Ideas & knowhow
Social media
Marketing using someone else's budget
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…
Bob Marley and your marketing
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…
How to use awareness days to boost your marketing
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 …
Important Instragram Updates
Instagram has recently made two changes which are likely to make a big difference to users.
Firstly, you can now log in to your account and post to Instagram directly from your computer so Instagram is no-longer mobile-only.
The second change is that now everyone can add links in Stories. This used to be something only available on verified accounts or those with a given number of followers but is now being rolled out everywhere.
To add links to your Stories, you need to use the Link sticker …
Using twitter to get free media coverage
I love twitter for the variety of topics on there and the many useful links I often find, but I rarely suggest businesses use it to promote their businesses. Whenever I look at Google Analytics for tourism business websites, twitter seems to refer very little business.
Twitter is brilliant for one thing though: generating free media coverage.
Journalists love twitter. They use it to gather stories, spot trends, find new contacts and – most importantly and useful for you – to ask for informati…
10 Social media ideas to build followers and your business
Do you sometimes struggle to think of good things to post on social media? It can be hard to try to find different ways of saying "Look at my business, come and visit!" without boring people or feeling like you're being too pushy (you're not!).
Here are some different types of social media posts you can use to promote your business, engage visitors and make your feed more interesting. Using a combination of these will help build engagement and followers. But don't forget to do numbers 6 and 10 …
Surprise and delight to get more word of mouth publicity
Ask any tourism business what's their most effective, lowest cost marketing method and they'll almost certainly answer 'word of mouth'. It's easy, it's free - and it 'just happens'. Or does it?
Most businesses just hope for word of mouth publicity and recommendations from satisfied customers. They do a good job, and hope word of mouth referrals will follow. Now we have 'word of mouth on steroids', in the form of social media so it's become even more important to impress.
Surprisingly few peopl…
How to use social proof to boost your tourism marketing
A simple example: would you rather buy fish and chips from the shop with or without a queue outside? Rather …
Are you normal?
I’ve been asked several questions this week, all with a common theme: comparisons.
What’s a normal level of direct bookings for an accommodation provider?
What sort of level of repeat bookings should I aim for?
What would be a usual bounce rate on Google?
How are bookings looking for everyone else over the next few months?
Are others experiencing a higher than usual level of cancellations?
How good is my social media compared to others?
I’ll answer each of these in a little more detail l…
What's the right image size?
Images are often the very first thing that people notice when they scroll through your social media.
Impactful images can make a big difference, but each social media channel has different image size requirements. While we might have got used to the idea that we need square images for Instagram, not everyone recognises the power of a long vertical image on Pinterest.
Social media channels change their image requirements quite frequently so it can be hard to keep track of which channel needs w…