ADEPT Marketing

Foursquare, the latest new and free location-based social media tool based on mobile device use that is taking off.

What is it?

Using a mobile device with GPS, it’s a way to explore a city and find people, places and things to do.  The users “check-in” to their current locations and can earn rewards in doing so.   
It’s got much more of a “game” approach to it than other social media tools where users can “unlock badges and discover new things” for rewards, but the interesting bit is that these things are in the real world so businesses can use it to influence behaviour and actions, turning Foursquare users into paying customers.

Is It Useful for Tourism Businesses and Destination Marketing?

You bet ya it is, well eventually anyway – once more people start to understand it, and provided it’s content continues to grow throughout New Zealand then it could become quite a powerful tool for travellers to decide what do to and where to go while visiting, plus you can incentivise your regular customers.

Here is a link to find out how businesses can use Foursquare to reward their customers with special offers and incentives.  You can either “claim your venue” as the business owner if someone has already added your business on Foursquare, or you can add your venue yourself.  Once you have claimed it you can monitor the stats, add special offers and award prizes etc.

This article “VisitPA uses Foursquare to it’s Full Potential” on the Project Wander blog is perhaps the first example of a Destination Marketing Organisation getting onboard with Foursquare to market it.

The limiting factor right now in New Zealand is the quality and lack of mobile internet access nationwide so it’s use is mainly in the cities….that may take some time to fix, but if your coverage is good then give it a go for your tourism business or organisation.  Would be great to hear about any businesses using it already.

There are plenty of choices out there in the market for accommodation operators in selecting an online booking system that suits them.  You can view a list of New Zealand booking systems available on this article “Online Booking Strategy for Tourism Operators“.  One notable change since that article was published is the merge of Bookit with Vianet – now both owned by Trade Me Travel with plans to phase out the Vianet system for bookings later this year.

The decision on which online booking system you choose will come down to a few key areas that are relevant to your business:

Cost model

Is it commission based per booking or a set monthly fee?  The certainty of a set monthly fee will suit some and not others.  Those will lower volume bookings are likely to be better off using a supplier with a straight commission model.

Flexibility with Inventory Management

Can you opt to offer real time or on request bookings?  Can you mix it up between the 2 options?  There are definite key benefits to having control over your availability type for different time periods – particularly for smaller suppliers who don’t have the luxury of large room inventories to always offer instant bookings.

Distribution opportunities

Does the system offer a retail distribution channel or network to increase your booking opportunities?  Many of the key systems either have set up their own retail website, work with key retail websites or have been purchased by a large retailer.

Functionality

Does it come with all the bells and whistles of a full reservations system or simply accept online bookings?  Can you choose what you use in the system to suit your business?  Pick a system that will work with your needs.

Channel Management

Does it offer an automated link to updating key retail travel websites or at least link to a channel manager that does?  This ability opens up the opportunity for you to gain broad exposure and easily manage your pricing and availability with key online travel agents.

Easy to use

For both yourself and your customers.  It’s an important consideration as to how your customers experience the booking process on your own website.  It should be simple, quick and easy to understand (likewise for you!).

How Do New Zealand Online Booking Systems Score?

To me, a great system would offer you options in all of these areas and give you the choices to make it work for your business without dictating how you use it.  Does any of the New Zealand systems offer all of this right now?  Not really, there is no perfect system yet that will suit every type of tourism business.

Don’t get me wrong – many of the systems work fine and offer comprehensive solutions, but I think all of them fail in one respect or another so it’s a matter of picking the one that is the best fit for your business based on some of the criteria discussed above.

Once you’ve been in business for a while and created a successful tourism venture, you may be wondering what’s next?  It’s very easy to sit back and keep doing the same old thing, however new and exciting tourism products can help to not only boost your business profile but also ensure long term success.  You will also likely find it much easier to develop something new building off your current successes and knowledge than when you started off the first time.

Joint Ventures

A great way to invent something new is to think about possible partners you could develop a joint venture product with.  Your expertise may be in one area but through your business you have likely networked with other tourism businesses that have different and complimentary skills.  Building an alliance with another tourism operator/s can be an effective approach to develop something new and innovative for continual business development where you can share the benefits and the risks.  Plus with joint marketing funds and knowledge it’s likely you can achieve a lot more and bring it to market faster.

I think this sort of approach can work particularly well in the activities and attractions area of tourism.  For example, some activities may benefit from having a historical or Maori cultural component added to it, a food and beverage component, a marine or water sport, or expertise on nature and eco tourism.  The type of “mix and match” options available is really up to your imagination, your local contacts, and knowledge of what your market likes.

