How can you ensure your  business remains ahead of your competition as worldwide tourism growth is slowing down?
It's not difficult, but you need to take time to think and plan.

In my discussions with visitors, tourism operators, inbound operators, wholesalers, RTO’s, Tourism New Zealand and from the international research I’ve done, these are the trends I see for the coming year(s).

• Product development trends
  • The types of products that visitors are looking for are authentic, personalised experiences. This is something that especially smaller businesses can offer as they are often owner-operated. The passion these operators have for their product shines through. Large businesses get bigger and in the process they tend to lose their personal touch.
  • Multi-day experiences or packages.
  • Off the beaten track and rural experiences
  • Wellness experiences
  • Development of products for niche markets
  • Environmentally sustainable experiences.

• ​Personalisation. There’s a shift back to personal interaction with customers. Sure, social media will remain important, but visitors want to get immersed in the local culture and people.
• Focus on the customer experience every step of the way. There are some businesses that are really good at marketing themselves, but they don’t deliver what they promise. In this day and age of online reviews, these companies will suffer. The businesses that go the extra mile, focus on delivering an exceptional experience throughout the sales funnel, are the ones who will thrive. Training your staff and having great systems is part of delivering a consistently amazing customer experience.
• Customer retention. This goes hand in hand with customer experience and product development. What new product or experience can you offer past customers, what do you do you to keep in touch with them?
• Content marketing. Focus on quality and uniqueness in whatever you do! Don’t post of social media for the sake of it, only post high quality content. Developing a good content strategy will provide more relevant information to your customers, will personalise your experience more and will help you with Search Engine Optimisation.
  • Long form content is on the rise. Rather than short snippets of information, write more in-depth stories, or produce a longer video with more detailed information on a topic. Video holds prospective customers’ attention in a way that photos and text don’t.
• Social media will remain important, but do write regular blog post on your website. This is the only content you ‘own’. You can’t control what happens on social media platforms; they change the ‘rules’ all the time. Instagram and Linkedin are the platforms that are growing fastest.
• Co-operative marketing. I’m a great advocate of businesses working together as many businesses in New Zealand are small and the overheads can be high. By developing and marketing products together, while retaining your businesses 'personality', all involved will benefit.

To operate a successful tourism business, it's important to take time out and work ON your business.
Planning, executing, learning, reading. If you make this a habit, and set a specific time each week to work on this, I can guarantee you that your business will benefit.

If you need help improving your capability, do check out our:

• Tourism Business Success Programme and
• Agritourism Success Programme

Have a good rest of your week!
Kind regards, Marijke

Happy new year to you! 
Here are 5 Tourism Marketing Trends for 2019!

​Trend 1: The rise of Instagram for tourism.
Instagram has grown at a much faster pace than Facebook has in the past. It’s a great visual platform for tourism businesses and by learning how to use Instagram ‘properly’, including the use of hashtags, you can reach and keep in touch with customers in an effective way. 

Trend 2: The growth of Google Reviews (and Google bookings).
​You will have noticed the increase in Google Reviews and Google Local Guides. The advantage of this is that everyone uses Google and it’s a good to have an alternative way to review to Tripadvisor. Google has offers online booking - you can book directly from the operator's Google Listing through one of the existing Online Travel Agencies (OTA's). Google clips the ticket.
Oh, and did you know that Tripadvisor is going ‘social’ too? Late last year, they launched their own social media platform. I won’t go into too much detail here, but to be honest, I’m not sure what to think of it and whether it will take off.

Trend 3: The increased importance of content marketing.
Content marketing has been growing in the last few years, but now businesses are becoming more strategic about it. Content marketing involves developing quality and unique content that will benefit your customers. Think about imagery, blogs, videos (virtual reality/360 degree videos) etc.
By developing a content strategy (rather than posting random ad-hoc content) for your website, social media, blog etc, you will have quality material that will encourage your customers to book you, share your content and follow you. User-generated content (USG) is when your customers’ photos for example are shared on social media. UGC is hugely powerful and should be a part of your content strategy.  

Trend 4: Mobile marketing & the growth of voice search. With between 75% and 80% of visitors using their smartphone while on holiday, the growth of voice search has grown too. Paying more attention to the mobile user experience and speed is important – how does your mobile site perform and is it optimised for voice search. 
We’ll also see the growth of payment methods such as Alipay, Wechat pay and Whatsapp pay.

