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A presentation from Destination Food 2018, Australia’s first food tourism conference. The post Eric Pateman from Edible Canada talks food tourism – episode 91 appeared first on Holly G.

A presentation from Destination Food 2018, Australia’s first food tourism conference. When Brenda Fawdon and Chris Sharp were commissioned by local council to produce the Eat Local cookbooks, the Scenic Rim region experienced unforseen media exposure, a surge in tourism and a swell of community pride. Dates have been announced for Destination Food 2021. An event that brings together Australia’s food tourism industry. A culinary tourism conference to network, learn and share ideas. So if this interests you then save the date: Monday 2 August 2021  More information coming shortly, see www.destination-food.com.au or join our Facebook group to connect with other food tourism professionals. You may also enjoy episode 68 of this podcast series, Food Tourism to attract visitors to your destination – episode 68. The post Eat Local: How a cookbook boosted food tourism – episode 90 appeared first on Holly G.

Welcome to episode 89 of Tourism Upgrade, the podcast unpacking marketing trends from travel, tourism and marketing leaders. I’m your host Holly G, and today we’ll be talking about engaging your community through visual content. My guest today is Lucas Luxton, Director of Tourism Partnerships at CrowdRiff. Lucas was in Australia earlier this year as our guest and spoke at Destination Food in Sydney, welcome to the podcast. HollyG: So we wanted today to talk about content, but I also wanted to introduce people a little bit more to CrowdRiff as well, because I’ve been talking to CrowdRiff for like the last several years actually, and yeah, I think it’s a really interesting platform that people should know about. So basically my understanding is that CrowdRiff is a platform or like a software that helps destinations and tourism business to really make the most of their visual content in their marketing. Is that sort of how you’d describe it? Lucas: Yeah, no, absolutely. We also help them source and organisation, and also share that visual content with other stakeholders, such as media, partners, customers, really any stakeholder to their brand. Really, if you’re a tourism brand and you work with visuals on a regular basis, we can absolutely help out with that. HollyG: Which pretty much we all do. So when we’re talking about visual content, what are we actually talking about? Lucas: Yeah. So when we talk about visual content, I mean, we’re referring to photos and videos. This can be both photos and videos that your team or a marketing team has actually acquired over the years from commissioned shoots or stock photography, but of course it can also be photos and videos that real travellers are sharing out there on social media around a given brand. HollyG: And why are we saying that visuals are so important now? I guess they’ve always been important, but … Lucas: Yeah, visuals are incredibly important, really. Sight is by far probably your most, most important sense, and our sight provides, I think somewhere around 80% of all of our environmental context we have with this world. So subconsciously of course we know this, that visuals are incredibly important and visual mediums have been obviously hugely popular and important over the years, everything from movies and television have been super important and popular of course, but in the digital area we’ve seen the rise of platforms like YouTube and Instagram, because humans are really drawn to visuals and they’re hungry for more visual content, and people can just learn so much from them so quickly as well. I know at Destination Food I did talk a bit about visuals and kind of the process that people go through when they’re looking at visuals and making decisions based off the visual content they see throughout their day. HollyG: Yeah, I think you gave a statistic, which everyone tweeted about, which was around how quickly we, or our attention span and how quickly we sort of absorb visual content. Lucas: Yes. Yeah, the, we have an attention span, I think less than a goldfish now, which is pretty bad. So people are skipping all over the place, and yeah, visuals and, I mean, all of the different, of course, technology coming at you plays a big part in that. HollyG: Yeah. And I think it was, you were sort of saying also that we’ve got about eight seconds to capture someone’s attention, and so a good way to do that is through visual content. Lucas: Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. So part of the reason for that is because the human brain actually processes visuals 60 thousand times faster than text, so if you can capture someone or tell a story through an intriguing visual that really captures their attention, yeah, you can absolutely keep them engaged. HollyG: So, I wanted to talk today also about user generated content. We do hear UCG talked about quite a bit, but I guess it is quite a big part of what you guys do, so I wanted, wondered if you could talk a little bit about what is user generated content, and importantly like how do we get it and what do we do with it? Lucas: For sure. Yeah. So there’s a couple pieces there. Yeah, let me break it up a little bit. So, I guess what is it? Quite simply, user generated content is really any content, whether it’s visual or text, that’s been produced by people who are not “professions” paid to actually create that content. Over the past 10 years, of course, we’ve seen this explosion of visual content, mostly because of kind of these advances in technology. User Generated Content is really any content, whether it’s visual or text, that’s been produced by people who are not “professions” paid to actually create that content. And now everyone of course is walking around with an incredible camera in their pocket everywhere they go, that also happens to be attached to an incredibly powerful internet connected computer, so these are always on devices, people can turn them on, pull them out of their pocket anytime, take an image or a video and immediately upload that to the internet, and folks can [inaudible 00:07:11] see that content and engage with it. And this content is becoming ever more important, especially for marketers, and it’s really important because it’s organically produced around your brand. These are real people who are sharing these experiences, and these every day people, whether they have a major social presence and they have thousands of followers, or maybe they don’t have a major social presence, they could be just a micro influencer, someone with a small social following that’s really just their friends and family, but with that as well, I mean, that’s also incredibly, incredibly powerful. HollyG: Well, that’s it, that’s who we’re trusting isn’t it? We know that ultimately we trust recommendations, or advice, or insights from our family and friends amongst, higher than anyone else. Lucas: I think there was a big Forester study done, I think in late 2016, I don’t have that in front of me, but I believe they, from that study they found that somewhere around 70% of US online adults actually trusted those product recommendations or those brand recommendations from friends and family over all types of other brand advertising. And that was all US adults. That was significantly increased when they just looked at millennials making those decisions. So, yeah, it’s definitely pretty important and pretty powerful, specifically those recommendations from friends and family. HollyG:  Nielsen does a similar study. They do the Trusted Advertising study. It’s something that comes out every second year, and that’s what they also find, which is why the whole influence of marketing is, in my view, still very important, because do trust recommendations from other people. They don’t always want to hear it from the brand. There’s still certain things that they want to hear from the brand, but, yeah. We definitely trust our friends, family, and even just other people, other real people, even if we don’t actually know them on the internet. Lucas: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s, it just provides another channel. It’s kind of more about, around diversifying your marketing channels, and moving away from strictly using advertising as a microphone, or like a megaphone really, to shifting some of your focus to actually leveraging some of those brand advocates who are already sharing around your brand. HollyG: So what we know is that, especially in, you know, we’re talking about travel in tourism, we know that people are, when they’re in destination or having some sort of tourism experience, they’re taking photos, they’re sharing these photos on their social media channels, and that’s really what we’re classifying as user generated content, the actual user out there sharing their experiences. So what then, as a brand or a destination, can we do with other people’s user generated, with this user generated content? Lucas: Traditionally when a business or a brand needed visual content, only a couple years ago, or really any type of of content, they would hire someone to produce that content, kind of what we quickly chatted about earlier. So they’d purchase it from somewhere like stock photograph sites, or they’d actually commission that, but now you can start to use user generated content to fill … You can start to use user-generated content to fill many of those different placements where you would have used stock photography or commission photography in the past. And it’s so plentiful. People are producing content like absolutely crazy. I think it was just last year, alone, there was over a trillion photos taken on the iPhone. It’s an incredible stat, and much of that content, of course, made its way into social media in some way. The content is very plentiful. It’s relevant. It’s in the moment, and there are so many ways where you can use it, whether it’s blog posts, whether it is more traditional mediums like advertisements. Obviously, it perfectly fits within the medium of say, a Facebook ad or an Instagram ad because that’s what people are used to seeing that type of content within their feeds, but I mean, anywhere where you can use visual content, or you’d traditionally use visual content, you can use user generated content. HollyG: So I’ve always sort of had the view that, just say someone takes a photo of, you know, my destination and shares it on Instagram, then I could sort of re-gramme that and use it on my Instagram, but I probably wouldn’t do anything else beyond that with it. Possibly, maybe use it on Facebook if I credited the photographer or the person that it came from, but really now, there’s a lot more use of this, as you just mentioned, in things like Facebook ads, in blog posts. I mean, are we actually allowed to use other people’s content in that way? Lucas: Yeah, and I mean, now we’re getting into kinda the rights component of how you kind of managed the legalities of using this content within those different channels. Kinda the example you used with even re-gramming that content, you know, most brands we work with will still err on the side of caution with even re-gramming in the native social networks, so they will still reach out and ask that user for explicit permission to use that content in that way. HollyG: And that really is best practice, isn’t it? To be asking. Lucas: Correct. Yeah, that’s best practice. Absolutely. But I mean, there’s a couple of different ways you can go with this. I mean, many of our customers will just go with a simple comment on a photo and just say, “Hey, we’d love to use your photo in our marketing channels or in our advertising campaign that we’re doing for X,” and they’ll be more explicit around how that content will be used. You know, many folks will actually say, and you know, they’ll call out, “If you’re 18+, and you agree to this, this, and this, please reply. Let us know, and then we’ll feature your photo.” But then some folks are going a step further, and they’ll actually outline terms and conditions that they make, or they ask those users to explicitly agree to before giving their rights to content. So in that type of case, within terms and conditions, of course, that allows a brand to provide a lot more details around how that content may be used before just using a simple comment or a few sentences before leveraging that content, so that can be a little more, I guess, in depth [crosstalk 00:14:44]. HollyG: So, it’d sort of be like, you know, maybe private messaging someone who’s content you like and then getting them to you know, click on a link or something like that to agree to something. Lucas: Yeah. I mean, there’s definitely a couple ways to do it. We know on Instagram, for example, you can just send a link to someone in a comment that they just can’t click on it in that medium, so we’ve seen a lot of brands actually utilise their profile link, so if they’re asking for folks, let’s say you just use a major source of content for them in all of those different marketing channels, they’ll actually have a system where they comment on a photo but ask them to click a link in their bio to provide permission to actually feature that content, and then they’ll go through a process through that link to actually give permission there. HollyG: Is there’s take up on this? Lucas: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, with our customer base, so we do offer solutions for getting rights to content in our platform, so we have like, a very low friction method of getting rights to content, which kind of is in line with what we were just talking about of kind of the first part of this, so it could just be in a comment, and the folks can … that original user can just reply. Generally, it’ll just be with an approval hashtag that you’ll kind of set up, just to make it very simple and make it explicit, and then we take care of a lot of that, so we automate that whole process for the brand. The other method is the more advanced right management process where those folks will generally authenticate with their social accounts, so it’s timestamped. You know that they’ve actually signed in, and they’ve explicitly agreed and signed off on those terms and conditions before, of course, giving your rights to that content. So it’s a little bit more of a in-depth process, but just to get back to you original question, you asked how many people were actually going through that process. We actually see with the standard rights approval process, kind of the more quick method, we see about a 70% approval across our entire customer base. Yes. Seven zero. It’s pretty substantial, and I mean, we work with, of course, tourism brands. A lot of destinations, and I mean, this industry is, of course, very blessed in a sense. People generally have very positive experiences when they’re travelling somewhere, so they are … they see the destination and that tourism brand as a friendly, and they’re very, very open to letting them use their content to actually market that destination further, so yeah, we see about a 70% approval on that. Lucas: When you are getting into actually going through a full terms and conditions and actually signing off on that, we see about a 10-15% drop off, so not too bad. You know, 55 to 60% of people will still go through that full, kind of advanced method, but yeah. Slight drop off just with the added friction. HollyG: