Social Media and all it’s benefits for businesses is now at the forefront of marketing tools with a considerable amount of engagement and interaction being achieved within these tools.

For me, a key strategy should be about using these social media tools to drive traffic to your website – afterall this is where you have the best chance of converting interaction into bookings or sales.

A blog hosted on your business website is the perfect hub for social media content as each blog post can be shared easily on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc and significantly it also benefits the content of your website and therefore ranking within search engines.

The great thing is that these social media tools all work in well together to benefit your business – if you have built up a great following on Facebook for example than posting links of your blog articles on Facebook will no doubt effectively drive traffic to your website provided your content is interesting and meaningful to your followers.

So if you were to think of social media tools as a gathering of friends for social chit chat, then your website/blog should be considered your place – i.e. party central.

One more thing…if you plan on inviting friends to your place for a party – don’t bore them by talking all about yourself, make it fun, relevant and interesting so they will tell their friends how great you are…

Unfortunately as well all know, crisis situations and emergency events do happen – we tend to think it won’t happen to us, but I have recently gone through an experience while at work that I doubt anyone can be 100% prepared for – certainly in my case it was a shocking situation that resulted in the loss of life of a fellow employee with intense media interest from TV, radio and print.

I hope this never happens to you or your business…but if it does you need to have a plan on how to deal with the media interest. As a small business it wasn’t something we had discussed and didn’t have a plan for but fortunately a media expert, who happened to be a regular customer of our business, was in touch with us as soon as he heard the news to see if his help would be needed – and by god yes it was needed, very much appreciated and ultimately the best thing we could have done on the day.

Media are of course very apologetic about contacting you during a tragic situation but they are certainly like a dog with a bone – they don’t tend to give up easily until they get what the need from you, and because news reporting is a very competitive environment if they don’t get the information from you then they will look to other sources that you may or may not be happy with and may or may not be accurate…so…I learnt some very valuable lessons on the few days that followed this event which I want to share.

Have a media/PR consultant with you as soon as possible

Here are some reasons why:

• Unlike you, they will be unemotional and offer clear strategic thinking
• They will have valuable experience of dealing with media and knowledge of individual media personalities
• They can advise on what you should or shouldn’t say and who is best to deal with
• They can prepare media statements and control media liaison
• They can filter the media and act as the first point of contact to reduce what the key company spokesperson has to manage

Media will publish the news whether you like it or not so  “No comment” won’t necessarily cut it

It was certainly our first instinct not to comment to media as the event unfolded but it became apparent pretty quickly that wasn’t necessarily a good strategy…we certainly had nothing to hide and wanted to ensure inaccurate or irrelevant information wasn’t published.  So it’s better to be as open as possible with media offering prepared media statements so they publish information that is accurate and from you as the source. This can make a significant difference on how the event impacts your business reputation in the long run.

Social Media Tools Are a Vital Communication Tool

Communicating via your social media tools such as your business Blog, Facebook and Twitter pages will be a key part of your strategy during this time as an effective and instant method to get media statements and information out there easily. We also found it a great way for others to communicate with us in an unobtrusive way as a form of support.

Who to Contact?

Overall, you may not need to employ a regular media/PR consultant for your business but at least have knowledge of who you might contact if you need to and get in touch to form that relationship. From experience, I can confidently recommend Peter Heath from Text Write as an expert is Crisis Management – Many Thanks Peter for your valuable support of Salt Air.

You may have noticed sometime in the past 12 months that for “local searches” your website that used to appear on page 1 of google results has slipped back to page 2 (or gone from page 2 to page 3 etc). This is because Google now lists “Google Places” results first on page 1, with organic results following that -  often starting on page 2. “Google Places” is the google map based listings of businesses.

When I say “local searches” I mean searches that include a town or city name in the search for a business type e.g “Taupo Motels”. The impact of this has both positive and negative effects on small businesses. For businesses that fit the location and business type criteria it may mean you now consistently appear on page 1 of the results now. For others that had put a lot of effort into having a well optimised website with strong online marketing it may mean you have slipped down the list onto a lower ranked page.

