Furthermore, tourism is influenced by many factors outside of the industry’s control. Travelers may change plans or destinations, or even cancel trips, due to economic, health, political or social factors.
Tourism marketers must often try to convince an ever more skeptical public that vacations are more than mere superficial wants; and that they serve a real and needed purpose. Over the last decade tourism marketers have struggled with the question such as if a vacation is a want or a need. They also struggled with defining what tourism marketing is. For example, in 2013 The Board of Directors of the American Marketing Association approved the following: Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. (Approved July 2013).
The definition created new challenges. For example, how are tourism marketers to define value? Tourism marketers must not only prove to their potential clients that their product has value, but in a composite industry, such as tourism, there is no one single product. The tourism experience begins even before the moment the client (tourist, visitor) leaves home and continues until past the time that the client has returned home.
Along the way, the tourism marketer must deal with a variety of products and services that range from the air/bus/train terminal experience to the actual transportation experience or in the case of a private vehicle, the roadway experience. There is also the dining experience, the lodging experience, and the quality of the visitors’ activities. To make matters even more complicated tourism customers are young and old, speak different languages and come with a wide range of expectations, wants and criteria.
Marketing is never easy and requires both basic and sophisticated strategies.
To help you develop some of these strategies Tourism Tidbits offers the following advice.
Develop a realistic budget and learn to live within the budget
One of the great mistakes in marketing is spending more than you take in. Be frugal, but not stingy, in how you spend your marketing money. Ask yourself what is a realistic expected rate of return on the money that you spend and are your marketing techniques appropriate for the targeted social group?
Know with which demographic groups you are most likely to succeed
Different groups of visitors want different experiences and different takeaways. It is essential that your marketing matches your demographics. Older visitors want a very different experience than younger visitors. Demographics should be broken down by age, gender and in today’s word gender-orientation, cultural desires and needs, distance to be traveled, and economic groups. No tourism destination can be all things to all people. Success is defined by matching your tourism offering to the correct demographic group.
Know what you are marketing
It is amazing how many organizations are confused as to what their base business is. For example, is an airline marketing transportation, travel, or a destination? In in the leisure tourism industry, we often state that we are marketing relaxation, but in reality what we are really marketing Is post vacation memories. That means that marketing must include not only what the visitor receives during the experience but also what the visitor takes away from the experience.
Do not depend on any one form of marketing
Different demographic groups require different marketing strategies. For example, younger generations are likely to respond differently to high tech or certain types of social media than older generations. Social media is a great tool for some but not all demographic groups. Furthermore, social media have many forms and these forms experience their own market lifecycle. For example, some forms of social media that were in vogue with the under 25 crowd only a few years ago, are now barely considered relevant by members of that generation today. Using social media as a media tool means being on top of the current trends and knowing which group not only reads social media, but also perhaps more importantly permits social media to influence its decision-making and believes social media.
Do not forget about the value of word-of-mouth
Wordof-mouth is an effective tool especially when one is marketing to a more educated and upscale market. Although it is slower in reaching vast quantities of potential clients, as a tool it can be highly effective. Word-of-mouth marketing is not simply a haphazard phenomenon. In fact, it is estimated that many products and services are purchased because someone has told them about a particular brand. The best word-of-mouth advertising is based on a clear plan. Here are some word-of-mouth tips to consider and remember word-of-mouth requires out of the box thinking and lots of creativity:
1. It is free and therefore we can see word-of-mouth marketing as a great leveler. This is especially true for small businesses that do not have a large advertising budget.
2. To get your narrative into the public realm make sure that you live your story. For example, if one of the things that you want people to talk about is your excellent customer service, then be sure to provide that level of service. The marketing goal is to transform your service or product into a brand or narrative and then by your actions have it become the narrative.
3. Think customer loyalty! Give your customers the sense that they are part of you; that the narrative belongs as much to them as it does to you. You can accomplish this goal by giving people the sense that they are “insiders” and part of your business family. To do this you have to do more than merely survey your customers. Make sure that you take their opinions seriously. If customers want to see a particular change, then try and implement that change as soon as possible.
4. Meet with some of your customers. Invite them to face-to-face conversations with your senior management; let them know that they are on the same team as you.
5. Listen more and talk less. The more you listen the more others will talk about you. Getting customer feedback in an unobtrusive and polite way shows that you care and the hospitality industry is nothing without caring.
Compete against yourself and not against your colleagues
Good marketing is not negative marketing. Using negative marketing may work in political campaigns, but rarely if ever works in tourism. The best marketing is when you are able to demonstrate to the public that your great offering has now become even better. That means you have to know what your offerings are and what “better” means to your public.
You have to be open to get business
Many stores especially in smaller communities have irregular hours. Good marketing makes no sense if the customer cannot enter your establishment. The same is true of large travel or tourism companies that put people on hold for long periods of time or force them to “climb” a telephone tree. Never have the people who take calls give the impression that it is only a job. If your customers cannot reach you, then your marketing efforts cannot succeed.
Appearances and the way your personnel act matter
How you interact with the or customer basis matters. That means that personnel must look and speak in a professional way. No customer judges your tourism business on what you say your represent but rather what the customer observes about you. Tourism is all about good service and the best marketing comes about when we do what we say we do, and allow people to live our collective dreams.
The author, Dr. Peter E. Tarlow, is President and Co-Founder of the World Tourism Network and leads the Safer Tourism program.