That is higher than what I expected. And that is really good to know, actually. I think it can give brands confidence that they can tick the boxes and utilise best practice and still get a really good outcome in terms of being able to access user generated content, so yeah, that’s really good to know. Lucas: Yeah, absolutely. I just wanted to add one more thing. I mean, you can do this whether you’re a small brand or a big brand. You don’t need a tool like CrowdRiff or something to actually manage that whole process for you. I mean, people, especially tourism brands, you know, if you already have a hashtag which you promote, which I’m sure many of your listeners already are promoting some type of hashtag, or using user-generated content in one form or another, but really, the first thing is tracking that content. Looking out there to see what folks out there are actually sharing around your brand, and if there’s a photo that you want to use in some way, or you want to amplify that photo further, really all you need to do is just ask, and people will be, you know, you’ll be surprised how open folks are in actually allowing you to use that content. HollyG: Can you give us, I guess, a few examples of brands and destinations that are doing good stuff in this space of user-generated content, and also just utilising their content? Are you able to give us a few examples? Lucas: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s so brands out there doing some really incredible things, obviously, all over the world. One that comes to mind is actually one that’s kind of close to our heart here at CrowdRiff. It was our first destination customer quite a few years ago, now, which is a small destination in Tennessee called Franklin, and a lot of people think you need to be a big brand to do great marketing, and I mean, they just do an incredible job using digital channels to really craft a really personal and unique story around their destination, and Franklin, in particular, has been very much of the forefront in using different technologies and particularly using user-generated content to tell that story. I know that their team, you know, a couple years ago, when they started making a switch over to user-generated content, really the strategy was we have all of these great folks here who are sharing content within the Franklin area. Rather than tell people what’s so great about Franklin and us, once again, kinda be that megaphone, let’s allow those people to tell our story for us. So they kinda really took that to heart. HollyG: And I guess that’s also you know, visitors to the region, but it’s also locals, as well. Lucas: Absolutely. Absolutely it is. Yeah. I mean, of course, you’re gonna have a tonne of folks who are just locals, and they love, they have that pride of where they’re from, and they’re, of course, experiencing their hometown or their city, and yeah, there’s gonna be a tonne of incredible content that locals are putting out there that you can, of course, amplify further. Yeah, and then, just one of the one that comes off the top of my head is Visit Phoenix. Phoenix, Arizona. I know both of these examples are, I guess, U.S. examples, Visit Phoenix is just doing an incredible job, particularly with user-generated content, where they have kind of gone into a whole new level. They’re using user-generated content on I believe, just over 230 pages of their website. I was just down at the ESTO conference in Phoenix last week actually and their digital marketing specialist was doing a presentation on this. And what they have done, is they’ve actually, they’re not only just using this content on the website, but they’re actually connecting these real experiences that people are having, these visuals, directly to other pages on their site, so people can actually find out more information about those experiences. So of course, that user-generated content serves as inspiration, but a big thing is, okay, how do you take those folks to the next step? And they are actually, you know, they are doing that by taking folks from that inspiration stage to actual planning, which is pretty neat. HollyG: So, does that sort of mean like, so someone’ll be browsing the destination website. They will sort of embed user-generated content into the website. And then sort of what happens? How does it go to the next stage? Lucas: Yeah, good question. Yeah, exactly that. So they’re embedding that user-generated content into everything from, you know, main pages like their things to do page to specific blog posts right through to directory listings pages. But what they’ll do on those embeds, is they will actually add a call-to-action. And generally, that call-to-action will be just in the form of, literally just a descriptive word. You know, they have that Musical Instrument Museum there in Phoenix. So they might have a photo of the Musical Instrument Museum or this experience that a traveller has had there, but then they’ll add a link to, like “Experience the Musical Instrument Museum.” And that link will go right to the directory listings page, or right to a blog post on the museum. HollyG: And is the content that is being fed into the overall site, does it change? Is it live or is every sort of photo, I guess, embedded separately. Lucas: So, they’re embedding it in a gallery style. So they’ll have kind of a gallery of images, or they have let’s say a header, where they’re showing, you know, three to five images within that header. So yeah, they’re showing it in that type of style, but of course you can use single embeds, which many destinations or many brands in general will use single embeds in blog posts and things like that as well. HollyG: Has any of the destinations experiment with whether the pages that have user-generated content on them perform better than say, more stock images? Lucas: Absolutely. Yeah. So we’ve had customers report anywhere from 3-4X increase in time on site, in some instances. We’ve seen up to a 40% reduction in bounce rate as well, when that content is shown above the fold, when someone first lands on that page. And then conversions are obviously much higher as well. We’ve heard anywhere from, you know with some customers, a doubling of conversion rates through to a tripling of conversion rates on where they’re actually showing that user-generated content. HollyG: Wow. I love the thought about, because we think about conversion, but thinking about things like time on site, which can be something really hard to encourage. And also the bounce rate. Yeah, that’s really interesting that people are seeing that increase in time on site and then a reduction of bounce rates, as well as the conversions. Very interesting stuff. Lucas:  If you’re listening and you’re a tourism marketer, and you want to find the best visuals that people are sharing around your brands, easily organise them so they’re quickly at your fingertips, share them with journalists or any other type of stakeholder, and also get information on what content is going to perform the best in your marketing channels, and on your website and in your ads, then yeah, please get in touch. As I mentioned earlier, we work now with over 400 tourism brands across 23 countries. So yeah, love to chat and love to show you some of the cool things our customers are doing. Pretty simple: lucas @crowdriff.com. We also, the company’s on Instagram, of course, which is very fitting, which is just @CrowdRiff. So you can always find us on Instagram or Twitter as well, at the same @CrowdRiff. Website: https://crowdriff.com Now it’s time for our $1,000 Bonus Question. We ask all our guests the very, very same bonus question. And that is, if you only had a $1,000 marketing budget, what would you spend it on? Lucas: A $1,000 budget. This is tough. I’m of course not in the trenches every day, spending marketing dollars. But I do do some research myself, and I feel like I have my finger on the pulse. So what I would spend $1,000 on, would probably be Facebook ads. It’s probably one of the most targeted and most direct marketing tools that you can use, and it’s really easy for anyone as well. And I feel like $1,000 could get you pretty far. HollyG: Yeah. Especially if you know which content performs the best … From using CrowdRiff, then it’s going to make it even more effective isn’t it? Lucas: It definitely is The post Engage your community through visual content – episode 89 appeared first on Holly G.

Talking social and digital insights with High Tea Society founder Michelle Milton   Show notes to come Find more at highteasociety.com The post What’s working with digital and social marketing with founder High Tea Society – episode 88 appeared first on Holly G.

Changes to the Facebook algorithm and what this may mean for tourism marketers. Welcome to Episode 87 of Tourism Upgrade. The podcast unpacking marketing trends from travel, tourism and marketing leaders. I’m your host HollyG and today I have with me Rachel Beaney a digital and social media specialist – And we’ll be discussing the recent changes to the Facebook algorithm and what impact this may have on our social media activities. Welcome to the podcast Rachel!   HollyG: We were just talking before we started about the announcement that Facebook made just really about a month ago at the start of 2018, about some changes they were making. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what happened, and what they said? Rachel: Sure. Facebook announced in the beginning of 2018, around early January, that they were changing their algorithm so their Facebook feed that was distributing content was now going to be focusing on friends and family, rather than pages. Their big spin on the situation was that they were going to be promoting conversations and engagements, and less on brand pages. Facebook as a whole, it sounds like what they’re trying to do is promote organisation conversations a bit more, but for marketers, for us, that meant that our page reaches would drastically, well, I don’t know about drastically reduced, but they’ll reduce from what they were. HollyG: He certainly created a lot of hype, and a lot of fear within the marketer community. Rachel: Yeah, for sure. I received so many SMSs and notifications over 24 hours of people saying have you seen this news, have you seen this news. The thing is that Facebook has been making these changes for a really long time, so we’ve been seeing these changes over years. About every six months they do something like this, but for some reason this particular change, maybe because it was January, I don’t know, people really were quite passionate about this particular change. HollyG: I think that’s a really good point you make that actually people like us who are living and breathing this social media everyday, there is changes all the time, and I agree it’s sort of just another one of those things really. Rachel: I think that it is a case of rolling with these updates as they happen. Every month there’s a new kind of change, and we need to think about how we’re gonna adapt to that change. This is another one of those which was a little bit of a surprise, but looking at Facebook’s news in the past it’s something we kind of could predict, seeing their declining reach over the past three or four years from 100% to 50% to 25% to 1%, and now the mysterious less than 1%, whatever that amount is. I think it’s something that we sort of could predict, so it’s not too big a surprise I think for a lot of people who are immersed in this space. HollyG: I guess we want to talk about what this means, and the questions that we need to be asking ourselves as marketers and as business owners who have a Facebook page and use this as our marketing, what this means. I guess I first wanted to ask did we see a drastic decline overnight in organic reach? We both look after a lot of pages. Did you note anything? Rachel: Not particularly across what I’ve been working on, just because our Facebook reach is about 1% already, so less than 1% … Look, Facebook hasn’t any switch that they turn on overnight, so it’s something that does roll out over time. Of course the Facebook algorithm depending on the kind of content you post or what time of day you post, or whether you’re posting a really engaging news article, whether or not you’re getting more or less reach is based on so many factors. I think that even as I’ve been looking through my pages, these things it’s not just a case where suddenly I’ve got minuscule reach. These changes happen over time. Your content that you post also impacts that as well. HollyG: Definitely. I saw that. I actually did see a couple of days where things were looking a little dire, and then it’s sort of back to almost normal. As you say, there’s no switch that gets flicked. It is more of a gradual thing.   HollyG: What do we mean when we talk about quality content? Rachel: It’s a big question. I think in terms of content there are a couple of ways we can look at it. One of which is looking at the content that is right for your audience, and then there’s content that the algorithm favours. They’re two slightly different things. Content that your audience engages with is obviously content that really taps into what connects with your audience, whether that’s creating conversation or creating something amazing that has an emotive reaction. Maybe it’s beautiful photos of a scenery around a tour that you’re creating, something that creates an emotive reaction. In terms of the Facebook algorithm, Facebook has always favoured different content types over time. Sometimes they explicitly state that, and sometimes they don’t. It’s just through testing that we say on our page, on this particular page, photos work really well for this audience, or links work really well for this audience. In the most recent update in January, they did mention they’re more likely to favour things that create conversations and live postings, so things like Facebook live. They’re skewing basically towards anything that starts a conversation or anything that’s about engaging community. HollyG: That’s interesting. You see that with content. You know that if you post something and you do have a lot of responses or conversation around it, it gets more reach. That happens because people are engaging with it and that sort of thing. I think that’s actually a really good point to remember. In the old days, it’s sort of just post a picture, and people would Like it, but maybe that’s not really performing as well as other things. We’re seeing good success with web links to quality content and that sort of thing. I guess thinking about it from a broader perspective, should we as marketers be phasing down Facebook? Is it still going to be relevant, or is social media still relevant for marketing? Rachel: I think it is a really tough question, and I think for some businesses they’ll have looked at this Facebook change and said you know what, I’m done. I can see that it can be quite stressful. I think that it really depends on your objective with your business. I think that social media does some things really well, and some things not so well, and it’s about looking at what you want to be doing. I think it’s also worth keeping in mind that when we talk about social media we’re talking about a lot of things. Talking about a Facebook page when you’re organically posting content is different to running a Facebook group, is different to running Facebook ads, and is different to working with an influencer on Instagram. Each of