Marketing

Pre-Covid, celebrations were a major trend. There was a significant increase in visitors meeting up with friends and relatives for a celebration of some kind, often a big birthday or anniversary. Celebrations are a great market. They often take place outside the main season. One person invites others to come along, so you can attract new visitors, and people are generally in a good mood and ready to spend!

There's now even greater demand as people try to catch up on all the celebrations they mi…

If your marketing budget is tiny (I don’t know any tourism businesses with a big budget!), it’s easier to stand out from the competition if you focus on being different or special in some way.

How about being so special and different, you’re the ‘one and only'? 

It’s easier than you might think.

You can choose a ‘category’ and be the king/queen of that category. Here’s how. It works equally well no matter what type of tourism business you run. 

Let’s say you run a self-catering holiday cotta…

There's a growing trend that you may have missed. You might even say it arrived by cover of the night...

It's a trend that could be valuable to accommodation businesses, food and drink outlets, activity providers and attractions. 

After dark activities

Visitors are increasingly interested in what they can do after dark. They're ready to have new and different experiences after dark. This could be nature-spotting or enjoying the dark skies. It could be sitting outside with a rug over their lap…

There's a row of images, or series of short films.

Each one shows something going wrong in the world, or is a shouty message 'this person is terrible', or a photo of something horrible or bad. There's just one that shows the green shoots of daffodil stems, and grass starting to grow again. 

Another row of images has a similar bank of negative images. There's one that feels different: a sunrise, full of promise and light. 

Which of these images are you most drawn to? 

Positive stories and im…

"Location, location, location" are said to be the three things that most affect property values. Location's also crucial to the success of tourism businesses.

I'm not sure we recognise and use location enough, or in the right way. 

Of course, every tourism business gives their address. They might add a map, or include a mention of their 'fantastic location' on the home page of their website. All fine, but you can use your location in many other ways to attract visitors and enhance your search …

When your marketing budget is limited, there's an easy way to add power to your promotions: piggyback. Piggyback marketing essentially means using someone else's marketing budget to benefit your business. 

Obviously I don't mean actually using their money, but rather harnessing the power of their activity and piggybacking on the awareness they're able to create. It's a bit like riding in the slipstream of a more powerful vehicle. 

Read on for some ideas for current trends you can easily piggyb…

People often tell me they're too busy to do any marketing. They just 'don't have time'. 

Is this really what they're saying?  Do we mean we don't have any time for any marketing or just certain aspects of it? Responding to bookings, sending emails, talking to visitors are all marketing activities but we don't always 'count' them because they're everyday business essentials.

For some people 'marketing' means anything that seems a bit more effortful - posting regularly on social media, writing b…

I'm not very musical but every now and then a song gets stuck in my head. For some reason I've got Bob Marley's words singing in my head: let's get together and feel all right. 

It really does feel like it's time for us all to work together. Tourism can be affected by so many different factors (Floods, Brexit, Coronavirus) which we can't control. We can however make everything feel better.

Community. Collaboration. Kindness. None of them cost anything, yet they have enormous power. Visitors lo…

You might have noticed on social media and in the press that it's Something Day or Week almost every day? Whether it's Dry January, Black Friday or Take Your Pet to Work Day, there's always an 'awareness day' with a hashtag trying to grab attention.

You might have even tried to use one of these hashtags to give your own social media a boost? I've put together a few ideas to help you use awareness days more successfully. 

First things first.

What are 'awareness days'?

For decades we've used …