ADEPT Marketing

This is a great summary by Karen Rubin from Hubspot about how to manage and plan content for your business blog so you can keep coming up with useful blog topics that attract targeted traffic. The video is 29 minutes long but definitely worth the time if you have your own business blog or are considering starting one.

See our Blog Set Up & Management Services

[business:Adept Marketing]

I’m interested to hear from New Zealand tourism operators as to what tourism websites bring them the most traffic and booking enquiries and why. Is there a website that you would absolutely always maintain a listing on (free or not)?

I quite often monitor the website statistics for tourism clients to see where their traffic sources are coming from so we can make decisions on where to best spend marketing money for online advertising. The answers are not always clear cut, and some sites work better for some and not for others, often depending on how the site ranks businesses (alphabetical or paid vs non-paid listings for example).

So is your most valuable tourism website any of the following or something else?

• Our national tourism website newzealand.com
• High profile tourism websites that you pay to list on like AA, Jasons and New Zealand Tourism Guide
• Your RTO, regional and local tourism websites
• Sector or Niche tourism websites that you specialise in e.g. luxury accommodation, B&B’s, Eco-tourism, etc
• Instant booking websites like Wotif, Ezibed, Travelbug, Expedia and so on

Perhaps there are a few key ones, and if you don’t know then you probably should find out. It’s a good strategy to be listed on a combination of the above listed sites to ensure broad exposure, so it’s just a matter of figuring out which ones. In any case it would be great if you could share what you think works for you.

Online marketing strategy is now a very important part of the overall marketing strategy for any destination marketing organisation and tourism operator. I came across an interesting blog post on the eTourism Blogoscope about “eDestination Marketing Secrets” based on a presentation from Martin Schobert from the Austrian National Tourist Office. His full presentation can be downloaded here.

These articles on my Marketing Tips blog may also be of interest:

“How to Avoid Bad Online Experiences for Travellers”

“Some Basics of Online Marketing Strategy”

So you’ve got a website and hopefully your customers and target market find it easily (a whole other topic), but once they do find it what sort of experience do they have? Does it project a positive image of your business or turn them off? Does it engage them or bore them? Is it easy to read and use or painful and frustrating?

One of the key things to ensure about your website is that it is persuasive – the language, the images, the layout and the usability all combine to appeal to and convert your website visitors into customers.

A key part of this is the language you use, here are some tips to help get it right:

• Don’t bore them with information all about you, particularly on the home page – it should be about them – what’s in it for them?
• Talk direct to the reader as “you” rather than referring to “them” or “our customers”.
• Don’t overwrite, keep your text content short and sweet, people don’t like having to read lot’s of text on a web page
• Use bullet points to list important information
• Tell them the benefits to them, don’t make them guess
• If you do have a lot of content to get across on a page use sub titles to break up the content into different topics

There are some good examples of how to do this in the article “How to write persuasively“. Have a critical look at your website and homepage – do you think it is persuasive from a customer point of view?

Branding in any media in not just about visual representation of your logo and colours, it’s also about the personality of your business and it’s people. Online media provides some unique ways to effectively share and reflect your brand image that allows engaging and interacting with your customers at a one to one level. Businesses can really use this to set themselves apart from competitors with how they communicate and manage relationships.

Here are some ideas that businesses can use to build and manage their online brand:

• Have a blog on your website – this will show your personality, expertise and interests, read more about the benefits

• Be part of the conversation – check online regularly with searches of your business name in blog posts and social media, you can use free tools like Social Mention or Technorati (for blogs). Wherever possible, get involved in discussions and reviews about your business.

• Create a Facebook page and build some “fans” – this will allow you to start any conversation and easily let them share their thoughts, photos and videos with you. LinkedIn is popular for business to business and career profiling.

• Get Tweeting on Twitter – an easy and quick way to build a strong online profile, great for connecting with people as well as driving traffic to your website and blog.

• Be active online – contribute to content by commenting on relevant and high profile blogs in your industry or area of interest.

What online activity has helped build your business brand? Keen to hear any other suggestions or examples of successful online branding.