these things are different, and they bring different results. HollyG: I think that’s a great point. One of the reasons that we’re having this conversation is that you wrote a really great blog post on your blog about the Facebook algorithm change, and sort of saying these are some of the things that we can do now, so don’t panic. One of the really great points you raised was about looking at other tools and platforms. Can we talk about that a little bit? I guess the one takeaway I took from your blog post was don’t put all your eggs in one basket, don’t just put everything into your Facebook page, really make sure that you’ve got other options there. Is that sort of what you were saying? Rachel: Yeah, for sure. I think it’s worth saying that putting all your eggs in one basket for me isn’t necessarily about saying being on every single social network, because that’s exhausting, and impractical in real life. It’s about diversifying the way that you engage with your customers. That can be by making sure that you have people who are on your Facebook page that are also on your mailing list or people who are following you on Instagram also on LinkedIn if they’re the same audience. It’s about diversification because if any of the big social platforms make a change we could have potentially lost that audience. It’s about making sure you’ve got some of that audience on the third party social platforms, also across your own platforms. Your website and your mailing list, you can either have people who are on your mailing list or people who just visit your website, you can then tag them for retargeting with ads. Whether it’s a case of diversification in terms of having people across different platforms, or whether it’s your owned and earned platforms, it’s about spreading that out so if one drops out you’ve got some other options to keep engaging your audience. HollyG: Are there any that you think would work particularly well for tourism businesses or destinations? Rachel: What I first was thinking about it, tourism is actually in a really great position for social media marketing because there’s such a passionate engaged community. Everyone loves talking about travel, so it’s the perfect platform for social media. I think some opportunities for people who are looking for new ways to combat the Facebook page changes is looking at things like Facebook groups. Whether it’s coming up with a group that people travelling to an area or a particular sport, or people who love kayaking or whatever it is, it’s looking at Facebook groups to engage that community aspect, but also the visual aspect. Looking at things like Instagram and Pinterest are really useful in terms of they’ve got such a strong visual component. Off the back of that, I’d also say that it’s also worth keeping in mind your audience for that as well. Each social platform has a slightly different audience, so if you’re targeting people who are slightly younger focusing on Instagram would be more effective, if you’re targeting maybe women in their thirties, Pinterest would be really solid as well. It’s also thinking about who your audience is and which platform they’re on. Maybe it’s LinkedIn. If you’ve got a corporate audience and do corporate tours, looking at LinkedIn in order to tap into that audience there I think is the other way to approach that. HollyG: One of the things I think is really important, and I’ve probably mentioned on this podcast lots of times, is making sure that we, and we’ve touched on it already, but making sure that we’re not just leaving everything up to the hands of these third party social platforms, that we actually are creating our own platform, and the best way to do that is through having an email database. Is that something that you see is still really important? Rachel: Yeah, I do. I think email is important to have a strong marketing mix. As I was saying earlier, not just putting all your eggs in one basket. People might find out about you on Facebook and they might visit your website to find out more about you, they might get reminded of you through email. Making sure that you’ve got all of these touch points so that they’re getting to know you and trust you all the time, I think email is particularly important in terms of things like running Facebook ads, and actually any ad platform I think these days, definitely LinkedIn ads now, you can upload your email list, and then you can use those to target ads to customers, or you can build lookalike audiences off those where Facebook [inaudible 00:15:14] … People with similar characteristics, and shows ads for those people as well. Even if you’re not using email just for email, having those emails are so important for digital marketing because you can use them in a lot of other ways as well. I would definitely endorse working hard to build up a strong email list. HollyG:  Are there any other tactics we need to be looking at to future-proof our business from a marketing perspective? Rachel: I think the thing that I would focus on is making sure that I’ve got that diversification, looking at making sure I’ve got a solid owned property, so that’s our website and our email list, and looking at making sure we’ve got solid traffic, we’re tagging that traffic so we can re-target ads to those people long term. Setting up something like Facebook pixel for example or the LinkedIn pixel [inaudible 00:16:09] marketing means that if anyone ever visits your site you can retarget them with an ad. Setting that up now means that even if you don’t use it for five years time, you can still retarget people down the track. I think that having that diversification of social platforms, thinking about your top social platforms that your audience is on and focusing on those, but also trying to get those people across different platforms just so that if things change we are in a better position. There’s already rumours that Instagram might do a similar thing to Facebook, and reduce their reach as well. While that’s only rumours, it’s not impossible because Facebook also owns Instagram. It’s something that we can suspect might happen in the future. I think it’s worth keeping in mind diversifying that. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. HollyG: Also thinking not to panic, that changes are going to happen, that is actually part of being a good marketer, is being across this sort of stuff. Also to educate other people that we’re working with that these things are going to happen, and to keep across them. I wanted just to flag with people because I thought it was a really good point, it was an earlier post, I think it was around November, you talked about your website might actually impact how your posts perform on Facebook, and that linking people back from Facebook to your website having a really good website is going to actually make your Facebook posts perform better. That’s what I took out of it. Is that what you’ve seen? Rachel: Yeah. In terms of looking at what Facebook had said in terms of what has impacted their algorithm, in 2017 and I think some content from 2016, they explicitly said we will look for this specific criteria on your website to determine whether it’s a legitimate site or not. In their quest to defeat spam and fake content on their website, or shared on Facebook, they look at websites to see is the content legitimate, is it authentic, and if it’s not they’ll reduce the reach of that post. If your website takes a really long time to load, if it’s got a really high bounce rate, if it’s got lots of popup ads, if it’s got a really click-bait title, Facebook will reduce the amount of people it serves that post to. Making sure that your website is up to scratch might make a difference in terms of the algorithm. As you say, this was announced before the most recent changes, but I think that it’s good practice to get into anyway because it’s good for SEO as well. Google looks at these exact same factors when they’re ranking your website for SEO. Even if you’re not doing it for Facebook, it’s good practice for SEO just to polish up your website and have a look at how fast is it loading. Can you optimise some of your images to make it load a bit faster, that kind of thing? HollyG: Yeah, and obviously making sure that it is also mobile responsive, as well. I know definitely with Google, but also from our experience with Facebook, your posts aren’t really going to perform very well if you’re linking people back to a site that’s not mobile responsive. That’s a very important one as well. How can people find out a little bit more about you or connect with you? Rachel Beaney: Yeah, sure. People can find out more about me through my website, which is rachelbeaney.com or they can get in touch with me on Twitter. My handle’s beaney, so @beaney. It’s not like the hat, it’s a bit different. Yeah, anyone can feel free to get in touch, ask a question and have a chat. I’ve also got a Facebook group called Bean Social that people can come and hang out in as well, so there’s plenty of ways to get in touch and have a chat. If you only had a one thousand dollar marketing budget, what would you spend it on? HollyG: Last time, in episode 77, I did ask you the question if you only had a $1000 marketing budget what would you spend it on. Now looking back at episode 77, we talked about retargeting, I believe, I think. I thought maybe I could ask you the question and say would you change that answer, or would you keep that answer? I guess time changes, so … Rachel: Yeah. I’ve been playing a lot with using lookalikes on Facebook lately, so I think uploading your mailing list or using something like anyone who’s engaged with your ad before and building a lookalike audience based on people who you already are really engaging, I think that’s a really effective way of finding new audiences. If you’re looking for new audiences, I would upload your mailing list or existing customer data, build a custom audience, and build a lookalike off that custom audience, and I would give that a go. Otherwise, I’m still staying with the re-targeting idea. HollyG: They sort of relate, very closely related anyway. Rachel: Yeah. I think it depends I guess what I’m trying to do. HollyG: That’s right. I guess the moral to the story, and I would agree with this as well, is definitely exploring the beautiful thing of Facebook ads, because they are very cost effective and there’s so much you can do with them to either reach an existing audience or reach new audiences. In the age of where we’re seeing organic reach decline, really we all need to be across and up to date with what’s happening from a Facebook ad perspective. Rachel: For sure. HollyG: Cool. Excellent. Thank you so much. Good to chat with you. Rachel: It was lovely to be back. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher or your preferred podcast service. Tweet me with any comments or feedback @hollygalbraith or email is good too holly (at) hollyg.com.au We love to read reviews and reviews really make a difference to our ranking in iTunes. If you could take the time to add a review to iTunes this would be greatly appreciated and i’ll give you a shout out on an upcoming episode! DID YOU ENJOY THIS EPISODE? CHECK OUT EPISODE 77 FOR A FURTHER CHAT BETWEEN HOLLY AND RACHEL. The post Thinking beyond Facebook for your tourism social media strategy – episode 87 appeared first on Holly G.

BIKE TOURISM Welcome to Tourism Upgrade, the podcast unpacking marketing trends from travel, tourism, and marketing leaders. I’m your host Holly G. Today we welcome Russ Roca from Path Less Pedaled. We’ll be chatting about bike tourism. Welcome to the podcast, Russ. Russ Roca: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be on the show. HollyG: Now you’ve done a bit of bike riding in your time by the sounds of it. Can you share a little bit about your pedaling adventures and where it all started for you in terms of having an interest in bike tourism? Russ Roca: Yeah. It started in 2009. A girlfriend and I decided to sell everything and travel by bike. That’s what we did. We got rid of everything and were kind of nomadic bike travellers for a span of about three years. It was largely in the US but then we spent some time in New Zealand. We actually were booked to go to Australia but by the end of that three period we were just really tired. Russ Roca: We landed in Portland, Oregon. At the time we still wanted to do things on bikes and in travel. It just worked out well because the state of Oregon was launching a big bicycle tourism initiative. We happened to meet the people near a development department. They asked us to start creating some marketing for that programme. It’s kind of how it all started from our own personal journey. Then transforming it into working in the tourism world. HollyG: Wow. When you say you were biking around for three years is that really how it went? How much would you ride every day and sort of stop off and sleep and that sort of thing? Were you camping? Russ Roca: Yeah. I think our mileage was about 30 to 50 miles a day. Initially, we were moving every single day but then it got to a point after three months that we realised that we were still missing out on so much because even though we were moving slowly and not covering as much distance we weren’t really getting to explore small towns and destinations. About three months in we decided, “Okay, we’ll pick an interesting destination and then base camp there for about two weeks.” Sometimes it was a couple of weeks. Yeah. It shifted over time from constantly moving to picking places to base camp out of. HollyG: When you were on these journeys did you meet other people doing a similar thing? Russ Roca: Yeah. 2009 was a popular year to do that. It was a big economic downturn in the US so we met just scores of people. All sorts of different stories. Programmers that had been laid off and got a severance and were pedalling from Alaska to Argentina. It was kind of a fascinating time to get into it then. Definition of bike tourism? We’ve kind of tried to push our own definition, which kind of borrows from the definition of a trip. That would be any kind of trip for the purpose of leisure that includes a bicycle. I know some tourism definitions define a trip as something that’s over 50 miles but because you’re on the bike and sometimes 50 miles is a lot we decided to focus on the fact that there’s a bicycle rather than a mileage parameter. Bike Tourism: any kind of trip for the purpose of leisure that includes a bicycle. What’s nice about this definition is it keeps it pretty broad. It covers everything from self-supported bike travel, which is what we did, to things like event rides. You guys had Tour Down Under recently. All the pro cyclists coming, all the people that follow the race and stay overnight. To things like destination cycling, if a place is a mountain bike hub those guests would come and stay the long weekend to ride a trail system. Under bike tourism it’s a big umbrella and has lots of specific forms of travel within it. HollyG: Yeah. This is my experience with bike tourism. Both times have involved wineries. I’ve gone to a wine region and they have a bike trail so you can hire a bike for the day and stop off at different wineries along the way. Is that classed as it as well? Russ Roca: Oh, yeah. That’s definitely part of it. Actually, Oregon did a state study and for the state of Oregon they calculated that bicycle tourism generated $400 million for the state annually. What’s interesting about that study is it got really granular into road cyclists, mountain bikers, casual and family cycling. So people that would go to a destination and maybe cycling wasn’t their primary activity but because they could rent a bike they would rent one and actually that section of cyclists actually spent the most. You’re thinking families or people that are staying to do wine tasting or other activities. HollyG: Yeah. I recently went to South Australia and they have a rail trail. They’ve converted the railway into a biking trail, which connects a lot of the wineries. Doing that experience or part of it it definitely made us stay in that region for longer. I guess that is very much a part of it as well. Russ Roca: Yeah. Definitely. Rail trails are great examples because they really make the bike travel experience really accessible to a wider range of people because it’s safer, it’s more casual, you’re not competing with cars. I think they’re some of the best return on investment in terms of infrastructure. When we were travelling we went to New Zealand and rode the Otago Central Rail Trail, which is about 100 miles. It’s unpaved. We chatted with businesses along the way and we asked them, “How do people usually interact with this rail trail?” They found that people were spending three to five days on a 100 mile stretch, which is pretty good. ******************* I hope to see you all at Destination Food, Australia’s first culinary tourism conference. It will be held at the Museum of Sydney on Monday, the 21st of May, 2018. This event will bring together key people working in food tourism to share ideas, stories, network, and learn. It’s aimed at destinations as well as food tourism operators, hotels, marketers, and food PRs, media, and content creators. I really hope to see you there. For more details and tickets head to Destination dash Food dot com dot AU. ******************** Are there statistics about the growth and interest of biking or bike tourism?  