Social Media System for Tourism Marketing Success

Course Content

8:04

A key way we'll be making your social media more effective and systematic is by posting with purpose and aligning your posts with your business aims. That might sound a little bit overly strategic but I hope as I go through this, it'll make much more sense. So we're going to put your social media on one side for a moment and we're going to think about what you're trying to do in your business. Presumably you're trying to increase your income but I'm going to ask you as we go through each of these suggestions to look at which of them are the most relevant to you and to also tailor them to your business. So don't just look at what I'm writing sorry.

Look at what I'm saying. Please write down which of these are valid and relevant to your business and are there any others that you might add as well and how can you make them more specific to you. So presumably you need to increase your income especially in and then note down the months or the times of week or day even when you would like more business more income. You would like to charge reasonable prices without reducing discounts and perhaps you might like to increase the length of stay or dwell time or average spend of your visitors. So write down which of these are relevant and add a little bit of detail if you possibly can.

It will help you later. Perhaps you'd like to create a more sustainable, consistent pattern of visits or perhaps to fill gaps at specific times of the year. And when I say specific then that means that you would write down middle two weeks of November or whenever it is. Perhaps you need to look at your calendar from last year and and consider when the similar times might be this year or maybe you've noticed a changing pattern that you need to, take notice of and do something about. So again write down what what works, what is relevant to your business, or perhaps you just or as well as you need to make more people aware of what you do in order to reach more visitors.

And one way of doing that might be that you're going to use the loyalty of previous visitors to attract more new ones to your business. So I've just used a few business aims there, you may say that only one of these is relevant or perhaps all of them are or perhaps you have some extras to add in there. So this is, something that you need to spend a little bit of time doing before you move on to the next exercise that I'm going to run through. So you might want to pause here and just scribble a few notes. Okay.

So just taking some of the things that I talked about there, what I've done here is give an example of a business aim, so increase income in January. And then I've written a few ideas for types of message, not posts, messages that we need to convey to potential visitors. So one of them might be, people are not coming in January, you'd like them to come in January. We have to consider the barriers, one of them might be they think it's horrible time of year, so you need to talk about why it's lovely, how your B and B is particularly cozy, how your visitor attraction is quieter, therefore it's easier to look at the exhibits, etc. And to just write down some ideas for messages.

So you're taking whatever your objective is, increase income, and you're writing down some of the things that you need to say in order to achieve that objective. And I've given a few examples here And as you can see, it's not just one answer. Often you've got to be specific, you've got to give more detail, but this is something that you would now need to do and to think about. So it's not simply I would like visitors in January, that's just wishful thinking, it's this is how I'm going to get visitors in January, I need to think about the barriers, I need to think about the positives, I need to think about the messages and you need to write down those messages. This can seem a little bit time consuming but once you've done it you will reuse this information again and again and again because you'll be repeating the messages in order to get your point across and remember you'll be using these in a number of different ways.

So if you decide that you need to write something about why January is a lovely time to visit, that could be a social media post, it could be something that goes into a newsletter, it could be something that goes into a blog or an update on your website. So go back to your business aims, there's objectives, the things you're trying to achieve, write them all down, create a chart like this or a grid and then write down some of those messages. And then we're going to go a step further. I've just not done it on this one slide because it gets a bit crowded, but what you're going to do is to create a chart, a grid with five columns. And the five columns are your aim, so the thing we just talked about.

Some more details, do you need to go into a bit more detail? So I've said there you might want to attract new visitors, but perhaps you need to also be more specific about is it a particular type of visitor. So perhaps you already get lots of walkers but they leave muddy boots and you would rather get some cyclists who leave their muddy bags outside. Think about the type of visitor and then think about why they would visit. And then you will have a list of key messages and you will probably find that your key messages are more numerous and once you start to write them you will come up with many many more.

And as you're doing that you perhaps have to think about the photos you need or some ideas, a little bit more detail, and then later you'd be thinking about when's the right time to post. And you might be saying I need to do this in spring or I need to do it monthly or you might be saying this is something that I'm going to repeat once a week, and when you start to get into more detailed planning then you would be starting to make all of this into not just messages they would then become actual posts with more details in them and then your when would become much more like a detailed calendar. I find it useful to use this grid for my initial planning to make sure that I'm really thinking about what I'm trying to achieve and what the right messages are and jotting down some ideas. I then go back to the content bank to see if the notebook to see if there are some ideas there that work and that fit within this grid. And then a second part of this is to look at a calendar for either a month ahead, two months ahead, whatever works for you, and to plot in that what I'm going to say when.

So you have identified what you need to achieve. You've identified what you have to say to achieve that. You've added a bit more detail. You've thought about content ideas and photos that you might need, and then you're thinking about when you're going to do what. And that in essence is how you make all of this much more strategic, much more effective and again, more powerful.

And in the next session, we'll look at the visitors you really want to attract.

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