Tourism Marketing with Covid-19

Well it sure has been an interesting journey – Covid 19 has challenged us all to find new ways to generate revenue, and maximise our much smaller marketing budgets. So what have we learned?

Here are my top 10 tips for marketing a tourism business during Covid-19, an unprecedented global pandemic to which NZ has responded with the toughest of local lockdowns.

1. Trim, but don’t turn off your advertising. If you’re going through a period where you’re receiving cancellations, you particularly want to dial down your brand advertising – let them find you via your organic listing, not your paid one. PPC advertising should mean that if you’re not getting clicks that will lead to bookings then you won’t be paying, but we all know there are times when customers are just thinking and planning about what they might do in the future but can’t book now. You still want to be found by those customers and ensure you’re in their consideration set for when the time is right. So reduce your spend and accept a lower return on your ad spend for a while if you can.
2. Keep up your social media presence and regular email newsletters, it’s important your customers still feel a sense of connection with you and know that you’re there for them, come what may.
3. Have a clearly stated lockdown cancellation policy and procedures for managing Covid-19 (goes without saying I’m sure). This may soon be extended to include a policy on staff and customer vaccination status.
4. Be consistent and fair in your application of said policies.
5. Continue to ask for reviews and share these on your channels, especially ones that highlight how reasonable you’ve been in dealing with Covid lockdowns.
6. Watch out for government funding opportunities (eg. Tourism Transition Funding, Business Strategy and Mental Health Support) and make sure you apply if you are eligible. That’s what the funding is there for. It’ll take a little time and patience to go through the application process, but you are just as deserving as the next business so make sure you get your share.
7. Look for partnership/package opportunities with other tourism providers, so you can enhance your offering, come up with a great price for the whole deal and leverage the power of both your databases.
8. With international borders closed you’ll be relying on domestic customers who love a deal and will pressure you to reduce your prices. Be careful here, don’t start or follow an industry downward trend, or set expectations you will have to reverse when lockdown lifts. Keep your cool and once lockdown lifts, you’ll be busy again with your loyal customers back in droves at reasonable rates.
9. Content is king – blog posts, web updates, newsletter material, great images and quirky videos – start getting some material in the bank now so that as borders open and life gets busier that you don’t drop the ball on your social media/eDM efforts. Ask past customers for holiday pics you can use, shoot/create some video snips and craft some nice blog posts and web pages while you can, ensuring of course that you hit the important keywords you want to be found for.
10. And perhaps most important of all, take the time to really think about your point of difference, revisit (or create) your marketing plan, talk to customers about what they are looking forward to doing when lockdown lifts and what you can do to help make that happen. In other words, do the important strategic thinking that you struggle to get to when business as usual keeps you fully occupied!

Good luck…and if you need some guidance, get in touch!

Tourism Marketing with Covid-19

Well it sure has been an interesting journey – Covid 19 has challenged us all to find new ways to generate revenue, and maximise our much smaller marketing budgets. So what have we learned?

Here are my top 10 tips for marketing a tourism business during Covid-19, an unprecedented global pandemic to which NZ has responded with the toughest of local lockdowns.

1. Trim, but don’t turn off your advertising. If you’re going through a period where you’re receiving cancellations, you particularly want to dial down your brand advertising – let them find you via your organic listing, not your paid one. PPC advertising should mean that if you’re not getting clicks that will lead to bookings then you won’t be paying, but we all know there are times when customers are just thinking and planning about what they might do in the future but can’t book now. You still want to be found by those customers and ensure you’re in their consideration set for when the time is right. So reduce your spend and accept a lower return on your ad spend for a while if you can.
2. Keep up your social media presence and regular email newsletters, it’s important your customers still feel a sense of connection with you and know that you’re there for them, come what may.
3. Have a clearly stated lockdown cancellation policy and procedures for managing Covid-19 (goes without saying I’m sure). This may soon be extended to include a policy on staff and customer vaccination status.
4. Be consistent and fair in your application of said policies.
5. Continue to ask for reviews and share these on your channels, especially ones that highlight how reasonable you’ve been in dealing with Covid lockdowns.
6. Watch out for government funding opportunities (eg. Tourism Transition Funding, Business Strategy and Mental Health Support) and make sure you apply if you are eligible. That’s what the funding is there for. It’ll take a little time and patience to go through the application process, but you are just as deserving as the next business so make sure you get your share.
7. Look for partnership/package opportunities with other tourism providers, so you can enhance your offering, come up with a great price for the whole deal and leverage the power of both your databases.
8. With international borders closed you’ll be relying on domestic customers who love a deal and will pressure you to reduce your prices. Be careful here, don’t start or follow an industry downward trend, or set expectations you will have to reverse when lockdown lifts. Keep your cool and once lockdown lifts, you’ll be busy again with your loyal customers back in droves at reasonable rates.
9. Content is king – blog posts, web updates, newsletter material, great images and quirky videos – start getting some material in the bank now so that as borders open and life gets busier that you don’t drop the ball on your social media/eDM efforts. Ask past customers for holiday pics you can use, shoot/create some video snips and craft some nice blog posts and web pages while you can, ensuring of course that you hit the important keywords you want to be found for.
10. And perhaps most important of all, take the time to really think about your point of difference, revisit (or create) your marketing plan, talk to customers about what they are looking forward to doing when lockdown lifts and what you can do to help make that happen. In other words, do the important strategic thinking that you struggle to get to when business as usual keeps you fully occupied!