Russ Roca: Yeah. From my perspective the interest is definitely growing. We kind of measure this by the number of various economic development studies that have come out specifically on cycling. I alluded to that Oregon one. That was in 2012. In 2016, Sierra, Colorado did their own economic impact study and they found that $448 million were brought in by non-residents that were doing cycling-related activities. Let’s see what we have here. In 2016 New Zealand did a study on their Great Ride system and they calculated 1.3 million people travelled to New Zealand to experience the great rides and that generated about $37.4 million for the local communities. We definitely see it in the States but we’re also seeing it around the world. I kind of keep my finger on the pulse of these things and all the time I’m seeing destinations create marketing specifically targeting cyclists or brand videos, destination videos, with cycling in it or different use cycling events that are popping up everywhere. HollyG: You mentioned I guess New Zealand and Oregon. What destinations are doing Bike Tourism well that you have observed? Russ Roca: I’d say New Zealand and Oregon. Russ Roca: In the United States, Oregon has definitely been a leader. A couple of years ago they just really grasped onto the idea of bicycle tourism. A lot of different state agencies created this whole system called the Scenic Bikeway Programme. The whole idea is that they’re iconic great rides within the state. This was a huge partnership between not only the tourism folks but the Department of Transportation, the state parks, all these different land managers, all these different CBBs and regional DMOs. They really led the way in the United States. I think internationally there are tonnes of examples but another one that we’ve seen … I think the Otago Central Rail Trail does it really well. That’s kind of a fascinating story because, again, 100 mile gravel stretch. Initially when they first were starting to develop around the rail trail they envisioned that the type of rider would be a young, male mountain biker that would ride the thing in one day or two days. It’s not very long. Then what they found was the actual user that was using it were more women in their fifties and their families. Instead of doing it in one day they were doing it in four to five days. That’s an awesome example where they initially thought it was going to be one thing but then adjusted to accommodate another kind of guest. Since then you go every 10K or 15K there’s a pub, there’s a B&B, there’s a place to camp if you want. There are all these food options. It’s just become this really cool experience. HollyG: Diversifying that market that the destination attracts as well, which is something that destinations try so hard to do. Russ Roca: At the corner of each bicycle tourism experience is some kind of great riding option. If you’re fortunate to be in a destination with a rail trail then that would be an obvious asset. What’s interesting these days is there’s a whole trend in cycling where people want to ride on dirt and gravel roads. This is pretty unique because now a destination doesn’t have to have these perfectly paved roads with wide shoulders to attract cyclists. If they’re dirt roads that’s a new latent asset. I know cyclists are gravitating towards this because there’s generally less traffic on dirt roads and it brings you to more remote-feeling places. If a destination has dirt roads they may see it as just dirt roads but now it could be reframed into a great cycling asset that’s actually really popular. HollyG: Yeah. That is really interesting because I think as you say destinations might feel like they don’t have the level of investment that they need but possibly they don’t need that. Russ Roca: Yeah. In my work specifically we’ve done a lot of outreach and speaking and presenting to small rural communities where their only asset is dirt roads or roads where no one drives on. That’s kind of the beauty of bicycle tourism. It’s not like you have to build a water park, a theme park, an area or invest in a golf course or something to attract visitors. It’s already infrastructure that you have that you can reframe for the cyclists. I guess the biggest shift would be in terms of the hospitality and the marketing and trying to reach the cycling visitor. HollyG: Yeah. Sometimes we think we have to … I don’t know, be competing on all these other levels. It’s like looking at what the destination has to offer realistically and then seeing what we can match to that. I think that’s really interesting with bike tourism. Are there other things that bike tourists, in general, are looking for when they are going to a destination? I guess it’s different when there’s events or things like that. Long-term or short-term stays. Russ Roca: Yeah. I think the biggest thing would be a sense of welcoming hospitality towards cyclists. I think as a group we tend to always be on the defensive because we’re sharing space with cars and we don’t always feel welcome. When the destination really reaches out and promotes cycling and promotes the idea of cycling-friendly hotels or maybe the town general store has a pump that you can use if you’re a cyclist or maybe the hotel does where you’re staying then those really small touches go a long way in terms of attracting cycling guests. We’ve seen some really unlikely examples of this happening. One of my favourite stories is this hunting lodge out in eastern Oregon. Very rural, very remote. This guy Phil has this lodge called TREO Ranches. He does a lot of good hunting business but when hunting season is over he was looking for another activity to fill in that gap. For some reason he stumbled upon cycling. He’s got tonnes of gravel roads. He’s done the legwork. He went to bike mechanic school and bought a shuttle to bring cyclists from Portland out to eastern Oregon to enjoy that area. That’s a great example of he realised his main asset was the emptiness. He already had the lodge facility. He just had to reframe it for a different customer. HollyG: I love that. Russ Roca: Yeah. He does some really interesting touches. When the hunters are there he’s got really light beer but when the cyclists come he switches it to IPAs and stouts. He knows the market really well. HollyG: Very clever. We’re seeing that with ski destinations as well. That’s been something for a long time. In their summer and spring putting in a lot of bike facilities and things like that to attract the mountain biker during that other season. I know that’s working very successfully in the main ski regions in Australia, which, yes, there are ski regions in Australia. Only a couple but they’re there. Did you want to talk a little bit more about Travel Oregon and what you’ve done there? I was thinking specifically just talking about some of the videos and that sort of thing. Russ Roca: Yeah. I work with Travel Oregon. It’s really interesting. We met their development person and she knew that we had done a lot of bike travel and could really relate the bike travel experience. They asked us to create videos and photography for each of these iconic rides. I think what was unique about the process was they really left it up to us to discover the narrative of each bike ride. We would contact the local community and say, “What do you want to show off? What’s the essence of this region?” We didn’t want each of the videos to be this bland vanilla, “Come bike here” but we wanted to really sink our teeth into what’s the value proposition of the area. In some places there’s a [inaudible 00:17:06] Oregon. There’s lots of good shopping, retail, beer. It was kind of focused on those activities. In other ones we would run along the river that had awesome fly fishing. We showed the bike travellers carrying fly rods on their bikes and stopping and fishing. I feel like our biggest contribution to that project was we interfaced with the people in the region, really respected their area, tried to tease out what the narrative element of the marketing pieces would be. I think that’s really important. We’ve seen a lot more bicycling destination videos and they tend to be a little bit too vanilla. In bike tourism the promise is good riding. If everyone promises good riding what’s that extra hook that’s going to bring that cycling visitor? That’s where we really keyed in on the network with Travel Oregon. HollyG: I love that. Yeah. That’s fantastic. Actually a long time ago one of my early podcasts, episode 28, is I talked to Travel Oregon. It was when they were first going down the path and talking about the Seven Wonders of Oregon. Yeah, that was about a specific campaign. I know it had a little bit of cycling stuff in there as well. Yeah. They consistently do some fantastic work, don’t they? Russ Roca: Yeah. Yeah. Right after that campaign I think the following year they extended it and they extended it to the Seven Bikes of the Seven Wonders. They actually asked seven different bike builders in the state of Oregon to create a bike that fits thematically with the seven wonders of Oregon. It was a really cleverly executed campaign. HollyG: Is there any other final thoughts or comments you wanted to make if we’re … The people listening work in the tourism industry, a lot of destinations or tour operators, that sort of thing. Is there any other final thoughts or comments you wanted to make? Also, if people want to get in touch with you can you tell us a little bit about the best way to do that as well? GREAT INFO AHEAD Russ Roca: I think my initial suggestions for any destination is to reach out to the local cycling group and local bike shop and have a discussion with them to see what they think are the best of the best rides in the area. That would be a real obvious first place to go to. In terms of actually marketing a route there are lots of tools out there that are free. There’s a website called Strava where cyclists will post their rides and it’s got real social component. There’s another website called Ride With GPS. As a destination you can set up an account and once you tease out what the best routes are for an area, put it up on Strava, put it up on Ride With GPS. I know when I travel to a new location the first thing I’ll do is I’ll bring up those apps and see, “Oh, are people riding here? What’s the most popular look?” That’s how I’ll discover new rides in the destination. Those would be some easy inexpensive steps. In terms of if you’re going to favour a platform I definitely use Instagram. There’s lots of cyclists are on Instagram. There’s a couple of key hashtags to use to get discovered. I’d say #roadslikethese and #outsideisfree. Those two hashtags if you incorporate it into any brand marketing on Instagram around cycling then you’ll definitely get a couple looks and maybe new followers. In terms of contacting me we’ve got a website. There’s a contact form there. You can email me directly at Path Less Pedaled at Gmail dot com. We’ve got a YouTube channel that’s about to click over 19,000 viewers. It’s a mix of community content targeted towards cyclists but it also has some sponsored destination videos that we’ve done with destinations. If you want to see some of that side of the work that we do it’s there. We’re on Twitter and Instagram as well under Path Less Pedaled. https://www.youtube.com/c/PathLessPedaledTV https://www.instagram.com/pathlesspedaled/ HollyG: Awesome. I’ll put those links in the show notes as well. Yeah, that was so, so great. You’re obviously very immersed in this space. Yeah. I look forward to following along. You guys have got some podcasts happening as well. Worth checking that out too. Russ Roca: Yeah. We’re going to launch a bicycle tourism-specific podcast. It’s not yet up but I’m still conducting interviews. We’re going to interview destinations that we’ve worked with, destinations that are doing it well, success stories, failure stories, what are the best steps if your destination wants to tackle bike tourism? It’s going to be a good resource. Hopefully in the next couple of months. The first episode is going to be on Oregon. HollyG: Ah, perfect. Great. Excellent. Now are you up for the bonus question? $1000 bonus question Russ Roca: Sure. HollyG: Now it’s time for our $1000 Bonus Question. Awesome. I ask all my guests the same question. That is if you only had a $1000 marketing budget what would you spend it on? Russ Roca: I’ve thought long and hard about that. I would suggest finding a cyclist … It would be photography and using that … Either finding a local cyclist that’s also a savvy photographer and buying some assets so you can have it on your Instagram feed using the good hashtags or on your Strava page, which is free, or your Ride With GPS page, which is also free. Cyclists are very visual. We want to see a place, we want to know what the experience is like to get us out there. I’d say a lot of destinations that we’ve worked with have awesome riding but terrible photography. That’s one of the big stumbling blocks. HollyG: Awesome. Great answer. Fantastic. When you get your bike tourism podcast up and happening I’ll definitely be listening so I can learn a little bit more about this particular niche, if you call it a niche. Yeah, thank you very much. Russ Roca: Yeah. Thanks for having me on the show. HollyG: For the show notes for this episode head to Holly G dot com dot AU. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast service. The post Bike tourism opportunities for tourism destinations – episode 86 appeared first on Holly G.

