The Best Tourism Marketing Practices of 2018

It’s extremely important to make sure that you are taking time out of your week to interact with your followers. Here are a few ways to show them some extra love: 

  1. Feature the best user-generated photo of the week
  2. Answer their questions
  3. Ask them questions
  4. Thank people for using your hashtag
  5. Go above and beyond

Check out this article from HubSpot about brands that nailed their customer care on Twitter! Click here to learn more about specific ways you can give your followers some love.

It’s extremely important to make sure that you are taking time out of your week to interact with your followers. Here are a few ways to show them some extra love: 

  1. Feature the best user-generated photo of the week
  2. Answer their questions
  3. Ask them questions
  4. Thank people for using your hashtag
  5. Go above and beyond.

Check out this article from HubSpot about brands that nailed their customer care on Twitter and their example from JetBlue.

Click here to learn more about specific ways you can give your followers some love.

When asking about our clients’ least favorite social media tool, Twitter is often at the top of the list. We understand some of the frustration, but with 330 million monthly active users, Twitter is not going anywhere anytime soon. So, before you throw in the towel on tweeting, try these top twitter tactics for tourism marketers!

 

  1. Tweet Frequently – 3 to 7 tweets per day (And, a few stakeholder or partner reTweets are acceptable in the total)
  2. Be visual – Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images
  3. Use GIFs/Emojis in your tweets – speak the language of Twitter
  4. Create Twitter Moments – highlight a major event in your area or local initiatives
  5. Upload video – use the video that you share everywhere else on Twitter too!
  6. Use Twitter to Drive traffic – Tweet links to valuable landing pages
  7. Run an ad – allow these to complement Facebook, Instagram and YouTube ads – think “campaign”
  8. Promote your hashtag – use your hashtag at least once a day
  9. Embed Tweets in landing pages to extend the story + build awareness.
  10. @ reply and retweet each day — be social on Twitter & engage with other users

 

For more details on how to improve your Twitter game, visit our blog!

The basic metrics inside Google analytics will help you understand the overall effectiveness of your website, so it’s important that you understand them:

  • Sessions: How many people visit your website
  • Pageviews: How many pages are viewed on your website
  • Average session duration: How long people spend on your website
  • Pages per session: The average number of pages people visit on your website
  • Bounce Rate: Percentage of people who navigated away from your website after viewing only 1 page

Other things that you can learn from Google Analytics:

  • Top pages on your website
  • Explore engagement data for all of your web pages
  • See how users move through your website by using “Behavior Flow”
  • Use keyword data to help fuel your content planning
  • Site search data to discover content needs

For more on why these metrics are important for your destination, read the full blog.

Learning how to market a major event in your destination is important if you want people to attend. Here is a quick step-by-step guide to marketing your next major event:

 

  1. Create an awesome landing page for your event
  2. Write a series of blogs leading up to your event to build the hype and keep people informed
  3. Write Blogs to Promote your event (& link them to the main even page)
  4. Run a Paid Ad Campaign
  5. Complete organic social and digital best practices

For more tips on how to market your next major event, read our entire blog post.

Influencer marketing has taken the social media world by storm in the past few years. If you are thinking about running an influencer marketing campaign in your destination, check out our list of ways to run a powerful influencer marketing campaign.

  • Tips for picking your influencer
    • Check the quality of their followers
    • Check out all their channels to scope their impact
    • Make sure their brand and your brand mesh
    • Review content from other places they’ve visited
    • Do more research!
  • Don’t run an influencer marketing campaign if…
    • You don’t have a solid, thorough social media plan
    • You feel you can tell the same story and have adequate reach with the on-staff talent
    • You don’t have a clear, written, agreed upon expectations between you and your influencer
    • You and the influencer do not see eye-to-eye on content usage

Click here to learn more about how you can maximize your influencer’s visit and how to track your success after they’ve left.

Did you know that over 300 million people use Instagram stories on a daily basis and that many of these users view stories immediately upon opening the app? With this in mind, Instagram stories are a great tool for destination marketers. When used properly, they can easily help promote a destination’s most unique experiences and events. Here’s how to get started:

  • Determine the story you are going to tell and why – it’s important to have an idea in mind before you start creating your story.
  • Create a storyboard like this! (add image)
  • Create your story – Add images from client example
  • Post-story distribution: stories are only live for 24 hours, but make sure that you fully leverage the content that you spent time creating! For example: Add to a highlight, upload to Facebook and YouTube.

 

For more details on how Instagram stories developed in 2018, read the full blog post.

Email marketing can be a tricky thing to master, especially in a world that seems to be dominated by social media. However, this definitely doesn’t mean you should give up on your email marketing strategy! Your email marketing program gives visitors the necessary information they need before visiting your destination. It’s also a great way to encourage past visitors to come back.

Here are 5 main challenges that often arise during email marketing campaign:

 

  1. Low Open Rate
  2. High Unsubscribe Rate
  3. No conversions
  4. Low number of subscribers
  5. Ending up in SPAM

Click here for the causes and solutions to these challenges to help improve your next email marketing campaign.

What is the most important thing that you learned about destination marketing in 2018? We’d love to know!  Comment on the Facebook post or send us a direct message on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Or, if you like going old school, just shoot us an email at info@twosixdigital.com.