Ideas & knowhow

As the leaves start to appear on trees, more visitors will be arriving. Is your marketing ready to make the best of the year ahead?

Once busy with visitors, marketing gets harder to fit in so here’s a pre-season marketing checklist to feel a little more prepared.

Let’s focus on just a few elements for now:

Anticipation

[ ] Ideas for social media posts asking what visitors are most looking forward to, ways to get them to talk about forthcoming trips

[ ] Messages (e.g. by email or text) for guests who…

When there’s so much marketing noise, with so many people and businesses competing for attention, how can you cut through and grab attention for your business?

You’ve got a few choices:

Shout louder than everyone else - but how?

Use paid advertisements - but that can be really expensive, and not always effective

Best of all though is to do this:

1. Be really clear about what you’re offering. Think about the best ways to describe how you can make visitors happy and use them often. Don’t assume others…

Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn… It all feels a bit overwhelming doesn’t it?

At least once a week tourism business owners ask me which social media channel works best, or ‘Do I really have to try to do them all?’, and ‘If I’ve only got time for one, which should I choose?’

It really depends on what you’re trying to do and who your target markets are, but there is one social media channel that works best for most tourism businesses. I’ll get to that in a moment.

If you’re feeling ov…

Are you busy? Tired? A bit over-whelmed or pre-occupied? Hamster-wheel spinning too fast? Just generally feel a bit ‘meh’, at least now and then?

I’m guessing ‘yes’ to most of those questions? If so, you’re definitely not alone. This is exactly how many of our visitors feel too.

Do you read every email you receive? Do you see every social media post of all the accounts you follow? When someone tells you something do you always listen and absorb what they say? Do you notice every word and photo on…

Are you leaving money on the table? Or maybe just not attracting people who want to spend money with you?

There are  reasons why you may not be attracting visitors or making as much money as you'd like.

Once you've considered each of these, small actions can have a big impact.

1. You don't make it clear who/what kind of people can benefit from your business. People often think something isn't for them, for example they may like the look of a holiday cottage but just not know what they'd be ab…

Confession time!

What's the one thing you're putting off doing?

The one thing you've either decided you can't do, or a thing that gets in the way of more business success or ease? 

We all have something. Usually our main excuses for not doing something connected to our business are 'no time' or 'no money'. But really they're just the lazy excuses. Most marketing activities don't cost a great deal and we manage to make time for the things we prioritise. 

There's normally something else that w…

There's one thing that makes every marketing activity stronger and more effective.

No, not money. Not even a lot more time. 

Consistency.

Taking one small action every day or week can be as effective as spending ages and pots of money on bigger activities. 

Consistency builds momentum.

It builds trust. It builds awareness. It builds experience.

It builds business and profitability.

What sort of marketing activity am I talking about?

I mean any action you might do regularly (and I do mean…

Where are you spending your time on social media? 

I don't mean where you're scrolling: rather where are you posting and most active in order to attract visitors?

I think many of us have got distracted trying different channels, enjoying the ease of just sticking a photo on Insta, taking a sneaky peak at stupid videos on TikTok. 

We've moaned about the changes to Twitter (X), thought that facebook was 'past it'. If you're anything like me, you've probably also felt a bit tired of social media…

I’ve been going on about this for a while. If you've been listening, you may be feeling a little smug as you'll have seen rsome good results already...

If not, its worth psying attention to this trend as its noty going away!

One of the biggest post-pandemic trends in tourism is an increased desire among visitors to gain insights into places that give them an ‘insider’s view’.

I’ve noticed it in two different generations:

• younger people who don’t want to follow the crowd, are independently-…

Sometimes it’s important to keep up with competitors, to use the latest social media or do something so you’re not seen as ‘old-fashioned’.

But sometimes it pays to deliberately be different.

Millionaire entrepreneur James Caan says he made his money by 'zigging' when everyone else was 'zagging'.

I was reminded of this recently when the family-owned Booths supermarket chain (the North’s answer to Waitrose) announced that they are removing almost all their self-service checkouts. This was in s…