Context

The Web and its associated e-marketing tools have revolutionized the way businesses market and sell their products, especially in the travel and tourism industry. Consider this: a good Web site for a hotel or attraction can draw millions of visitors, book rooms, sell tickets, offer promotions and sign up visitors for further communication. No other media comes close in capabilities and reach.

But just having a Web site isn’t enough
There are many travel and tourism sites that don’t generate much business for their owners, yet others are sales and lead generating machines. What makes some sites so successful? The foundation for success starts with the 5Ps.

1. Personae – the words and pictures that tell your story
Did you know that visitors to a Web site decide within the first few seconds whether they will explore a site or click onto the next one?

Your site’s Personae is what visitors see first – your Web site is your product. The story you tell with words and images creates the first impression. If your site is hard to read or looks like a page from the classified ads, visitors will not bother to stay and shop. People believe that what they see on your Web site is what their vacation will be like – if it looks poor or is hard to use they won’t bother to buy.

Your Web site is your best employee – welcoming, helpful and engaging. The design, layout, images and words need to reflect your special personality, character and give visitors a “sample” of what they can expect when they buy your product. It’s the the sizzle that makes the sale.

Don’t underestimate the power of the first impression – that’s the power of Personae.

Personae Checklist
• Is the content of your site up to date? If you’re talking about summer specials and it’s fall, you’re losing business. A stale site is an immediate turn-off and visitors leave.
• Are your pictures as good as they could be? It’s tempting to shoot a few digital shots yourself, but people are increasingly sophisticated and if your images don’t really capture the quality of your product, hire a photographer. A picture is still worth 1,000 words – what does yours say about you?
• Do the words on every page on your site describe your place with an engaging manner – with a personality that makes people want to visit? Go over your site with a critical eye. How does your “story” compare to some other sites? Make sure every page presents your product in the best light.
• Is your site easy to skim? Good organization of the layout and formatting techniques make it easy to read quickly. No one wants to read masses of grey text without the help of good formatting.
• Does your site answer the most important question for every one of your visitors: “Is this the place I want to buy to enjoy and relax?”

2. Position – do the search engines know you exist?
It’s crucial to be found by the search engines and to come up on the first few pages. Today 90% of travel shopping is done on the Internet, and 79% of Web visits start with a search – it’s the #1 activity on the Web today.

That means your site needs to rank highly for your key terms. Critical for a resort, a trail or a geographic region is for the Web site to be highly ranked by a wealth of “activities + interests” based on what words people use when they search. Few people search by the exact name of a trail, attraction or resort. Most look by subject – “hiking in Ontario”; “petting zoos”; “fall colours’. Do you know what words travelers are searching? Have you tried searching for your site using terms that your potential visitors would use? Where do you show up, on the first page or the fifteenth page?

Position Checklist
• Think about the words you use to find things to do or buy in the search engines. Understand how search engines work and what their “spiders” look for as they crawl the Web. Here’s a good place to start: with the tips that Google gives to Web site owners.
• Do you have enough of the right words or images on your Web site for search engines to find you? Search engines live on words – they need something to find so they can rank it.
• Is the information on your site written in such a way to be search engine friendly? Are you including key terms that people use to find products like yours in your copy? How do you name your pages, navigation and images? Doing it right makes a big difference in your search engine rankings.
• Do you use Flash animation on your site? Make sure it’s search engine friendly. Often it’s not, and spiders will miss your site which will hurt your rankings.

3. Prospect – reach out, draw them in, keep them coming back
In the early days of the Web, the theory was, “build it and they will come”. With hundreds of tourism sites about Ontario out there, those days are long gone. You need ways to keep people coming back to visit you after they have found you, reminding them about you, new products and special offers, in others words to sell them again.

One of the most successful ways to keep people coming back is offering people a chance to subscribe to you and get periodic updates. 40% of people who visit travel Web sites sign up for an e-newsletter. It is one of the most common and successful techniques to convert visitors to leads. Now instead of waiting for them to get back to you, you can get back to them.

The first place to start is with a simple promotion to get people to sign up for your e-newsletter. It might be chance to win a free stay or visit to your property or some merchandise.

No matter how you do it, at the foundation of all of this activity is to create a list of leads and email addresses of people who have agreed to receive your messages. Then you need to work at sending out short e-newsletters every couple of weeks with news about yourself, exclusive offers or special early-bird discounts. Your goal is to build a list of contacts that are potential sales leads and visit them periodically with e-mails.

Prospect Checklist
• Explore the various options and test a couple of different promotions for reaching out to your potential customers.
• Create a way to reward people for telling you about what they are interested in.
• Think of how you will promote your list to encourage more sign-ups. Ask them to forward to a friend.
• Is there a tourism partner with whom you can create a joint promotion that you can both put on your Web sites sharing the costs and the leads?

4. Pitch -once you have a prospect, you can pitch.
What are your offers? If they like family vacations in the summer, how about a family ski holiday in the winter? Or what about a weekend away for Mom and Dad? Or think about a free meal for the next time they visit? It doesn’t have to be a discount. Think of adding low-cost high-value items to your products and services. Could you turn a one-time offer into an ongoing seasonal offer? Could you team with a partner or supplier to contribute to your offer to enrich it?

Once you have permission to contact them, build a campaign of scheduled e-mails – starting with one a month or at a minimum one per season – with potential messages and offers that match their interests. Chances are if they have subscribed to your Web site they are giving you their permission to communicate with them on a regular basis. Don’t miss the opportunity.

Pitch Checklist
•Research shows that 30% of visitors who signed up for e-mails actually buy something. Be sure you have something compelling to sell them.
•Test your offers. Consider splitting your list to send different versions of your offer to each segment and see which one works best.
•Make your offer time-sensitive and limited in number (the first 10 who take advantage….) to encourage action.
•Build in a reward for a referral. It doesn’t take much to encourage your customers to recommend you.

5. Partnerships – don’t go it alone.
If you are a resort, arrange with a local attraction to create a simple package. Work with partners and use your local associations, festivals or attractions to create virtual products and experience packages. Combine and leverage your budgets to reach more prospects.

Think about your customers and what kind of packages they would enjoy. Bring partners in to create and promote those packages.

If you don’t have partners, now is the time to find ones with common interests and common prospects. You’ll exponentially increase your marketing reach and scale. Experience shows that the effort it takes to create solid products and partnerships pays off with greater sales at lower costs.

Partnership Checklist
• Make a list of potential partners and the packages you could create together, and call them.
• Let others know that you’re interested in partnering. Encourage them to bring their offers to you.
• Need a thought-starter? Speak to your association about new partnering ideas.
• Consider the impact of the seasons, holidays or local events in the theming possibilities for your partnering activities.

The Bottom Line: The Internet is here to stay and has changed the way that people shop for and buy vacations in Ontario. People are not relying on a brochure to drop out of their mailbox or newspaper. The Internet has given travelers the opportunity and freedom, at a click of a computer, to plan and buy vacations themselves. Internet marketing is different from the traditional marketing approaches. The 5P’s are the foundation for successful e-marketing. You need a systematic, staged e-marketing plan to market and sell your products to a more knowledgeable and sophisticated traveler.

About Context Creative
At Context Creative, we help organizations that need to make the transition to successful e-marketing. In the travel and tourism sector, we build revenue-generating programmes on our 5P platform – Personae, Position, Prospecting, Pitching and Partnerships.