So if this is now the case, what can you do now to influence your rankings? Here are some tips to get the most out of “local searches” and Google Places:

• Make sure you have a Google Places business listing AND you have claimed it as the business owner so you can edit the content.
• Once you have access to edit your google places listing, make sure you complete all aspects of the content – including an accurate location on the map and choose all 5 category types (e.g for a motel the categories may be: motel, accommodation, motor inn, family accommodation, conference venue). The categories you enter will determine what results your business will appear in so it’s important to make the most of these and pick them wisely. You should have a 100% completed listing, so add your own business photos and YouTube videos too.
• Google Places pulls in content from other websites too – like business content from finda.co.nz or reviews from Tripadvisor, even pricing and booking links from accommodation booking websites. So having a comprehensive online marketing strategy will pay off here too.
• Use the additional free tools on Google Places like the Offer Coupons to help your listing stand out more and provide a mechanism for deals.

You’re probably also wondering, why bother with SEO on my own website now if Google Places results come up first anyway? Well, don’t give up on SEO! It’s still vitally important to rank as highly as possible in organic results and local searches aren’t the only way people will find your website through google (not to mention Google isn’t the only search engine).

For those new to Google Places, this video below is a useful reference for the key areas to cover in the content.

If there’s one thing in a marketing sense that has risen out of the recession it’s the rapid development of websites that promote heavily discounted deals for just one day of sales. These one day deal sites are simple and pitched to businesses as being effective in getting large volumes of sales in a short period.

New sites of this nature seem to be popping up on a regular basis with dozens that are New Zealand based. Some of the big online media companies feature strongly in the line up including APN Media’s GrabOne and Trade Me’s Treat Me. There are so many that there are now websites that aggregate all of the one day deals as a quick way to see them all.

It’s unlikely all of them will survive successfully and you have to wonder how willing businesses will be to continue to discount by such large degrees (typically 49-50%) as the economy improves. It’s likely the deals will get less attractive over time and therefore lose their high traffic volumes or perhaps they will just evolve with less focus on heavy discounting.

There’s no doubt they offer an attractive short term marketing tactic for businesses, but are they really a good strategy to undertake?
Let’s analyze the pro’s and con’s from a business perspective…

Pro’s

• Great exposure to a mass audience
• Little or no upfront cost (typically they take a cut of sales made off their site)
• Can create sales and demand that the business otherwise wouldn’t get
• Provides instant cash flow
• If a service provider delivering the service may well be spread out over a long time so low stress on meeting demand

Con’s

• Could deter sales at the normal price and so may cause slower sales after the deal is no longer available
• To achieve big volumes of sales you generally need to offer a considerable discount which will drop yields and profitability
• Selling at discounted prices doesn’t guarantee ongoing business
• Demand may well be significant and hard to meet if you are a small business

Each business thinking of actively offering these deals needs to consider the pro’s and the con’s – does discounting help or hinder your brand image? Do you really want to be flat out busy at very low margins? How will this affect your regular loyal customer relationships? Can you afford such large discounting?

I’d suggest you try being creative with your offers rather than just straight discounting and include terms and conditions that suit you so you don’t find your business losing out in the long run.

These websites will suit some types of businesses more than others – before you go into it make sure you can deliver good service on what you offer.

Have you tried this for your business already? Got any good tips or stories of success/failure to share? Feel free to leave a comment.

[business:Adept Marketing]

I don’t usually go out of my way to blog about particular brands or businesses, but I like using Mailchimp as an effective email marketing tool so much that I think it’s worth sharing with business owners or marketing specialists.

The main reason being that is really is EASY to use. Mailchimp have gone out to their way to design an interface and online tools that make it simple to set up and manage your own email marketing campaigns – from the design right through to the reporting of the campaign statistics. You don’t have to be a designer or marketing whizz to use this tool.

And to top it all off for most small business owners use of this tool will be completely FREE. Cost only kicks in as your email marketing needs and database gets bigger – for example it will only start costing you once have 2,000 email subscribers on your list and you wish to send emails to more than 12,000 email addresses per month. Even then it’s reasonable cost and the pricing is flexible to suit too – you can opt for set monthly fees or pay as you go credits.