Photography tips for tourism: podcast with photographer Alfonso Calero Tourism Upgrade the Podcast Episode 85 Welcome to Tourism Upgrade. The podcast unpacking marketing trends from travel, tourism and marketing leaders. I’m your host HollyG and today we welcome Sydney photographer Alfonso Calero and we will we chatting about photography inspiration and creativity. http://www.alfonso.com.au https://www.photographytravel.net   HollyG:                   How did you get into photography in the first place, Alfonso? Alfonso:                  Professionally, I’m what’s considered in photography a late-starter because I decided to go to the Sydney Institute of Technology TAFE in Ultimo to study a diploma when I was 30 years old. I, of course, started photography when I was about 19, and I’ve been doing it ever since. HollyG:                   Wow. Yeah. Well, there’s a bit of a growing trend I’ve been reading about lately of this, making a career change in your 30’s and 40’s, and with so much of our work life still yet to go, I think yeah, it can be a good move to make. What are the things that you like to take photos of? Alfonso:                  Mainly people and places. HollyG:                   Because you travel so much by the looks of it. Alfonso:                  Yeah. I really enjoy stopping people on the street and asking their permission to do a street portrait, and also, I love to take photos of cityscapes at night or landscapes out in rural areas, so it’s that combination of being able to switch genres that makes it quite interesting. HollyG:                   What are people like when you ask them if you can take a photo of them? Are most people like open to that sort of thing? Alfonso:                  I’ve been lucky so far. You will have to accept that maybe 10% of the time, you will get people saying no, but I think it’s the people you approach and how you approach them that can either make or break the … getting the permission working [inaudible 00:02:26]. HollyG:                   Yeah. Alfonso:                  You look at the body language. You look at … If they’re walking in a hurry, they’re probably going to say no to get somewhere. HollyG:                   Yeah. Alfonso:                  If they seem to be floundering around or standing around and you don’t seem like you’re intimidating them … I don’t usually have a very long lens on my camera as well, so it doesn’t feel as scary for them, and explain what you’re doing, why you’re doing it. You take your sunglasses off. You give them a handshake if the culture allows for it. Just show a little bit of trust quickly. HollyG:                   Yeah. I like that because when I travel, I’m a very amateur photographer, but I actually just love taking photos of people, but I am often very, very shy about asking, so yes, I might try and practice that a little bit more. You’ve been obviously in photography for quite a while, and I guess I wanted to ask a little bit about how it’s changed over the time that you’ve been practicing. Alfonso:                  Massive shift. When digital photography started over 10 years ago, there was a massive drop in the work because everyone suddenly became a photographer, being able to have that access to digital photography. That’s a massive shift, a technology shift, but it’s exciting that we have that available to us now. I’m 52 years old, and the younger generation are much faster at learning because we used to shoot with film, so we have to spend the money, make the mistakes, wait for our results, and then look … Alfonso:                  With digital, you can learn from your mistakes immediately and the young are so tech-savvy, and they’re so fast. You’ve seen some people out there that are 19, 20, and they’re doing incredibly beautiful work. HollyG:                   I think you raise a really good point actually because one of the things that I find when I talk to people, tourism operators, or people in the industry who maybe have been in the industry for quite some time and they have … They’re not used to using a camera, and they’re quite scared to take photos, but really, today … I guess two points. One, in this world of social media or in social media marketing, business owners and people really need to know how to take a good photo in my view, and we can talk about that in a minute, but also, the learning curve can be a lot easier because it is digital, so you can practise and make mistakes, and it’s not a … Yeah, it’s not a costly exercise. Alfonso:                  Yeah, definitely. All those points are spot-on. I think that the immediacy is great, but the question is just because you can take photos and see them quickly, does it mean that you will probably be getting better? Yeah. Like you said, it’s down to your confidence. You come back from your holidays typically with thousands of photos and you’re overwhelmed by the amount, so you almost want to try and consider shooting less, but getting better quality instead of shooting a lot and hoping to hit the target. HollyG:                   Yeah, that is very true. That works in marketing as well actually. I guess is that some of the things that you teach people when you take people out on photography tours, and photography walks, and things like that? Alfonso:                  Yes. Yes, but every person learns differently and every person has a different form of visual communication, so I have to figure out what they’re like, what they like to photograph, but also how they like to photograph, and then try and guide them in that way to enhance that style of shooting. HollyG:                   Okay, so what are some of the different styles that you come across with that? Alfonso:                  Okay, so for example, you might have somebody who’s a very organised person, a very neat person, and they would prefer to shoot with less distortion of maybe architecture, so all the lines are really straight as opposed to someone who has more of a photojournalistic style where they shoot really wide angle. Let’s say, if you’re shooting architecture, the building might look a little bit more distorted. Either way is fine. It’s just that it communicates a different message. HollyG:                   Yeah. I love that. I have never thought about that before. Before we get into a few more tips because I’d love you to share some tips with us, I just wanted to talk a little bit about why is quality photography for those working in the tourism industry really important? Alfonso:                  Because we’re saturated with visuals and video, you really need to stand out with a quality shot. If you don’t, then you just get lost in the mix. HollyG:                   Yeah. There’s ridiculous statistics about how many photos are uploaded online every second and videos on YouTube and all that sort of things, so yeah. I guess it is about looking at ways to cut through. For the show notes for this episode, head to hollyg.com.au. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast service. Can we go into a little bit about maybe some tips that you can share with us around how we can take a better photo? Alfonso:                  Definitely, so it all … Initially, I guess it would help if I at least know if they are shooting with their smartphones or if they have a DSLR or a mirrorless camera. In other words, they can change the lenses. Of course, they have more manual control with the bigger cameras compared to the smartphone. There will be some pros and cons as to what capabilities each one can do. If it’s about your smartphone, and you’re in an event like you just mentioned, and you want to use it there, you may notice that it’s quite a struggle to try and get a nice photo in an indoor environment. It’s dark. There are all these really orangey-colored tungsten lights, and so it’s a challenge. People are moving around, and it’s tricky. Look. If you happen to have a camera that’s a DSLR or aside from your smartphone and you can at least consider learning how to tackle the manual settings, it won’t be a hit and miss, and it’s a lot easier than people think. Another I guess suggestion which wouldn’t matter what camera you have is composition. If you can master the elements and principles of composition, instinctively, I think most people know them like leading line, texture, looking for shapes, looking for the right tone. Those are some examples of composition. HollyG:                   I remember early on learning. What are you actually taking the photo of? Yeah. What part of that are you actually trying to communicate? Alfonso:                  Yeah, and I think the most common error is people want to say too much in the photo. They’re communicating maybe more than one message. I guess in marketing, it’s the same thing, people trying to say too much, and then the message gets muddled and unclear. I guess you’re almost like Robin Hood with the bow and arrow. You’re trying to hit a target or dominant point of focus in the shot, and you want the viewer’s eyes to lock in on that and not be distracted by any other elements around it. HollyG:                   Great description. That’s awesome. Where do you find inspiration for your photography? Alfonso:                  Everywhere all the time, but mainly, I gravitate around towards art, so I look at different periods of art. Mainly, paintings. Before photography started, these painters mastered light and composition, so they must be on the right track, and they definitely are. I’m always really excited by that. I use Pinterest a lot. HollyG:                   Oh, yeah. Alfonso:                  I have a lot of boards, mood boards. In the old days, before Pinterest, I used to cut clippings on and put them on my board in the studio, and I just look at those. Now, with Pinterest, yeah, it’s amazing how many boards I have because there’s so much inspiration from everything. HollyG:                   Oh my gosh, it’s addictive, isn’t it? Alfonso:                  Yeah, I love it. I love it, and you could share with people too, which is great, so they could see my boards. I could see theirs. We could give each other ideas. It definitely motivates you to go out there and create. HollyG:                   I’m going to check yours out now. Alfonso:                  Yeah. HollyG:                   You travel to a lot of different destinations because you take photography groups and things like that overseas. Alfonso:                  Yes. HollyG:                   Is that true? Do you have a favourite destination to photograph? Alfonso:                  Yeah, so I started this travel education tour company about 2008, and because I’m born … I was born in the Philippines, but I’m of Spanish descent, and I came to Australia when I was 15. I used to live in Japan, and my wife is Japanese. I focus on those four places. Australia, of course. HollyG:                   Yeah. Alfonso:                  The Philippines, Spain, and Japan. I only take up to four people, from two to four people, so they’re very private, custom-made itineraries, and we focus on enhancing their style and genres of photography every day for about five to 10 days. Again, the more I go back to the places I have a strong connection with because I know the local language, the culture. I have friends and family there. The more interesting it gets because my local knowledge is building it every time I go back, and I’m exploring new areas, and it’s so much fun. HollyG:                   Yeah. Cool. Is there any final sort of comments or tips you wanted to share? Also, let us know how people can find out a little bit more about you and connect with you. Alfonso:                  Sure. Look. If you haven’t bought yourself a larger camera aside from the smartphone, don’t hesitate to go out and use your smartphone. I teach a smartphone course in the Rocks almost every Saturday afternoon. That goes for about three hours, and more information can be found on photographytravel.net. My overseas tours or my Tasmanian tours are on alfonso.com.au. Yeah. Look. Feel free to drop me a line at any time if you just want to have a little chat, and also, I would love to help people think of ideas for any of their tourism campaigns that are coming up because it seems to be changing rapidly with the way people are viewing things online. HollyG:                   Yeah, great points, and we’ll put the links to those in our show notes, and I will give you a big thank you. Actually, we have our Women in Tourism Leadership Christmas Party coming up soon, and you have actually donated a prize for that, which is one of the tours and lessons down at the Rocks, so someone attending that event will be lucky enough to win that. Yeah. Thank you for that. Alfonso:                  No problem. Lovely, lovely to do that. HollyG:                   Now, it’s time for our thousand-dollar bonus question. Now, I have a bonus question if you’re up for it. Alfonso:                  Of course. HollyG:                   I ask all my guests the same question, and the question is, if you only had a $1,000 marketing budget, what would you spend it on? Alfonso:                  I would probably if I was going to market my photo tours … Yeah. A thousand probably won’t be enough, but I’d probably get a videographer that does a little bit of drone as well if possible. Yes. I’d probably get a videographer to do and I’d make some of my stills with the videography and do like a 30-second or one-minute video that can … and carefully-scripted with voiceover. That would really be useful, and I can throw that on any platform online, and I think it would gain traction. HollyG:                   Yeah, nice. I reckon you could do that for a thousand dollars. Alfonso:                  Yeah, yeah. I just bought a drone HollyG:                   Look. It’s been really good to talk with you, and I appreciate you sharing those tips and insights with us, and I will jump off here this call now, and then go on to your Pinterest and check it out I think. Alfonso:                  Yes. Please keep in touch, and if you have any questions, you can catch me on my websites. HollyG:                   Yeah. Awesome. Great. Thanks for your time. Alfonso:                  Thank you. HollyG:                   For the show notes for this episode, head to hollyg.com.au. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast service.   The post Photography tips and inspiration with Alfonso Calero – episode 85 appeared first on Holly G.