For the bulk of businesses they do the obvious thing when establishing their website domain name and register the name of their business with a URL like www.acmeindustries.co.nz. Which by and large is not necessarily a bad thing, but unless you have “keywords” in your business name like “Auckland Lawyers Ltd” then it won’t necessarily be the most effective website domain name that you could choose for search engine marketing.

If you are in the situation of choosing a domain name for a new website then here are some tips to get it right from the start:

• Choose something that describes the key things that you offer, particularly if your business name just doesn’t do it and there is a lot of competition in your area. For example if your business is a motel in Tirau then www.tiraumotel.co.nz would be a great choice (it’s available by the way, quick someone register it!)

• Also register your business name as a domain name but simply redirect it to your main domain name to avoid a competitor using it and keep control over your online brand.

• If some of your best choices are already taken then try variations using hyphens or an extra word e.g. www.great-furniture-design-store.co.nz (note: search engines love hyphens but people don’t like having to type them in a URL).

• If you are a New Zealand based business but target customers in both New Zealand and internationally then register a co.nz and a .com version particularly if your website has different content versions for different countries. Just register .com if your main target market is international.

• Don’t confuse customers and the search engines by registering lots of different domain names and promote them all going to the same website, focus on having one main URL name that can be universally promoted.

If you are reading this and think, oh I should go and change my website domain name right now, then consider the following things:

• An established website will have already gained some level of search engine ranking and network of traffic sources, if you then change to a new domain name this ranking will be lost until you build traffic with the new domain name.

• If your existing website is already ranking well in search engines don’t muck with the domain name – enjoy the rankings and keep on building it with great content on your site.

• If you do want to change your current domain name to improve rankings then make sure you redirect your old URL address to the new one, and immediately change all inbound links you have advertised to the new address to quickly build up rankings. Submit the new address to the search engines, and promote it intensively with pay per click advertising like Google AdWords and Facebook ads. Share it on social media too.

You may think that having a blog on your website is just for professional bloggers or people who are experts in something, but in reality the functionality of a blog opens the door for your business to easily add fresh content to your website and allow online interaction with your customers.

Some of the key benefits of a Blog page are:

• Basically it’s a way to share any relevant information of interest with your target market. It may simply be a “News” page where you can add any recent or upcoming events, or news and tips about your business products and services.

• Because blog posts can be less formal, it can help to show the personality of your business and how you interact with customers providing an open way to communicate.

• Search engines like websites with fresh content and you can effectively grow the traffic of your website as each blog post can appear in search results. Particularly if you ensure you use the blog title in the URL name, e.g. this blog post URL includes: the-benefits-of-a-blog-on-your-website/.

• Blogs work in perfectly with social media as each blog post can be announced on Twitter or promoted using sites like LinkedIn or Facebook. These tools become an effective way to regularly attract relevant traffic to your site.

• For the above reasons, it can really make you stand out from your competitors online and build a stronger online profile.

• If you use a blog tool like WordPress you can manage and update your entire website with a full content management system that is free.

So if you are looking for a way to enhance your website and traffic then add a blog! Interested to hear any additional benefits or successes businesses have experienced by having a blog page so add your comments or questions.

See our Blog Set Up & Management Services

[business:Adept Marketing]

When researching online for travel destinations, transport, accommodation and tourism activities travellers have to sift through a huge amount of information. Chances are before they book with you they have looked at several other competitor websites in your area plus many more in other destinations.

Making your website stand out and avoid a negative first impression therefore comes down to some key areas:

• Ensure it is an easy website to use. Clear easy to use and consistent navigation is vital with easy to read, brief content for each page and subsection. Solid professional website design will go a long way to achieve this.

• Provide comprehensive but succinct information about what you offer AND your destination without making your site cluttered. Include transport options and maps. Long-winded flowery marketing content doesn’t work so well online.

• For travel, quality photos and a good selection are vital – make them easy to view using slideshows and options to view enlarged versions.

• Offer online bookings – preferably with the ability to check real-time availability, secure payment and instant confirmation. See Online Booking Strategy for Tourism.

• If using email booking enquiries then make sure you respond quickly.

• Promote previous customer endorsements of your business, see how to Make Traveller Reviews part of your Marketing Strategy.

• Keep your website updated with fresh content – there’s nothing worse than out of date information. Having your own content management system will go a long way to do this. Also having a blog page can give you a quick and easy way to adding new information and news.