Here are some of the things I especially like about Mailchimp:

• It’s very easy to upload email addresses to Mailchimp – you can simply copy and paste a list from excel for example or upload a spreadsheet or file
• There are many design template options and it’s fairly easy to customise any design to include your own colours, logo and images
• Every task is easy to go through and complete with clear step by step processes and it’s easy to go back and make any changes
• Once you have set up a design template and a campaign you can easily replicate these for future campaigns making it quick to send our new emails to your database
• Once an email has been sent out to your database you can view and track detailed results and statistics straight away. This information is so useful to understand how successful your email marketing efforts are and what works better (or worse)
• They offer online training and webinars for beginners to get you started
• Mailchimp offers an iPhone app for tracking your email campaigns from your phone
• There are some nice social media integration tools to help make it easy for your email marketing efforts to be shared online

Overall the functionality offered by Mailchimp is matched by any other high profile email marketing tools available but I think this one is particularly useful for the small businesses who can’t afford to pay professional designers or agencies to manage their email marketing for them but still gives them a professional and cost effective way to do it themselves.

So give it a go yourself, it’s so easy a monkey could use it!

[business:Adept Marketing]

For most tourism businesses now is the time of year to review your high season performance and plan ahead for the next one. This includes analysing how well your marketing and sales efforts are working to get bookings. Here are some areas you can review to help with your marketing planning.

Sales Results

• Go through your sales figures and do some analysis and graphs for different measures – e.g. Sources of bookings (direct, inbound agents, visitor booking offices, online websites, campaigns and advertising etc), Direct booking types (e.g phone, email, website, walk-in), Product Type sales (you may offer different tours, room types etc).
• Compare all of these sales results against last year’s figures too so you know where the changes have been.
• It may be that your current booking system doesn’t allow you to categorise your bookings in these ways – if not, is there a better alternative out there?
• Once you have analysed all of the sales measures that are important to your business you are then armed with great information to make better decisions about your what areas of your marketing and sales efforts need attention.

Your Website and Online Marketing

• This is now undoubtedly a key area for tourism businesses to get right. Have you invested the necessary time and money into delivering a quality website and comprehensive online marketing strategy including social media and networking?
• Does your website reflect the quality of your business and the experience you offer to travellers?
• Is it easy to book with you online?
• Are your number of direct bookings via your website increasing?
• What feedback do you get on your website?
• Do you use tools like google analytics to measure the performance of your website in detail so you know it’s performance rather than just gut feel? For example, knowing how many visits you get from external websites you’ve paid to list on is vital information when it comes to the decision on whether to renew for another year.

Customer Feedback

• Comments and feedback from your customers is always a vital way to improve your product and services, provided you seek out the information.
• Don’t be afraid to ask them, provide customer feedback forms or encourage your customers to place online reviews so you know what is working well and what isn’t.

Don’t just blame poor sales on the recession – in realty there are always areas you can control and plan for in marketing and sales to improve your performance.

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It’s free!

 

Webcams have become a great way to promote destinations throughout New Zealand and so are serving as an invaluable tool for travellers, tourism operators and RTO’s. Not only do they give an accurate and up to date views of the location, they also serve to provide valuable scenes of the weather as it happens – an important ingredient for travellers and tourism operators.

Do you have an iconic or simply stunning view from your business or property? It’s worth considering whether a webcam at your location, could be part of your marketing mix that can drive traffic to your website. Tourism operators of any type and RTO’s can showcase their views and location as an information tool to visitors helping to make the vital booking decision.

There are a few Northland webcams from SnapitHD (used on the Takeabreak.co.nz website) that as a tourism business Salt Air uses daily to check weather conditions on where we are flying to, this has really helped our business in terms of operational decision making. The time lapse images enhance the applications even further.

Other than that webcams can simply be stunning to look at – the Mt Cook webcam has to be one of the most stunning examples (when the weather’s good of course…)

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It’s free!