The Modern Travel Media Summit was held in Sydney on Friday 22 Sept 2017. This podcast episode brings you highlights and key takeaways from The Modern Travel Media Summit. Although below is the podcast transcript, it is designed to be listened to, so pop on your headphones, press play and enjoy! Lauren Bath: Hi. My name is Lauren Bath and I’m a professional Instagrammer. Liz Carlson: Hi. My name is Liz Carlson and I run Young Adventures, which is one of the biggest travel blogs in the world, and I’m based in Wanaka, New Zealand. Georgia Rickard: Hi. My name is Georgia Rickard and I’m a travel editor and co-founder of The Modern Travel Media Summit. HollyG: So, there you go. You just met the three people involved in the Modern Travel Media Summit, an event that was held in Sydney, run by a Blogger, an Instagrammer, and a journalist. Three interesting people to be putting on a conference. So in this podcast episode, you’re going to hear my top takeaways from the conference. These will be practical things that you can implement if you’re looking to further work on your content marketing strategy, if you’re looking to work with Bloggers or Instagrammers, or if you already are, things that you might not have though of that you could possibly implement. So, I hope you enjoy this episode. You’ll be hearing from me and a couple of other snip its from the conference, as well. So we’re here today at the Modern Travel Media Summit. Can you tell me, just really briefly, about what you hope people get out of today as one of the key organisers of today? Liz Carlson: We really hope that people will take away key things that they can do to help share the story of their brand better through new media, blogs, social media, online. You know, this conference is sort of bourne out of the idea that we’ve all been going to travel trade shows and events over the years and not really taking away things that you can actually learn and put into practise. You know, sort of the same thing that is repeated over and over again. So, for us, our big point of difference is that we want to give concrete advice, tips, and practises that you can take away and use to help create a better brand online. HollyG: Great. And one of the things that you spoke about just in your first presentation today, the difference from micro influences, niche, and just being small. Can you just talk a little bit to that? Liz Carlson: Yeah. I think that its really easy to mistake being niche and just not having influence. And I think people aren’t really digging in deep enough when they’re vetting people to work with and distinguishing that. This is just because I’ve been on so many trips and campaigns with people that say their niche and they actually just don’t have a following but they’ve managed to sell themselves well enough that they can work with clients. And then at the end of the day, the clients don’t get a good return on it. So its not good for anyone involved. So I think, while there is definitely niche blogs and influencers out there, it takes a lot of vetting and research to make sure that they still have influence and they should be able to accurately demonstrate that in an easy way to understand. HollyG: So, just stopping the chat right there, that was Liz Carlson and I thought that was a really interesting point she made about asking bloggers, before you work with them, to demonstrate how they actually influence. Plus, she goes on to say that influence should be repetitive. Thought that was interesting that you were saying so many times clients don’t ask you how you’ve demonstrated influence or to show influence. And, I guess, from being on the other side working with travel destinations and things like that, I’m not sure if that’s something I would even think to ask a blogger. Liz Carlson:  Yeah. For me, I think it’s the only thing I should be asking because we all know that numbers can be bought, numbers don’t really mean what they could mean. You know, you could work with someone who as 10 million readers a month and they have no engagement on that post through that those readers are from a place that’s not relative to your market and then its just pointless, you know. So, I think the only thing people should be looking for is examples of where a blogger can demonstrate that they have real influence and just ask, you know. I have case studies and campaigns and examples and feedback and screenshots that I can show people, you know. And be like, “Hey this is how I can show that when I publish something, this many people are listening. This many people convert into buyers. I direct this many people to your website.” That kind of stuff. HollyG: And then this leads into what Lauren Bath was talking about, which was what is a digital influence? Is about trust plus reach. So its having a trusted relationship with raters, which is then amplified by reach. And then importantly, what do influences do? Why would you engage one? And this is something that I’ve talked about with destinations and clients in the past. And although, it sounds really simple, I think it’s a really good point. I would say the top reason is, and this was also what was reflected in the conference, is to create awareness of your brand to the influence’s audience. That’s really why you’re engaging an influencer is to reach their audience. And then, secondly, the influencer to create content around your brand for your social media assets. And thirdly, Lauren says also to drive traffic. So the conference talks about influence but also influence of limitations so saying what we can do. We can create awareness, we can start conversations, we can drive traffic, we can produce engaging content, and achieve valuable touch points in a campaign. What we can’t do is provide measurable return on investment in the travel space, drive substantial traffic outside of the Instagram, substantially increase your following on Instagram, give free commercial image rights, and perform miracles, of course. And, again, I think that’s really great points that they raise about being clearer about what an influencer can actually do for your campaign and what they can’t do and making sure you’re all on the same page before you go down this path of working with influences. Okay. Pushing on with a few other key points from The Modern Travel Media Summit. One thing that Liz Carlson, blogger from Young Adventurers, was saying was that we really need to remember the value or the long term value of working with bloggers and this is something that I totally agree with. Sometimes I think we get caught up in the hype of Instagram and have really started to under value what bloggers can actually do and yes, especially that longer term value. They’re content hangs around for a longer period of time and can really impact your SEO. The good ones are great story tellers and they really do come with a trusted audience or a trusted community. And people really seem to be able to relate to bloggers on that personal level, which can be really good and necessary for your brand or destination. The other thing that Liz talked about is things to look at when deciding, which bloggers you’re going to work with. Look at their google analytics, which maybe obvious but then other things are about the demographics of their audience. As we touched on earlier, ask about how they demonstrate influence. Look at their work to see if it matches your brand. Talk to them about what previous experience that they’ve had. And even references from other destination or people that they’ve worked with because you don’t want to necessarily be putting really difficult people on your blog trips, so making sure that they are easy to work with and they’re going to deliver what they promise, and that they’re going to be able to contribute to a famil, contribute positively to a famil. Finally, Liz also talks about the professionalism of bloggers and also of brands. This definitely came across about the whole Modern Travel Media Summit day and was something that was felt passionately from these. Liz Carlson: Ask for that. One of the things that really came through for me in your presentation was just really about wanting to raise the level of professionalism. From not just the bloggers perspective but also the brand perspective and to be talking about the question that we should be asking. And also, what we should be expecting back from bloggers. Yeah I think there needs to be more standardised numbers within the industry and that is only going to happen if we talk about it. You know, everything has always been so closed doors about what’s worth what, who charges what, you know. I think that needs to stop if we’re going to have any kind of standard in the industry because you get influencers who don’t know and throw out a number. And then you get a client that really has no idea either and they are like, “Okay.” And then it just doesn’t work, you know. That happens so often. I’ll work with people that they’ve used all their marketing budget on a blogger who has a twentieth of my following and influences just because the blogger was ballsy enough to ask for that much money and they just assume that was okay. So I think, there’s a lot of talk where it projects badly on bloggers right because there’s bloggers that going out or influencers and pitching things before they’re ready. Or over selling their influencer, not accurately demonstrating their influence, but also at the same time, you also need to do the research and look through. And I know that’s hard because you probably get so many requests or whatever. But straightaway, you should be able to find ones that are good versus not good and then take the time to dig through the ones that are good and see and evaluate, you know. HollyG: Yeah. Yeah. I agree. And look you said something that was also really simple that everybody jotted down, which was set up a form for them to fill out with you a few standing questions. At least initially for a first [inaudible 00:11:18] and then the other thing, which was something that I have always harp on about in my podcast is about building relationships with bloggers, going to events and being part of the industry, how important that is. Liz Carlson:Yeah. Until I have the time to set up a blogger accreditation association, which I want to, but when is that going to happen, that is good enough and universal and can worldwide. There is none, so you’ve got to do the work. Liz Carlson: And I think all of my [inaudible 00:11:51] campaigns come out of relationships that I’ve built with people, you know. And I don’t want to say, do what I do, you know. I feel like I did that too much in my presentation, but I really take the time to get to know people. I almost never like meet someone and pitch to them straight away. You know, I meet someone, “Oh lets go get coffee, lets have a call, you know, tell me about what you’re working on.” And then, maybe a year later, or whatever, if something lines up and they remember of Liz loves writing about this and I’m doing this campaign. This is such a good fit. And that’s happened to me so many times. And also because I’ve just taken the time to get to know people like I don’t just see a person and then see the word Mercedes over their head. You know, I see them as a person and I always treat people like that first, as opposed to what can I get out of this. HollyG: And yeah, that is good advice in life and business isn’t it ? HollyG:  Now, I wanted to move on to some of the points that Georgia Rickard talked about. So Georgia, as a journalist, wrote a travel editor, and she did raise a very good point of the fact that media has changed so much but the media release really hasn’t. The fact that sometimes they use very uncommon words, very lengthy words, sentences that are too long, ridiculous headings, often you’ll be talking about something very visual and there won’t be any images in the media release. There’s a lot of really great points that Georgia raised in relation to media released mistakes. And just rethinking the way that we do these, to reflect modern media. And one of those points was around how we are looking now for shorter content, content that is more visual. And she broke it down into looking at Nugget News so that’s a snack able, bite size media, or micro news, that although that might not sound that exciting people are actually reading it. Looking at a trending news and also the fact that photos can be news in itself and have galleries, photo galleries, can really generate a lot of traffic and interest and clicks. So I asked experienced PR manager Jill Collins what she thought about Georgia’s points. Jill Collins: I’m Jill Collins with Barking Owl Communications. HollyG: Now I wanted to grab you now, we’ve just heard a presentation from Georgia around really the new way of the old media and I wanted to get your opinion on a couple of things that she said. She talked about the way that we’re delivering media releases and how its pretty old school. I guess I’ll just start with that. Jill Collins:Sure. I think that certainly we do have to constantly evaluate, you know, how we’re presenting content to editors and making sure that it is in the right format that meets their needs, not our needs or our clients needs. And I think, you know, making sure that we’re giving them really great sound bites, things that they can work with easily, is really, really critical. One of the things that we do find, though, is that editors because they are [inaudible 00:15:10] still need the written word to back up the story because they don’t have time to raise go and write everything themselves, research everything themselves. The other thing that Georgia talked about today, was of course, about imagery and how important that is. She is absolutely right. Many, many, many years ago when Instagram wasn’t even a thing, she approached me about a photo lead story and I remember at the time being rather shocked by that because we always typically sent a journalist on trips before. But I went with her because I loved the way Georgia was injecting new style into the magazine and it did pay off beautifully. The story was photo led and it was amazing and it really did tell a great story. And I guess, I’ve always been a real fan of images. I love Instagram now. And I have been an Instagram follower and advocate from the start. So, she’s absolutely right about the use of imagery. HollyG: Yeah and I think it was a really good point and putting back for when I actually worked in marketing in hotels, we would need to do a photo shoot every couple of years and its not something that we did on a regular basis. And now, I just look back and go why. Why did I do that? I mean, why. I mean one of the reasons was budget, was the cost was such a big deal, and I can see now why what having those up to date images would be just so valuable. Jill Collins:  It is. It’s really, really valuable. I’m away working with a new hotel client right now and constantly even trying to get good images before their open because everybody’s asking for images. Jill Collins: But, I think one of the really interesting things is that there are some creative ways of getting good images without spending $20,000 on a photo shoot. And that is working with influences to creatively tell a story through photos. Not actually, kind of sending out the brand shots that we all like to think are important and to a certain extent, of course they still are. But influences see it with a different eye and they see it through the eyes of their followers. And I think its really important that they’re providing what their audience needs. I think it all comes back to the audience and just making sure that we’re constantly giving them what they’re looking for. HollyG:  Yes. And just quickly. There’s some good case studies out at the moment about how using generated content in hotel blog posts really does convert to, you know, better sales so I think there’s a whole nother argument when we’re starting to look at how using generated content converts. Jill Collins:  Well that’s right. And I mean, you look at TripAdvisor now and you know that’s a great example because not only are they providing the hotel brand shots but they are also publishing the readers shots. And I look at those as much as I look at the hotel brand shots now because some of them are quite different really. HollyG:Yeah. More realistic. And finally, one of the hot topics of the day was around working with or avoiding working with frauds and fakes especially in relation to Instagram and how there is so many ways that people can buy followers, getting to pods, all sorts of ways that really are taking away from the way, the real way, that Instagram can influence. And Lauren especially talks about how we really need to be diligent in our vetting and hiring of influencers to ensure we don’t fall into these traps. We need to be making sure we’re using tools to see that they haven’t bough followers. Things like Social Blade are a good one, Instagram account age checker is another one. But for me, I think it does come back to looking at relationships and working with people like Lauren who have worked on so many campaigns and have great connections with all the Instagrammers in the travel space as well. Asking influences for the Instagram analytics we need to be comfortable with the quality of their images. And we need to be looking through the comments to see how they engage with their community to get an idea of who is actually engaging. Obviously, we can check their numbers on Instagram but also checking it on other social platforms asking around about them, seeing if they’ve got any references and making sure that all their work behaviour has been really professional. Lauren Bath: Yeah. I think because the industry we work in is so amazing there are a lot of people trying to get in and trying to take shortcuts to do so. And I notice it a lot in my industry. I’m really passionate about giving people the tools to spot it and hopefully avoid working with these people because overall I see it as being really damaging to the industry. HollyG:So a big thanks to Lauren, Georgia, and Liz to allowing me to come along and to be able to put these podcast episodes together. And share with people that weren’t there some of the key takeaways. I guess, just top line going over some of those takeaways again, I would be saying, remember the value of working with bloggers, making sure we’re asking for demonstrations of influence and campaign reports and things like that Being aware that influence should be repetitive over time. I loved the point from Liz about micro influences versus nation influences versus just being small and to making sure we’re not being bamboozled with the terminology. Really understanding what a digital influencer does and what they can offer and how they can enhance our campaigns. Looking at how maybe our press releases need to change to be more in line with the way that people are consuming content. And understanding that travel editors are so very busy, so how can we make their jobs a lot easier. And one final point that I actually forgot to include, which I loved, Liz Carlson said that one of the best famils she’s ever been on with the destination, she was partner with a local blogger and that local blogger could really take her around and show her things that she wanted to as opposed to maybe just being partnered with a host who isn’t in tune with what a blogger needs. And I loved that idea of partnering your guest blogger with a local blogger so something to remember. And there were plenty more key tips and takeaways. I would encourage you to reach out to Liz, Georgia, or Lauren with any of your questions as they are really open to sharing information and really improving the way that our industry, in the travel industry, works with bloggers and influencers and connects with media. So thanks very much. I hope you enjoyed this episode and talk to you next time.   The post Highlights from The Modern Travel Media Summit 2017 – episode 84 appeared first on Holly G.