Trend 5: Direct marketing. More and more hotel chains world-wide are using direct marketing to reach customers as their share of bookings (and thus paying more commission) to Online Travel Agencies (such as booking.com and expedia) has grown so much. Many hotels are focusing on direct marketing to their customers and I believe it’s hugely important that smaller accommodation and activity operators do this too. Don’t forget that you don’t control what’s happening on social media. What you do control are your own customer databases. 

Do you need help with your business and marketing strategy? Do you want to learn and keep up to date? Then check out the new Tourism Business Success Programme and the new Agritourism Success Programme.  Go to www.smartraining.co.nz for more info!

Did you know that around 40% of adults use google voice search on their mobile every day (and the younger demographic even more)? 

Google also recognises where you are. So, if I do a voice search: "Where can I find a Mexican restaurant?", Google gives me the Mexican restaurants in Queenstown (as this is where I'm based).
Or: "What are the local walks?", Google gives me a list of websites where walks are listed. 

Voice search is growing at a fast pace and it's important and easy to optimise your website content for voice search.

Here are a few tips:

• Ask yourself: What would my customers ask google to find my business or want to know about my business?
• Add a FAQ page (frequently asked questions) to your site with the types of questions your customers would ask
• Use a conversational tone in your website content
• Longer phrases or questions are common, compared with the shorter searches in text search.
• People use voice search mainly for local content and information, so make sure your Google listing is up to date (opening hours too!) 
• Try out voice search to find similar businesses as yours and see what comes up!

Till next fortnight, Marijke

As Instagram continues to grow with over 800 million users each month, it's become the go-to channel for brands as customer engagement on Instagram is higher than Facebook.
Did you know that Instagram Stories became more popular than Snapchat just one year after it went live?
Here are 64 tips to help you make the most of Instagram:

NOTE: for the 2017/18 summer, I will be writing fortnightly tips instead of weekly ones. Last summer, I carried out a survey re tip frequency, and many of my readers preferred fortnightly tips in summer as they are busy looking after visitors (in NZ)! 

This week, I've been doing research on this year's marketing trends. I am always reading marketing books, blogs, work with clients and present marketing training programmes. It's interesting trying to find out what's the new trends are for the future.

I just found the infographic above. It compiles trends from 151 articles, so I thought you would find this interesting!
Over the next few weeks, I'll discuss several of these trends more in-depth - the ones that I think are relevant to your business.

Till next week, Marijke

Are you active on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram?

One easy way to make your website more interactive, interesting and up to date is by embedding social media widgets. With this I mean for example a live Facebook, Instagram or Tripadvisor feed.

So instead of just displaying the Facebook or Instagram logo, your website visitors will see your latest posts. It also encourages them to LIKE you, which is what you want!

Do you want to know how to add this to your website? If you have a good content management system, you should be able to do this yourself. Otherwise, get your webmaster to do this for you!

Here are the links with instructions on how to do this:
For Facebook: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/page-plugin
For Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/developer/embedding/
For Tripadvisor: https://www.tripadvisor.co.nz/Widgets 

Till next week, Marijke

20 April 2016: Tourism Marketing Bootcamp Queenstown: learn all about the latest tourism marketing trends.
Don't miss it! A few places left!
Click here for more info!

1. Create a Marketing habit! Set aside a set time each week to work on your marketing & business goals. If you do this, it becomes a habit and you will actually get the things done that you plan to do!  
2. Keep up to date with your marketing! I read 2 marketing or business books a month and I attend conferences, workshops, read online newsletters etc. I don’t remember it all, but I do pick up the things that are useful to my business. And I find it motivational and it inspires me to implement new ideas!
   Do check out the Marketing for Success Programme, you’ll love it!
3. Create a video for your website! Video is a great way to increase the conversion to sales!
4. Keep in touch! Keep in touch with your customers by sending them an update every month or quarter (keep it brief and ensure it relates to them!) Note: do personalise the message!
   
5. Get to know your customers better! Where do they hear about you, what do they want, what do they like, what social media do they use, what could be improved? Plan to survey them regularly. Then create products or experiences that suit your customers!
6. Work with complementary businesses! Develop a package or jointly market your products.
7. Make a list of topics to use in social media & newsletters – then, when you do so, you don’t have to come up with new things all the time! Examples: great photos of customers experiencing your product/service, something funny, something interesting, a link to a video, tips, special deals etc.
8. Communicate your USP’s! Why do your customers choose you over your competition? Your unique selling points, the things that set you apart from others accounts for 50% of your sales. So, do communicate these clearly on your website and promotional material!
9. Make it easy for people to book or buy your product! Whether through online booking, 0800 numbers, distribution through a range of channels. For example if you’re in tourism I mean through your own website, 3rd party websites, booking centres, wholesalers etc. The wider your distribution, the easier it will be for people to find you!
10. Focus on the quality of your service and whole customer experience! The better the service and experience, the better your reviews and word of mouth. Hire enthusiastic staff and train them well!