A good example of a new tourism joint venture launched recently in the Bay of Islands is “Dining under the Stars” (see the media release here).  This product has been led by Adventure Puketi (a forest walks tourism operator), who have joined with a local restaurant “Food at Wharepuke” to offer a unique guided kauri forest walk and dining activity  in the Puketi Forest.  The experience includes a night walk in the forest (something they already offered) culminating in an exotic dinner service in a forest clearing under the stars with Maori cultural performers and a guide talking about the stars in the New Zealand night sky.  The target market is aimed at conference groups, tour groups, and the cruise market.

This type of creativity and willingness to work with partners is what small to medium New Zealand tourism businesses can use to revive or expand their tourism products plus create memorable and unique experiences for our visitors.

New Zealand is well positioned in the world of Adventure Tourism – we are the innovators and leaders of bungy, and have the perfect setting and natural resources to offer a comprehensive range of tourist activities that are land, water and air based.

But every so often we are reminded of it’s risks when a tourist in New Zealand suffers serious injuries or even death by undertaking one of these experiences.  Such was the case on Friday in Hanmer Springs where an Australian tourist slipped out of a bungy harness.

Is adventure tourism inherently risky and something tourists should agree to at their own peril?  Yes, BUT – there should be safety regulations and regular approval/review processes of commercial adventure tourism operations that aim to eliminate or reduce the risks, that are balanced with the need to attract and effectively cater for thrill seekers.  As a backpacker in South America I undertook several adventure tourism activities and recall that asking about safety precautions was not high on my list of key concerns (put that down to youth, being trusting and language barriers), the point being that adventure tourism operators need to be the ones who are concerned and do take the right precautions, training, checking of equipment and conditions etc.

Scarily, over 5 years 29 people have died (and at least 540 seriously injured) in New Zealand adventure tourism activities.  I have no doubt that each time this happens the overall New Zealand tourism reputation takes a hit – particularly when it’s occurred under the management and care of a marketed tourism business and not the result of irresponsible behaviour on the part of the tourist.  Sure accidents happen when people do things in the outdoors – but severe injury and death are not acceptable outcomes during the course of a paid or chaperoned tourism activity if it was avoidable.

The Department of Labour is currently conducting a detailed gap analysis of risk management and safety provisions in the adventure and outdoor commercial sectors in New Zealand, due to the Minister of Labour by 31 May.  We will look forward to seeing the outcomes that will hopefully outline a way forward to prevent these statistics from growing.

In the meantime, for the sake our visitors, we hope adventure tourism businesses are reminded that safety is priority at all times and it would be interesting to hear their opinions as to the best way forward to improve safety measures across the industry and for reputation management.

The countdown is now on, less that 500 days until the Rugby World Cup is on in New Zealand.

Our Regional Tourism Organisations (RTO’s) seem to be getting into gear with workshops, websites and planning for their regions.

With ticket packs now available to apply for, individual tourism operators should be starting their planning on how to benefit from the expected influx of visitors to New Zealand throughout Sep/Oct 2011 (if you are not already a supplier for an Official Travel Agent).

Key Areas to consider now:

• The starting point has to be understanding the legal aspects of what you can and can’t promote in regard to the RWC brand and events.  For full details go the this link to download a useful guide in relation the RWC2011 Major Events Management Act Guidelines.
• Get in touch with your RTO to find out about events and marketing opportunities relevant to your region that your business may benefit from or be involved with.  Some RTO’s have held workshops (Auckland for example) and Northland have developed a website just for the RWC so this is a good resource for businesses to understand the opportunities available.
• Consider your own pricing levels and packaging opportunities for the RWC period.  We’ve been seeing a lot in the media about over the top hotel pricing being applied, so be realistic about what you can charge based on your location to any of the key matches, team training areas and so on.  Generally it’s recommended you apply your high season pricing during this period and for accommodation minimum stay requirements may help to achieve high occupancy rates.  Operators located in close proximity to major games should achieve pricing that the market is prepared to pay for such a high profile event – which is likely to be well beyond high season prices.

Any other tips out there for tourism operators to maximise the opportunity?

RTO’s and local government will now be considering the impacts of visitors arriving in large numbers and planning towards ensuring a positive impression and everything runs smoothly – a number of events and festivals are being created to entertain and encourage visitors to stay longer and spend more, so bring it on!

Search engines love regular fresh content and links to a website, the more you have of both the better your website will rank in search results and your website visitors will have more reason to visit your website regularly to see what’s new.  So a blog function on your website is a great solution to achieve this.