Episode 83: Evolving your tourism business to a new target audience – talking with Club Med Welcome to Tourism Upgrade. The podcast unpacking marketing trends from travel, tourism, and marketing leaders. I’m your host, Holly G. and today we welcome Madeleine Clow-Suares (Maddie), General Manager for Australia and New Zealand for Club Med, and Marine Blanchetier, Australia and New Zealand Marketing Manager at Club Med. Today we’ll be chatting about pivoting your business to a new target audience. So, welcome both to the podcast. It’s good to have you here in person in the studio. Brief history of Club Med Maddie Clow: Yes, of course. Club Med started in 1950. We’re in the resort business, so we have holiday resorts across the globe. We’ve got ski resorts, we’ve got sun resorts, and I can go into lots of detail of what they are, but basically, we were post war. Everybody was looking for some sort of distraction after the depression and its really where Club Med was founded. It was people going to tents, spending time together, just reliving, and I think from that, our values were really built, which are kindness, multicultural, pioneering. Since then we’ve really evolved year on year. We’ve opened 70 resorts now across the globe. We’re on all continents of the world. We have 25 of those which are just pure ski resorts. We invented the kids clubs that exist today. We opened the first one back in 1967. We invented the first ski resort back in 1956. We’re kind of well known … I studied at Club Med at University when I was doing tourism management. Maddie Clow: They were the first company to put aeroplanes  with the stay. What we take for granted today when you book your package tour or you go on holiday, they were actually the inventors of that and actually took people away on a plane to discover somewhere different in the world. Accompanied with a lot of history and a lot of heritage, and basically now today … and we’ll talk a bit more about it, but they’ve had to go through a revamping and a restyle. Today we’re the specialists of premium all inclusive holidays. HollyG: Yeah, great, wow. I had no idea about that history. So, you mentioned about a bit of a revamp or a bit of a change. Can you give us a bit of an insight about when and why Club Med realised that change was needed within the brand and the organisation? When and why Club Med realised that change was needed Maddie Clow: Well, change is always needed. If we stay still, then it’s not necessarily a good thing. Obviously being the inventors of things, you get copied on lots of levels. For us, really, the big change came after the 11th of September, 2001, the American market took a big hit. People stopped travelling as much, and we pride ourselves on giving a very good level of service, a very warm welcome. To do that, you also have to be very profitable as a company in terms of what you can reinvest into your resorts or staff. It was really back in 2004 with new direction for the company where we sat back and looked at our business model, and from looking back at our business model, we made the choice to move upscale. So, really focus on high end resorts. It’s often the same cost in terms of fixed assets and costs as it is to have another resort with a lower price, but you’re offering a better service at the end of the day. It often has better return, people come back. So we focused on upscale. We focused on international resorts, and really placed our resorts worldwide in places that could be served from different business units. Either it’s Europe and the States or it’s Asia, China, Pacific, Europe. Basically to keep our resorts open all year long rather than having seasonal resorts, which means you have fixed staff, better service, and it’s complimentary in terms of seasons between different countries. Smart moves, simple moves, but really making sure the bottom line was there, and then since 2004, we’ve really invested everything back into our resorts to bring up the level and the standards. HollyG: Yeah, and what have been some of those investments or steps that’s been undertaken? Maddie Clow: It could be on lots of levels. The first thing is on what we call the heart. Obviously, in the quality of the rooms, in terms of the infrastructure, the resorts, developments or opening up lots of new resorts. We’ve also invested in terms of IT tools, marketing tools. We could talk more about that. It’s on all different levels, but first of all obviously in the quality of the product that we provide to our clients. HollyG: Yeah, great. And so you went from how many resorts to sort of 70, in – Maddie Clow: We actually had more resorts when we saw more mass market. We decided to cut back and really do less but have them very well placed and really offer fantastic experiences. Moving on to delve into the marketing a little bit more HollyG: Moving on to delve into the marketing a little bit more, who are you targeting in Australia for Club Med from that decision to really change the direction of Club Med or just take it to a new level? What are some of the things from a marketing perspective that you’ve been implementing. Marine B: Sure. So, Australia isn’t a huge market in terms of volume, obviously, compared to others. But, what’s great in Australia is that there’s a real affinity between the mindsets here and what people are looking for and the brand in which we are able to offer now with this new positioning. What I mean is that Australians obviously look for quality. They have high standards and they’re not looking for the cheapest deal. They want value for money, but quality, and we’ve got an absolutely great clientele for more luxurious products. I think this move upscale has been very beneficial in growing the business here in Australia. What’s great, also, is I think Australians are looking for this quality and even luxury, but they want to keep it down to earth and relaxed and friendly, and I think that’s one of the things that Club Med is pretty unique for. We’ve got a really relaxed atmosphere in our resorts. Those are very social places, which is also a very Australian feature. I would say the other points are that our resorts are very family friendly. Which is also something … clearly a big part of our clients in Australia are family, and worldwide. We were the first offering kids clubs, and I think our kids’ facilities are really top class on the market at the moment. It’s offering Australian clientele looking for both having family time, family moments together, but also having the kids have fun and learn something new and the parents having their own time, which is this kind of mix in our family time and “we” time, which is really important for some parents, that we are offering. The last point is that there’s a lot of activities in our resorts. Obviously, you can do a lot of different sports, which for a big part are included in the package. Australians are obviously very active people on holidays and I think that’s also a very big success there. HollyG: So I guess that it’s a real family target out of the Australian market? That’s changed a lot from 20 years ago or 30 years ago, when you think of Club Med and you think of more sort of party vibe, I guess. You must hear that all the time. Marine B: I think at the time there were also quite a lot of families, but it’s true that it’s changed. What’s great I think is that we’ve maintained a little bit of the fun and relaxed culture into the experience but it’s obviously changed a lot and it’s not a party resort for sure. Marketing has changed accordingly, to be able to get our brand out there and say what we are actually offering today, which are those very premium, all inclusive holidays. Maddie Clow: But let’s be sure that Club Med … yes, there was a time … and I think it wasn’t just Club Med, it was the 70’s, and once again, another change in the world. What we pride ourselves in is our level of standards and our security and all of those type of things and quality, but also people say they arrive as a client and they leave as a member of the family. It is that fun side as well. It is the place to be happy. It is the place to let go, so it’s just finding that balance between the 70’s, what it used to be, and obviously today it’s a much more well rounded, wholesome time. Maddie Clow: What’s interesting is Australia is our third or fourth in the world in terms of, if we look at Club Med sales, seller of luxury. So that means Australia is higher in terms of actual business volume, so money made, so compared to bigger countries, than Switzerland or Belgium or these countries where you’d expect very high level, it’s Australia. So, what you’re seeing is people really … it’s a country where you’re really looking for that high standing level of quality, but you want to make sandcastles on the beach with your kids. You want it to be down to earth. You want to have a few drinks and meet some people from around the world. So, it’s nice to go somewhere where it’s upscale but it’s not uptight, it’s that balance between the two. HollyG: So, can you tell us a little bit about some of the specific marketing activities that you’ve worked on? Marine B: Yeah, sure. If I look at the change and the way we’ve changed in terms of marketing strategy, I think there are really three big things, three main changes we’ve made. The first one is of course in our communication strategy. We’ve gone from having a communication strategy that was quite focused on promotions and very below the line, to really talking much more about the experience, about the emotional value, also, of the Club Med holiday, which is all about carefreeness and reconnection and feeling good. That was one of the big switches. The other one that’s been made is on the pricing strategy, where we used to, like a lot of tourism operators, we used to do big promotions and we’ve gone to a very early booking focused pricing strategy. So today, we decided we’re going to do early bird deals and they’re going to be the best offer of the season, and that’s guaranteed. We’ve actually worked really hard on sticking to this promise for a few years, and that’s been a big success for us. HollyG: Yeah, great. Storytelling in marketing Marine B: And another thing, I think, is in terms on means, we’ve really gone from investing into [inaudible 00:11:23] and switched to investing in storytelling. That means sending photographers and influencers to our resorts to get their view of the Club Med experience, to get them creating the content. We’ve also been looking at all of the third party content that we can get. It can be the client point of view. Marine B: Client reviews and everything. We’ve also switched our means to one, online a lot, so investing a lot on online media and social media, and PR, just to tell the story and get it out there, so those have been the major changes. HollyG: Out of some of the things that you have done, is there any that have been the most successful, or favourite things that you’ve worked on? Marine Blanchet: Yeah, for me definitely in this sort of third party content strategy, the influence of programme, if I can call it that, which is a big success for me because first we got amazing people, really talented people, travelling to our resort, which is always something we are very proud of. They are actually all telling their own view of the Club Med experience. We’re lucky enough to have Benji Marshall, the Rugby player has travelled with us and is maybe showing a bit of the active side of the holidays and then we had Samantha Wills, which we are big fans of, and she looks more at the design and she’ll have this amazing point of view on our resorts as well. It’s a real success I think, we can see that we are in demand quite a lot at the moment and that’s something we’re quite proud of. HollyG: And that’s quite interesting, because often when brands look to work with influencers, they might just look at influencers within the travel space. It is really interesting to look outside of that. You might have, from a design perspective, or a sport active or food or whatever – Maddie Clow: And recently we had Emanuel Fidel from My Kitchen Rules, so he’s just come back from our resort and once again, it’s the same thing, on our best resort, Finaloo, which is one of our villas, with that whole food angle. But, at the end of the day, a holiday is about a lifestyle, so you want people who tell the story of the lifestyle and the experience and not as a travel agent professional. I mean, obviously we have professionals, travel agents who travel, would be great to share their stories too, but it’s so nice to have those different angles, and not from people who are … we kind of avoid TV reality show people. We’re really looking for people who are already in the profession, who have a story to tell, who are respected, and for them to experience it and to give us their angle and their point of view. HollyG: Yeah, I think they’re really good tips for brands that are looking to work with influencers and look at such a hot topic at the moment. There is a lot of value and when you’re really doing the research on who to work with and finding those people that are great fit for you, for your brand. Maddie Clow: Yeah, it’s very cost effective as well. HollyG: Yeah, exactly. Marketing and communicating internally at Club Med When an organisation is making change, there’s changes that you will communicate externally to your potential customers, but there’s also … obviously, there has to be a fair bit of internal changes I guess, as well. Internally, how is Club Med success in communicating and executing those changes? Maddie Clow: Yeah, it’s not a small job. It’s a big job. Like I said before, 15,000 people, 96 nationalities, spread across the globe and time zones, which obviously we know a lot about here in Australia. We focus a lot of time on it. We’re a very people orientated company. We spend a lot of time on having a very clear vision of where we’re going, why we’re going there, a clear direction so it’s quite tangible for the teams, and then we actually have company projects. What they’ll have over the period of a year … our recent one