 

The latest campaign activity from Tourism New Zealand launched this month in Australia has evolved with a noticeable shift in focus to “100% Pure You” that offers viewers a more direct link to things they can experience while visiting New Zealand with a strategy to connect at the emotional level.

With 3 initial different TV commercials it’s clear that the brand is being moved away from the generic to the specific which Tourism New Zealand is hoping will spark action with travellers to increase tourism numbers.

I think this is a good move to both ride off the power of the 100% Pure brand but also offer a range of activities that people love about New Zealand.

What do you think?

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It’s free!

 

There are times, despite best intentions, where any tourism business has to handle a dispute with a customer. It may be something to do with things like the products or services provided, the pricing, or employee behaviour. Due to the world economy travellers seem to be particularly pedantic over price and value for money.

Regardless of the cause of dissatisfaction there are a few things you can learn from these situations to help avoid them again in the future:

• Make sure communication to your customers is clear at all points of contact – don’t hide any details or extra charges
• Ensure employee training is thorough and effective so they are delivering the expected information, standard of service delivery desired and are competent to do so. You can’t expect employees to know information you haven’t shared with them or trained them to understand all processes and procedures. Have you got an effective operations or procedures manual to refer to?
• During delivery of the product or service continue to question the customer to ensure they are happy with how things are proceeding – don’t just assume all is well if they say nothing.
• Once the dispute is raised, listen, then handle it effectively and positively – regardless of who is at fault try to resolve it equitably and don’t play the blame game, take responsibility for your business at all levels. It always works well to tell the customer involved you understand their concerns and how you plan to resolve it rather than asking them what they want which could be unrealistic.
• Identify the point where things went wrong and put in place remedies to ensure it won’t happen again or at least lesson it’s likelihood
• Some people are just difficult to deal with so don’t take it personally, be the bigger person – learn from it and move on!

No matter how experienced or developed your business is things can come unstuck from time to time, so don’t worry it happens to the best of us and chalk it up to a fact of life of being in business.

Have you got some good examples of customer disputes or complaints and how you dealt with it? Share it here with us

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It’s free!

 

Promoting a new blank Facebook Page doesn’t really get people interested to “Like” your page – so before you start marketing it to your customers and friends add a nice variety of content to get it off to a good start.

10 Ideas for content:

• Add Photo Albums – try not to put a lot of photos in just 1 album, create different topics to divide them up so it’s easier for people to view what they are interested in
• Link to some of your latest online traveller reviews or media articles and comment about them
• List some recent accomplishments or news e.g. awards, star rating, sustainability efforts, product development etc
• Set up automated feeds with your other social media such as your Twitter account and Blog articles to create regular content
• Offer a special package and provide a link to book it on your website
• Create a Competition that will attract followers and encourage people to share your Facebook page with others
• Add links to websites for some upcoming events or activities in your area – ideally you would write a blog article about it on your website so the traffic goes to your own site
• Add a link to any relevant YouTube or online videos about your business or location – a link to a video on Facebook will embed the video on your wall so it can be easily viewed
• Ask Your recent customers to post their own photos and comments on your wall about their experience with your business
• Get your whole team involved in adding regular content to your Page – you can add as many “admin” people as you like for the page so make it easy and share the load

How to Get Followers for a New Facebook Page:

• Start connecting with others on Facebook and then use the Facebook “Suggest to Friends” function for your page – ask them to suggest it to their friends too
• Promote it prominently on your website and use the Facebook “social media plugins” to show current activity on your Facebook page and encourage Facebook users to follow you.
• Email your customer database telling them about your new page with a link so they can follow it
• Promote it from Twitter and any other social media sites you belong to
• Once you have 25 followers for a page go to http://www.facebook.com/username/ to set a user friendly URL for your page e.g. http://www.facebook.com/yourbusinessname – this makes it easier and more memorable to promote verbally and in print.
• Make it accessible to your customers while they are with you so they can follow it and add content during their experience.

Have you got any other suggestions that has worked for your Business page on Facebook?