If you need more convincing then see this article on Hubspot called “SEO is Evolving Fast – Is Your Website?” – it discusses Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and includes how a blog can now help a small business website to achieve better rankings than a larger/less flexible competitor website.  Another great article on this topic is “6 Reasons Every Small Business Should be Blogging…Are You Missing the Boat?”

For tourism operators or organisations a blog is a great way to promote any news, media releases, tips for travellers coming to your area, events and activities – anything that is relevant to your business, specialist knowledge and tourism in your area.  It doesn’t have to be about opinionated articles and topical issues.  Once you get the hang of it adding new articles is easy and fun.

Another great thing about blog articles and RSS Feeds (all blogs have an automated RSS feed) are that they are very easy to share online adding significant opportunity for you to increase the number of inbound links to your website, which identifies it as a popular or important site by search engines.  You can also list your blog URL with a large number of online blog directories, see this list for starters.

When setting up a blog, to ensure you get the best benefits for search engine rankings, make sure the blog software allows the following:

• The blog can be “self hosted” with your website domain rather than a separate domain e.g. the blog URL is: www.ABCTours.co.nz/blog.  This takes a bit more effort to set up than just using a free blog hosted site and you will need your web designer to get it set up for you – but it’s worth it as all the website traffic to your blog will be credited to your main website ranking which is ultimately where you want the traffic and recognition to be achieved.
• Each blog post title can be set as part of the URL name so that keywords are included, for example this article URL is:

http://www.tourismindustryblog.co.nz/2010/04/why-a-blog-can-improve-your-website-ranking

• Each blog post can have meta tags applied (see this article “Using Meta Tags to Get Your Website Ranking Higher in Google“)
• It has a blog plugin to easily share your content online via social media websites or email.
• You can easily set up a blog email subscriber function to build an email database and send out articles as they are published.

If you were to ask my opinion on what blog software to use to achieve all of this (and more) then I would always say WordPress.org (self hosted) wins hands down, but what you use may depend on what website content management system you have, so talk to your web designer.

Got any examples of good tourism websites with blogs? Here’s a couple I’ve spotted recently: Sky Dive Wanaka, Dive! Tutukaka

It’s been around for a while now (over 10 years) and quite possibly one of the most successful and unique tourism brands in the world that has stood the test of time. But is it time for something new? Would anything new just be a hard act to follow? Or a welcome evolution of progress and the growth of our industry?
We certainly wouldn’t want something safe and generic like the new Australian “There’s nothing like…” campaign. Yet 100% Pure is more than a campaign, it is a true brand that has earned it’s significance and can be interpreted on so many levels – it’s not just about being pure and green, it’s about promoting pure New Zealand experiences.

Changing a brand that works so well is a big decision, a gutsy move and something that perhaps should not be done just because “it’s time” but because it’s no longer relevant or effective. Tourism New Zealand certainly haven’t indicated a change is coming but it’s no doubt something for the new CEO Kevin Bowler to consider with his team.

Overall I think it’s a been and still is an effective overall umbrella brand for New Zealand and we should continue to create campaigns, like the “Youngest Country” and other more tactical campaign initiatives under that umbrella that can be differentiated to continue to inspire and attract our various target markets.

I’d be interested to hear the thoughts of others in our industry with your opinion is as to whether we should still be “100% Pure New Zealand”?

In the US Facebook recently overtook Google for popularity based on weekly traffic (for a week in March) accounting for 7.07% of US Website Traffic for that week – this is an incredible achievement given Google’s dominance on so many levels. With over 400 million registered users for Facebook worldwide it has become a social media website that is difficult to ignore and as a business you should be considering using it as a way to communicate and share content with your target market.

Not only that, the applications and tools available on Facebook pages are a great fit for tourism businesses that can sell your features based on interactive and user content such as photos, videos and reviews. The personality that you can show about your brand and your people can come through strongly and add to your online brand profile.

Facebook Pages

• This is the key way for a brand or business to represent themselves on Facebook, and can generally be set up in less than 30 minutes, create a page here. Note: All Facebook Pages have to be set up by someone with a personal profile.
• It can be viewed without being a Facebook user so you can have a link directly to your page from your website but only Facebook users can follow your page as “fans”
• There are a multitude of free applications that you can add to your Facebook page that can enhance it’s functions, see this article on Mashable.com “5 Essential Apps for Your Business’s Facebook Fan Page“
• Your updates will appear on the personal walls of your fans to draw their attention to the activity on your page
• You can send your fans messages, so it’s essentially another form of database marketing and incredibly powerful because all fans voluntarily opt in to receive your content
• While it all sounds easy, creating and maintaining your content plus attracting user content from your fans requires a time investment and a strategy to keep it growing effectively combining it with your other marketing media
• Always keep in mind that the is aim to use tools like Facebook to drive traffic to your website and increase your marketing database of targeted customers