Checkout this summary of Content and User Experience in Online Travel 2009 – a global online traveller research study conducted by Frommers Unlimited which gives a lot of detail about the process travellers go through with online research, what they are looking for and what annoys them – very information reading.

Existing websites designed for desktop computers are simply not easy to use on a mobile device. So if you want to cleverly target the increasingly sophisticated FIT traveller then start work now on a “mobile” version of your website or an application for mobile and touch screen devices like the popular iPhone.

This will provide long term benefits for the online marketing of your site and ensure you can capture all of the traveller market, especially for those travelling rugby supporters during the Rugby World Cup 2011.

If you have a WordPress website (like this one) then converting your site for mobile is very easy with this WPtouch iPhone Theme plugin. Good to see Wellington Tourism with a mobile site version and Auckland Tourism with an iPhone application!

For further reading, check out these related blog posts and articles:

Destination Marketing & Mobile Travel on Tnooz by Stephen Joyce

The impact of the iPhone on Travel on eTourism Blogoscope by Prof. Christian Maurer

Mobile Marketing & Distribution in Hospitality by Lawrence from Cabbage Tree Creative

iPhone and Travel on Phocus Wright by Joe Buhler

Most small business owners are happy having a website up and running and beyond that don’t put much thought into how people they want to target can find it….and once they find it does it effectively convert them to customers?

Here are a few basic guidelines on what you should focus on for your online marketing strategy (yes you should have one!):

Website Design & Content

• It should reflect your business image and brand, designed with a layout and content to appeal to your target market
• Make sure it is designed to EASILY find the key information needed to make a decision to buy from you
• AND make it easy for them to BUY your products or services (preferably instantly online)
• Use persuasive language talking direct to your customers, make them part of the story so they feel involved
• Use professional images, videos and photos to also communicate what you offer
• Build a website with a content management system (CMS) included so you have control over keeping it updated
• Give your website visitors the opportunity to connect and interact with you online using tools like a blog (with a comment function), subscription to your communications, connecting to your social media pages or a members only area.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

• Most websites really don’t do this well. One of the first things to do during development of a website is to establish WHO the website is targeting and what the keyword/phrase search terms they would use to find you in search engines
• Use these keyword phrases in your page URL’s, meta tags, page titles and content.
• Better results will come with using specific phrases e.g “Paihia luxury self contained accommodation” rather than broad generic terms like “New Zealand accommodation”.
• Each page on your website should have different meta tags and SEO content relevant to the contents of the page
• Don’t expect your web designer to manage all of this for you, it’s up to you to be proactive and thorough with the details of SEO

Online Marketing

• The objective on any online marketing activity should be to attract relevant and well targeted visitors to your website
• Any traffic is not necessarily effective traffic, so ensure you promote your website on relevant websites that attract your market with a link direct to you. The higher profile the website is that links to you the more benefit it will be to your website ranking
• Pay per click advertising like Google Adwords or Facebook ads can really help to boost your website traffic quickly, ensure you use specific and relevant keyword phrases to trigger the ads – if they are too broad the cost per click will be expensive to compete for the bids and the traffic you attract may not be relevant
• Build reciprocal links with complimentary businesses to feed traffic to each other. E.g. if you are an accommodation business you may have links on your website to tourist activities, local restaurants and transport. In return ask for a link to your website and ideally use your keywords in the link e.g instead of ABC Motel as the link name, request it is Kerikeri Budget Motel Accommodation

Don’t Ignore “User content” & Social Networking

• Online marketing should now include strategies to attract content from your customers online, whether it be on your own website or on your social media pages like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and so on
• “Word of mouth” marketing is powerful and now easy to generate online using these tools
• Social media is also an effective way to build a profile online for your area of expertise and to maintain and form new relationships
• Make it easy for your website visitors to share the information you have on your web pages or blog by providing “sharing tools” such as Sharethis.com or Addthis.com

There is a whole lot more detail involved with each of these areas above however if you have a plan that includes these things then you are on the right path to having an effective and well ranked website with a strong online profile. And finally….it’s an ever evolving process so never stop planning and implementing online marketing strategies.