Do you need help planning your marketing and get support along the way? Do you want to learn new marketing skills and work with like-minded businesses? Then join the 11-month Marketing for Success Programme  starting in April. Click here for more info & testimonials!

Till next week, Marijke

This is a great time of year to have a critical look at your most important marketing tool: your website!
Set aside half a day to do this, and keep the following trends in mind:

Simple design: rather than having a site with a lot of elements on a page, keep the design simple and responsive (this means it can be easily viewed on mobile devices too).
Simple design is more user-friendly and pleasant to look at!
Tip: review your website design, and simplify where possible.

More visuals, less text: I don’t know about you, but when I look at a website, an image says more than 1,000 words! Rather than explaining something in a lot of words, why not shoot a little video and show your customers? They help with your conversion too! Large images, videos and slideshows are ‘in’.
Tip: is it time to update your visuals? Add a few videos? Go through your site and see what needs to be updated. Also check what text you can cut out. In other words, 'declutter your site'!

Stick to 1 topic per page (if you can): if you can stick to one topic per page, it’s easier for people to find the information they want, rather than have too much information on one page. Search engines like this too!!
Tip: split your content into individual topic pages and group similar pages under one drop-down header/

Fresh and clear content: rather than have pages and pages of text, try to say it in fewer words, but keep it fresh! Update your content regularly. And yes, once again: Google loves fresh and original content! Sure, if you want to go more in-depth, have a link to a page on your site with more detailed information about a certain topic!
Tip: over time, you have probably added a lot of info on your site. Review your content and rewrite where necessary.

Give people an opportunity to subscribe to news updates and send your customers some information that is of value to them regularly (this can be weekly, monthly or quarterly – depending on the type of business.
Tip: do make this part of your marketing habit (like I do with this weekly marketing tip!

Add share buttons so people can share the content you display (like on the right of this message) on your website either through social media or email.

Scrolling sites: I must admit I’m not a huge fan myself, but you see more and more scrolling sites nowadays. By clicking on links, the site scrolls down to the applicable section lower on the page.

Till next week! Marijke
- See more at: http://www.marketingwhizz.com/weekly-marketing-tip/7-website-design-trends-you-wont-want-to-miss#sthash.dH32N9oH.dpuf

I came across the 2015 Digital, Social and Mobile statistics for a range of markets across the world.
If your customers are international (tourists), then this info is important!
It provides you with an overview of a range of countries and what type and how much social media they use, mobile and the internet. As online marketing is your most important marketing, this will provide you data to more specifically target your customers.
Till next week, Marijke
(PS - at the bottom of the slide, you can click it to full screen)

It's that time of year where we look at the marketing trends for next year!

The way we market our businesses is changing. With an even more increased focus on online marketing compared to print, it's important to adjust your marketing strategy accordingly. Are you ready?

As you know, we are running the Marketing for Success Programme 2014, which is totally aimed at helping you develop a clear vision for your business with specific goals. You will learn all about the latest marketing techniques. The action planning component and monthly 2-hour workshops will keep you on track. Registrations are filling, so don't miss this opportunity to work a lot smarter & achieve what you set out to do. Go to www.smartraining.co.nz for detailed information. Deadline is next week!

So here are the Marketing Trends for 2014:

1. Planning: Businesses see the importance of developing a Marketing Plan to focus where they go and use the best NEW marketing methods to reach their customers. 

2. Online presence: Your online presence is becoming more and more important. Not just a basic static website, but one that allows customers more interaction. It should also integrates with social media.

3. Content is king! Creating relevant, quality content that will help your customers to buy or book your product becomes more and more important. This is something you need to plan!

4. Mobile optimised. Between 10-25% of your web traffic is through mobile devices. It is therefore vital that your website is mobile optimised - ie that your website looks good on a mobile device!

5. Personalisation. It's becoming more important to tailor your message to your different target groups and communicate with them personally. This could be through opt-in newsletters that are personalised to creating content that is aimed at a niche market.

6. Visual presentation. You will see the use of imagery and video increasing. Other tools like embedded slideshows (see last week's marketing tip) are also on the increase and of course you know that Youtube is 2nd largest search engine in the world!

So. are you ready to grow your business in 2014 in a smart & cost-effective way?

If you need help and become part of a great network of like-minded businesses, join the Marketing for Success Programme 2014 in either Queenstown, Te Anau or Invercargill!

Till next week, Marijke