Establish Your Fan Base

Building your Fan base is always the first challenge for a new Facebook page, so here are some ideas to help get it going:

• Create some interesting content on your Page first so that when you start promoting it will attract fans
• Promote your Page with in a prominent place on your website
• If you have a marketing database then use email marketing to promote your Facebook page, similarly if you already have a following on other social media sites like Twitter then you can promote your page to them
• Use the Facebook Ads to promote your page – costs are based on pay per click and you can select the demographics and location of people you want to target
• Develop some fun and interactive viral marketing initiatives that can be featured on your page, competitions and incentives are a great way to attract visits

Popular Tourism Facebook Pages

If you have some doubts over the benefits of building a busy Facebook Fan Page have a look at the number of fans generated on some the following popular tourism pages – marketing gold!

Australia - 384,220 Fans

100% Pure New Zealand – 118,800 Fans

Air New Zealand – 18,844 fans

WellingtonNZ – 13,846 fans

Have you got any more examples of popular tourism Facebook pages or useful apps to use on your page? What has worked for you to build your fan base?

Become a Fan of the Tourism Industry Blog Facebook Page

Email marketing can be an extremely cost effective way to communicate with your regular customers and drive traffic to your website and social media pages. Despite this I’ve noticed this is an underused marketing tool for tourism businesses, for some this is because they don’t have a strong repeat business base – but for those that do then email marketing should be a key part of your marketing communications strategy.

What are the key steps to Get Started?

• Develop a database. You may have a lot of email addresses of regular customers in your email software so add these into an excel spreadsheet for starters (so you can import them into email marketing software). It’s OK legally to send marketing emails to customers who you already have a relationship, but it might be a good idea to email them first to invite them to subscribe.
• Have an email subscription option on your website. Make it easy for your regular customers to opt in to receiving your emails. Ideally this function is linked to your email marketing software so they are automatically added to your database. “Opt in” email marketing is the most effective in terms of open rates and successful campaigns.
• Use professional email marketing software. You do not need to purchase or download this software, there are plenty of options that are internet based. Pricing will depend on how big your database is and how often you send out emails, generally it’s quite cost effective and you will find an option to suit your budget. There are also free systems like Mailchimp for smaller databases. Email marketing software provide design templates that you can customise with your own colours and logo, it’s also worth considering have a professionally designed email template that matches your website as a one off cost. The software will also track the open rate and click throughs from your campaign so you can measure it’s success. It will also manage unsubscribes and bounced emails.
• Establish a regular email marketing schedule. Too often can be annoying so don’t overdo it, once every 1 or 2 months is a good start or just when you have something newsworthy.
• Keep the content relevant and interesting. Special offers, events, new products and competitions are popular reasons to send out an email, be careful not to make the email too long. Ideally you will provide links to your website for further details and to make a booking.

Email Marketing Tip: The best time to send out an marketing email is Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon

Got any other tips you want to share or email marketing software you prefer? Let us know.

Click on the image to enlarge

Interesting to see an article on the Mashable website yesterday about Google Testing Hotel Prices in Google Maps. This news, which was announced fairly casually on Monday on the Google Maps blog siting it as an “experiment”, will no doubt spark up interest among the Online Travel Agents (OTA’s) as a new way to advertise pricing and get click through traffic to their website.

For travellers it’s means they can use google maps to find accommodation with the ability to search on dates of travel to get real time pricing and then click through to the provider website to book.

From Google’s perspective it’s probably seen as an evolution of the maps business listings and another way to develop advertising revenues rather than a desire to become part of the online travel market, however it will no doubt have an impact on OTA’s and introduce a fairly competitive necessity to be included as an advertiser on the google maps.

Of interest to accommodation providers will be whether they too get the opportunity to be one of the listed advertisers to attract direct bookings or whether the pricing has to come through an automated feed from participating OTA’s or booking systems – if it’s a bidding model like Google Adwords then it’s likely the large global OTA’s will dominate this opportunity.

Potentially the effects of this will be lesser felt in New Zealand as many accommodation suppliers do not participate on the global OTA’s, leaving the opportunity open perhaps for more of the local accommodation booking websites and accommodation providers themselves.

So time will tell on how this will all work and impact on the market, we will keep an eye on progress of the likely roll out of this new feature. In the meantime, if I were an accommodation provider I’d make sure I’m listed on a selection of OTA’s.