the case of Vodafone I had a small query on a 90cent charge. The women like me was puzzled about how the charge occured but with some work she identified what she thought the problem was. She then tested this theory by replicating the action. She then waited 24 hours to check billing and sure enough there was the charge. She contacted me again and confirmed the reason for the charge and credited the charge from the message before. 

All I can say it was fantastic customer service and while the amount was small in portion to my total account it showed a company willing to investigate even the smallest error.

In contrast I called Optus and had three very unpleasant phone conversations which resulted in a formal complaint.  Basically this experience was a reminder of my experience back in January 2008 resulting in moving the service in October 2008.

After speaking with two different people the end result was a formal complaint as they refused to investigate the issue but kept insisting I hadn't been disconnected when in fact the service had been disconnected in late October 2008. However what was interesting was that the service had sometime between late November and now been reconnected without my knowledge. Optus didn't seem to care or wish to investigate this issue.

The end result was the filing of a formal complaint to Optus. As previously no response to the email was received I called them the next day to confirm receipt but was told that this wasn't on file yet and to check in another day. On discussing with the person managing the call it became clear that the earlier discussions were not documented correctly but rather were documented with what Optus wanted to believe happened. 

I also asked why instead of transferring me to another department they couldn't send an email to the other department and call me back. I was told that this wasn't possible - the department couldn't call out. This seems to be a common practice of phone companies and other large companies to assume that their time is more valuable than the customers and so refuse to call to their customers but insist you be placed on hold.

End result: Bad customer experience  - sufficient to say Optus should be avoided in Australia. If you are looking for a cheaper option Engin Naked ADSL provides a great value service.

Lessons for a business from this:

a) Listen to the customer. Sometimes the customer may rant but that is okay. You don't need to listen to abuse but do allow the customer to express their feelings and emotions if necessary - remember you have come in at the end of the process.

b) Check what the issue is. It may not be what you think it is.

c) Agree with the customer what the issue is - say something like so you are concerned about xyz. Is that correct?

d) If things get heated not call the customer "uncooperative". Take a deep breath and ask what do you want to do about this?

e) Once agreement on the issue is identified then start looking for a solution - in some cases if you don't have an immediate solution the best option is to offer to investigate and call back later.

e) Agree timeframes  and means to follow up - does the customer have email - get their details and email them what was discussed so they have a copy.

g) Action and followup.

When things go wrong!

At 7:15am the phone rang and a message was left from Jucy rentals.

I missed the call by seconds and checked the voicemail to find a booking we had made for a client had been cancelled and so there was no car ready for them so you can imagine my first reaction on realising in the peak season a clients holiday might be ruined.

The good news is it wasn't and highlights how things can be fixed.

So what happened next highlights how a potential holiday disaster can be turned around when good customer service kicks in.

Jucy found a vehicle at their airport depot and put our clients into a taxi (they got the taxi to agree to a $30 rate instead of $70) and so they got away quickly.

From our end I contacted the guys at Baystay B&B to give them a welcome drink of wine or other treat.

We also credited them for a wine tour to apologise for the inconvenience

In the end the clients got the rental car with some inconvenience and got away on their holiday.

Thanks Jucy Rental for having such great customer service.

The last bit which will happen over the next week is we will trace back through the system to see what went wrong with the booking and put in place systems to stop this happening again.

As always when things go wrong it pays to sort out the customer first then work out what went wrong afterwards to avoid the situation repeating again.