Good luck…and if you need some guidance, get in touch!

If you’ve got a business facebook page, chances are you’ve noticed that your posts are reaching fewer and fewer people.

Facebook have recently confirmed what we’ve long since suspected, that organic reach is declining.

They say this is because more and more content is being created, making it more difficult for your posts to stay at the top of your fans’ news feeds. But they also confirmed that their news feed ranking algorithm is designed to show only the most relevant content to users at the top of their news feed, increasing engagement with these already popular/relevant posts.

They deny, of course, that facebook organic reach is dropping because facebook wants to make more money – but then, they probably would say that wouldn’t they? By far the quickest and most effective way that I have found to ensure that a good percentage of your facebook fans see your business page posts is to boost that post for about $36. This increases your reach significantly, otherwise you’re only like to be viewed by around 10% of your fan base.

Now $36 is a pretty reasonably advertising price, and so long as you’ve got the ability to measure the return you’re getting from that then its not a bad strategy. And, depending on the kind of content you’re able to dream up, if its engaging and relevant and gets people commenting, then this might not always be necessary.

So, in my view, not yet a complete waste of time – but not the free advertising business must-have that it was perhaps thought to be a couple of years ago.

We all know that social media has turned the marketing world on it’s head. Not so long ago I was taking to business owners wondering whether their business needed a website and if they could cancel their Yellow Pages advertising to pay for it. Now, it’s assumed Facebook is a business essential and we’re grappling with the need to manage Twitter, Google+ and Linked In alongside it.

Easy to think that the world has indeed gone mad.

Are marketers just making work for themselves?

Here are some things I have learned helping companies manage their social media strategies…

1. Have a strategy to begin with. As with any other form of marketing work out who your target audience is and what they could gain from engaging with you on social media. What do you hope to achieve – is it new customers, more sales, improved customer retention or constructive customer feedback. Think about what sort of content you can create and share regularly that will help achieve your goals.
2. Be in it for the long haul. A short burst of enthusiasm for a few weeks won’t get you far. Posting once a week for a year is better than every day for a week.
3. Pick your battles. Facebook may not be the best medium for business-to-business operators, Twitter is more likely to ensure your posts are picked up by newspaper and magazine reporters and if SEO is important you might have to be on Google+.
4. Buying Facebook likes (boosting posts and paying for advertising) is a good way to get your likes up to a respectable level to begin with but won’t get you a loyal and enthusiastic following. Be measured in your use of these tools and be sure that you set up your ads correctly to suit your goals – be that post likes, page likes or clicks to your website.  Remember that unless someone has liked your page, not just your post, they won’t see your future posts.
5. Managing social media is a bit like caring for a young baby, just when you’ve settled into a nice routine everything changes! Join social media groups on Linked In, sign up for social media newsletters. Yes you’ll get a deluge of email you’ll scan then delete, but keeping a weather eye on social media developments is important.
6. Without wanting to keep going with the baby analogy for too long, be careful that you’re not posting crap – with each post go back to your strategy, who is your target audience and how does this help them? Keep your content original, check for spelling mistakes, and use eye catching photos.
7. Make it easy for your customers to find you. Share your social media links on your website, in your e-Newsletters, and on your advertising. An integrated approach works best.
8. Measure your results – google analytics can tell you how many clicks to your website (and e-commerce transactions) have come from your social media pages. But like I said before, be in it for the long haul – go back to your original goals and be realistic in your expectations.

Good luck!

Fuse Creative is a brand and advertising agency that I have trusted to assist many of my clients with the creation of brand identities that reflect their key points of difference and brand personality. Working from our brief they developed the new name and brand identity for Indesco and we partnered on the development of the Indesco website.

Fuse Creative Limited

4 Nikau Street, Eden Terrace, Auckland 1150, New Zealand

T:  64 9 379 9800

www.fusecreative.co.nz

This website was developed using WordPress and a theme called Freelancer by Themefuse. If you can find a theme that closely matches the look you are trying to achieve and has all the functionality you want built in, it can save you many hours of website coding and make for a very cost effective website.

But not all themes are created equal, and there are those out there that will cause you nothing but frustration when you try to customize them. I am delighted to say that this one has worked really well for me.