Social Media System for Tourism Marketing Success

Course Content

7:37

If you've created your content bank or started to create a content bank and if you've created the grid where you filled in your business aims and some of the key messages, you already will have a lot of ideas for social media posts. But remember you need to keep relating them back to your business aims so that you can be more strategic and more effective. What I'm going to do now is to talk to you about some other types of post and what I call content pillars. This will give you more ideas, but remember you need to then, go through them and decide which ones are relevant to you and what you're going to use when. The idea is that you probably end up with more ideas than you need, than you need.

So you can choose which are going to be more effective or experiment a little. So three more aims. We've already talked about the business aims that you might have such as, increasing your income or attract new visitors but in order to do this, there are certain things that have to happen and that social media is really useful for. So building trust. There are many, many people in the world, there are many, many businesses and we have to somehow make a choice.

And we make a choice depending on things that we like things that we enjoy recommendations but also we have to trust that the business we're going to spend money with the business we're going to spend time with is not just reliable and isn't a scammer but is also the right place for us. So you need, to think about how you can build trust, how you can show that you your business is the right place for someone to go. The other thing that's happening at the moment is people are dithering, they're making, they're taking a lot longer to make decisions so you need a particularly particular messages thinking about how you can entice people, show people what to expect to overcome some of that uncertainty, to give them things to look forward to so you're enticing them into booking or visiting, you're trying to stop them from dithering to break that cycle of I'll do it one day and get them to really think about it right now. We need to push people into action and some of this is by saying the time is right to visit or book right now or plan it for two months time, but plan it right now.

So I think there are three things that you probably need to do and you need to think about how you're going to do that. That brings on to four different kinds of posts. And if you've done a workshop with me before, you'll have seen I often use a kind of, a circle diagram and talk about four different kinds of posts because it helps most people to get some extra ideas. So there are the posts that are about you and your business. So quite a gentle sell here is just giving a little information.

It's building trust, telling them what they can look forward to, perhaps answering individual frequently asked questions and then adding in a little bit of information that can help to surprise and delight. The next kind of post is sharing something that you've seen online on social media. Perhaps it's someone you know, perhaps it's something that you find interesting. Don't just share it though. It's useful if you can add a comment when you share it.

So you say why you like it, why it's relevant to your business, or why it's relevant to your visitors. That just tailors it a little bit more so that you're not just randomly sharing and it can make a difference to people also commenting. Information about your local area, tips and advice, so this is your kind of consideration content if you like. It's the extra stuff that can help people feel confident, help them feel more comfortable with making a choice that can give them the context to your business which then encourages them to book or visit with you and then there are other posts where you are literally pushing people into action where you're saying we're quite busy or you're just saying the weather forecast this weekend looks particularly good are you going to come? You're pushing them into action.

And then we might want to think about some content pillars. The idea of content pillars you don't have to use them but for many people it's useful because it's something they keep coming back to. And it's different types of content that you can use. Now remember, you need to use this to devise the right kind of messages that also correspond with the kinds of aims that you have. Different kinds of content pillars I'm going to list here.

The first one is about the experience. So rather than saying here is our business, you're actually saying this is the experience you could have, here are the benefits of our business, this is what's in it for you, this is how you might enjoy it. And I think that's different to we are here, look at us. It's showing how what you do is relevant to a potential visitor. Talking about a local area, why it's a good place to visit, using some social proof.

This has become really important now where we talk about happy visitors. We might share a quote from a review. We might talk about the things that people love about our businesses because that helps people to feel more confident and it helps them to stop dithering and it helps to build trust. Talking about anything behind the scenes about you, about why you have your business, anything that you're happy to share, builds trust, positions you as more human, shows people that you have an independent business and that's something that people often like to support. And then also the other bit is talking about your availability this is where you are literally selling in a strategic way and pushing people into action.

That's something we'll talk about more in the next section. And then you might also be thinking that you need to appeal to specific types of visitor and they need specific kinds of information inspiration. So if you're appealing to grandparents then they probably need some information about what you've got to offer to, for their grandchildren. Now do you remember this grid? We need to go back to it once we've looked through the content pillars, the different types of post because what you're going to do is add in more aims, more details into your grid.

When you've done this, this grid will end up being quite a big document, but it's something that you can keep going back to. This is the system that you're creating. This is how it makes all your posts be more effective, but it also makes everything repeatable because some of the things that you write here you'll be doing, redoing every month or reposting every month. Some of it you might look back, six months and then realize, no, I need to repeat that now. So it just takes the guesswork out of posting.

It makes it more effective. It makes it just much much easier and it builds consistency in the way that the algorithm wants you to do but also visitors want you to do. Okay, in the next section I'm just going to give you a quick few tips to help you avoid overwhelm and

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