Social Media System for Tourism Marketing Success

Course Content

8:37

If I ask you which kind of visitors you'd like to attract and your answer is anyone, you might need to think again. We're just going to have a look, a little bit at the kind of visitors you might want to attract and to get you to think a little bit more about who they really are even if you don't meet them directly so that you can understand how they think, what makes them tick, what their motivations are, which in turn helps you work out what kind of messages they need to read, what kind of posts they'll be interested in, and then you can start to create content that's more effective. So new visitors, if you're just trying to get new people, then you would need to understand what motivates them. Of course if they are new people then you don't know them so you can't ask them that question but you have in your head the type of people that you might like to attract. So for example, you might be wanting to attract more retired people and you have to then try to get into their head a little and you might decide that the people you want to attract are newly retired and they're really trying to make the most of every moment to get the right kind of balance between relaxing and enjoying their free time as well as being active and trying to be happy and healthy and start a whole new phase of life.

So I think you can very easily, very quickly just scribble down something about the motivation and perhaps there's something they particularly care about if we talk consider the newly retired people. Maybe they have young grandchildren and they're really besotted with them or maybe they've just got a dog or maybe being newly retired means that they can campaign and they can really think about the environment. Is there something or someone who really influences them and helps them to make decisions? Perhaps they are very avid readers of the telegraph or perhaps their profile is much more someone who is glued to Facebook and local Facebook groups, you can create your own kind of profile and consider what they might be like. Repeat visitors is a little bit easier because you've probably met them and if you haven't met them then hopefully you've read their reviews and they know the kinds of things that they say about you and your business so you know what they love.

Now as you go through this exercise thinking about your repeat visitors ideally your new visitors will be fairly similar people unless you're trying to break into new markets. If they're repeat visitors they already know what you do, they already like what you do, so maybe there's a way of getting them to bring family and friends with them another time and you probably need to remind them to visit because although they might have said we'd love to come back again, they will forget. So what is it that would remind them to visit? And is there something that you could do when they are visiting or to get them to come back again to post something about you on social media perhaps as something that you could actually use as a kind of talk trigger to get them to do that. So just thinking about your target markets, I think this very simple diagram will perhaps help you think about what you're trying to do.

The people who already love you are your best target market. You know that they're happy and you know that the chances are if they're happy they will talk about you. So it's a good idea to really think about them as your bullseye and then to start to ripple your markets outwards. So not suddenly to say I just want other people, but you think about if if Bert and Bill who come quite often love what you do, then Bert and Bill's friends or family are probably going to be at a similar life stage and probably they're going to have similar hobbies or interests to their friends or their family. So encouraging them to talk about you or targeting people who are similar makes sense.

And then you might also have an extra target market which could be new people but they'd be similar to your current visitors because you know what makes them tick and it's easier to get those. If you then trying to get people who are completely different, just other people, randomers, they are further removed from that bull's eye and so it's harder to think through the messages that you need to use and to say the right things to appeal to them. Let me just show you how this works on social media because what we're trying to do here is not just to convince the people who are already following us, but to reach new followers using social media. So here is just one post from Yorkshire Treasures and, you can see it did very well with a good number of likes, comments, and shares. And a few reasons I think that happened, it's not a fantastic photo, but perhaps a little intriguing.

But it also starts with something, which can work very well. I've started with a known concept and then I've extended this by making a comparison. So gentleman Jack, many people will know Gentleman Jack a very successful TV series so I've started with that that grabs attention and then I've mentioned someone who people might not have heard of but said she was even more remarkable. So anyone who liked the Gentleman Jack story is probably going to be a bit intrigued and then I've gone on to say his story is one of incredible determination and strengths and I think that gets people to want to see more so they're clicking on the see more I'm stopping the scroll. You can see here the insights, showing what actually happened with that post and you can see that 200,000 people, saw it.

And, the bit that perhaps is most interesting here that led to around 90 people following the Yorkshire Treasures account after seeing that post. Now interestingly that post got a 185 comments. I think the discrepancy between the comments sorry, the discrepancy between the number here and there is that I did this screen grab a little bit later after the screen grab of the actual post. But what you can see below is that another post shortly, before that didn't get as many, views or viewers that actually got more comments, but fewer shares actually attracted more followers. So sometimes you have to think about what it is that works to get your followers.

And what was happening there, I think, is that in the comments, people were tagging other people in. They were adding information which intrigued other people. And so that got seen by more people because the people that commented some of their comments would have been shown to their followers. And then looking a little bit further at something that is worth taking note of. So out of those people that saw my gentleman Jack post, you'll notice something interesting there.

Only 6% of them were followers. A higher proportion, the vast majority were non followers and that's because those posts were that post was shared and it was commented upon, so it was shown to other people. And then 93 people happened to follow me as a result of that. So that's just something to bear in mind that you're using social media to reach new people, and you're not always going to do that directly. It happens through comments and through shares, which is why engagement is also important.

We're going to look at some more content ideas in the next section. So you'll be able to see how to start to put some of this knowledge into practice.

Bookmarks