now is two years … a company project and a mission with very concrete things and actions that we’re going to work on. We’ll spend a lot of time with lots of different people involved on the projects, so it’s almost them who are building it, it’s from the bottom up. Another big chunk of the time, which is driven by HR, but another big chunk of time is spent on the communication, even to the people who clean the rooms in the resort. Everyone on board, everyone knows where we’re going, why we’re doing it, and there’s part of the tourism. HollyG: Is there specific tools that Club Med uses to communicate internally? Maddie Clow: Well, there’s a big one, which I’ll let Marine tell you about. Marine B: Yeah, there’s actually … it’s my favourite. We’ve got this amazing tool which is called Workplace by Facebook. It’s basically a company version of Facebook. It works exactly the same, it’s as easy to use and as fun to use. But, it connects people within the company. We actually now really want to take away from anyone from any resort or any office and I think it’s totally changed the way we communicate and the fact that we now are aware of everything that’s going on in the other offices so you can share best practises, what’s been working well, and share it easily through photos that you can upload very quickly, like on Facebook. You can also know what’s going on in the resorts, so as a marketer it’s really great to know exactly what’s going on in each of the resorts, get videos, get content directly from the resort to use. It’s been really exceptional, I would say. HollyG: So, does that use people’s personal profiles? Marine B: Actually, that’s a professional version, so everyone can create its own version. You’ve got a different app, so it’s not on your Facebook app, it’s a different Facebook app, so you can’t get them mixed. Marine B: It’s just the same user friendly experience, which is easy. You don’t need to have any training to use it, it’s just super easy. Maddie Clow: It’s linked to your professional email, so everyone who has a professional email has an account. It works a bit more by groups, so there’s a lot of groups. You can have a bright ideas group. My favourite is spray and pray, so when you need an answer to a question, you just put it out there and the world replies. Obviously then, you’ve got digital marketing, sales, all of those other groups. So, it works a lot more like that. We’ve got one page, which is called Club Med life, which seems to be a bit like the news feed. That’s where everyone tells you, you know … Arnold Schwarzenegger’s in this resort, or these turtles have just been released in Malaysia, and you kind of feel what’s going on around the world, day and night. Marine Blanchet: One of the great ones actually is the bright ideas one, because you can basically post any idea that you have to improve either the way that we work or the experience in the resort. What’s absolutely great is you actually get access to the CEO of the company. We’ve got an example, a few ideas have been liked, liked like on Facebook, by the CEO of the company, and that just makes the idea happen really quickly. Maddie Clow: Within an hour, you post an idea, the CEO’s liked it, written a comment, he’s shared other peoples’ names on it to tell them to put it into place. There’s no more barriers. HollyG: The thing that I hear from a lot of other resorts or hotel chains is the challenge of what’s happening on property. How do I know if I’m sitting in head office, what’s happening on property? Staff aren’t necessarily sending me photos or telling me what’s going on, and that is honestly one of the biggest challenges that hotels and resorts have from a marketing and content point of view, especially trying to communicate that back to the consumer across social media. That must really help. Marine B: Definitely, but actually we had the same question on that, and so we actually did something really interesting, which is creating a new position within Club Med, which is … we call our staffing within the resort GO, which means – Guest Organiser. Marine B: Guest organiser, yes. We’ve created a new position, which is called E-GO, which basically is a content creator. So, we’ve got someone that’s really part of the resort team but who’s actually creating content around what’s going on in the resort, sharing the information with every marketing team and communication team worldwide. It’s changed everything, as well, in terms of knowing what’s going on in the resort, getting live feedback, and also this amazing content, real content, because today it comes down to this; We need real content, real stories to tell. That’s been really, really great – HollyG: That sounds like a really fun job, by the way. Marine B: Yes, exactly. Maddie Clow: It does. HollyG: So, you’d want them to be able to take a pretty good photo, I guess? Marine B: Yes, for sure. That’s one of the – Maddie Clow: It’s very important for brand perspective as well. So, obviously, when every resort was a bit freestyle and could do what they want, obviously sometimes what you’d get in a resort maybe would be what we would say fits into our brand charter. So, these people are then trained, so the look, the feel, the style, and obviously yes it’s to bring it to life, real people, but then to keep that within our look and our feel so it’s very easy for consumers to identify with us. HollyG: Yeah, for sure. It’s having that … and that training takes time. Do you have an issue with staff turnover in that sense? Maddie Clow: I think we have the opposite problem. Not many people – I’ve been in the company 17 years on a lot of different jobs. Obviously there are countries where there’s a high turnover, like China, where it’s difficult, but as long as we keep people moving and keep people learning, and we’re also respectful … especially people who work offsite or in countries with their family lives, couples, and we try to organise ourselves around them. We tend to keep people for quite a while. Marine B: That’s true. On this specific position, it’s only been in place for one or two years. What we feel is they are actually great candidates to then become, if they wish, part of the marketing and communications teams in the offices. Marine B: There’s already been these kind of moves and I think there are going to be more in the future, for sure. HollyG: Yeah, great. What are some of the proudest achievements or activities since you’ve pivoted … I don’t know if pivot’s the right word, really, would you say? Pivot? Marine B: Evolve. HollyG: Yeah, evolving to the next level for Club Med, I guess. Maddie Clow: Specifically for the Australian market, for me I’m going to talk like a general manager now, not a marketer, but obviously for me it’s the growth and we’ve achieved our targets. Since we’ve obviously had a resort here (in Australia), four years ago, and with our rethinking, and Australia’s quite removed from the rest of the world, so you really have to fill it just from Australia. If something happens and there’s a recession in Australia, who else can fill this resort? For me, from closing a domestic resort, we’re back up the level now that we were with having a resort on our doorstep. So, we’ve had that growth and what we’ve got planned in the next three years is another 50% growth and we’re just really seeing that, like Marine explained, the affinity with the brand plus this moving towards this premium direction, people are busy today. They want holidays where they can go, they can relax, they can experience the local, they can have the lovely family time, and it’s working. For me to see that, and to see that people are enjoying our product is probably for me the biggest achievement. Marine B: In terms of activities, one of the latest big successes we’ve had is also the launch of our new ski resort in Japan, which looks like an amazing resort. The doors will open in December of this year. We’ve launches sales a few months back and it’s been such an amazing success, so I think this was a very successful campaign. It was almost too much for us, more than we were ready for. Maddie Clow: Yeah, we experienced … we could have sold the resort four times over in 48 hours for the January school holiday, so obviously if any travel agents or people are listening, there was … we didn’t expect … we were ready for 30% growth. We didn’t expect 60% growth. Also, with success comes learning. So, then we sit down and say, “Okay, how do we prepare for this?” because it’s actually going faster than what we expected. We’ve had to review and revise and get ready and make sure that we’ve got the service levels behind it. People say that’s a good problem to have, but you still have to work on it. HollyG: Manage it, yeah. Do you find that people that stay at a Club Med are quite loyal then, to Club Med? Is that what you find, they’re staying at different ones? Marine Blanchet: Yeah, I mean we – HollyG: I guess the point, sorry, being there, when you launch a new property, which is what you’ve talked about, I guess there’s a lot of that knowledge and trust already. Maddie Clow: Comeback. HollyG: Yeah, comeback. Maddie Clow: To be totally honest, we’ve got retentions which are higher in other countries. If you look at France … but you’ve got 40-50 resorts, so it’s not the same scale. So you have to look at it here, you’re looking at 10 resorts across Asia/Pacific. There’s going to be 30 within the next five years, so that’s where we’re going. So, with that it will grow. It’s a good level today, we have very loyal clients, so we have good levels of retention. I think probably working on our loyalty strategy is the next step for us. There’s been a big catch up on a lot of other things. We’ve had to catch up on our structure, way of working, the right resorts are coming, so now it’s, “Okay, how do we balance perspection with loyalty?” We have a very strong loyalty plan, but we want to increase it with partnerships and all the things that can come with it, to really take care of our most loyal customers. HollyG: Yeah, no, that makes sense. When you talk about the Japan launch, what was some of the activities that were implemented during that launch? Marine Blanchet: There’s been quite a lot of teasing, which I think is always something really important, for sure. Of course, in PR, in pitching some of the titles, even one by one, and we’ve done some trade, teasing in communication to our base agencies. We’ve got instal boutiques, as well, which are little stores where we’re got Club Med caller in the agencies, so we’re informing them. Then, of course, a lot of social media activity. All of this combined has really proved successful. HollyG: What social channels are you really active on? Marine B: Mostly Facebook, which is working really well, and the level of targeting you get with Facebook is just amazing, so that’s definitely something that we use and have fun with, but it’s getting better and better I think every year, so that’s definitely with any budget that you get. Go on Facebook, it’s really worth it. A little bit of Instagram, but this would be a bit more … at the moment, I think we still have to really crack it. HollyG: Yeah. I think that’s definitely the case with Instagram. It’s sort of that really inspirational, aspirational, but it’s sort of like, where does that fit into … from a marketing perspective, into the final – Marine B: That’s exactly. It’s the question we’re still figuring out, but it’s obviously a very powerful tool and an amazing discovery tool. At the moment, Facebook has been working really well. Maddie Clow: I think what the team did really well in January is they really built a campaign with a funnel. There was the whole upper funnel and there was cinema as well, so there were a whole lot of things done to really gain awareness and then it was really targeted, so the next level, what people see. It kind of tells a story on three levels. People are followed and then they see the next bannering, and then it’s much more call to action. That’s something that they did really well that helped us [inaudible 00:27:29]. The second thing is we create events out of nothing. An opening of a season, which could just be, “Okay, we’re opened.” The marketing team do a teasing four or five weeks in advance. “You can preregister, you can book now, this is going to be the opening season”, for all of our resorts. We find ourselves … we had something in the region of 5000 people who wanted to preregister before we even opened sale. Two or three years ago, it was 100. You can really make an event also out of just the fact that you’re a new resort, and the buzz that you can do before you actually open the doors. Are there any tools that you can’t live without? HollyG: I like to ask the question around tools. Are there any tools that you can’t live without? Maddie Clow: For me, it’s not very sexy, but it’s reporting. We’re very lucky to have … we use Clickview. We have Salesforce as well. For me, you’re blind unless you have figures and numbers that tell you what’s happening. You can have a guess and I always love it when people tell me what they feel, but I’m like, “Yeah, but what do the numbers say?” “Oh, we’re really busy.” What does that mean in numbers? I really think the more … you don’t have to have too much, because obviously too much reporting can be … but enough to be able to tell you what’s happening, where, who, how, because it always tells a story. It’s a little like looking at a matrix, and then you can really see okay, this is what’s working, this isn’t what’s working, how do we address it? What do we need to do? For me, reporting is a – HollyG: And, Marine? Marine B: From a work perspective, I would say Workplace Facebook is my go to place now and I love to check it in the morning and in the evening because with the time difference there is always something going on. I would say that would be it, and from a more personal point of view, I’ve got my Ted app, which is where I got for inspiration when I need to take a little break and take a little bit of perspective and just watch or listen to a talk, which is always inspiring. HollyG: Ah, yes. The Ted Talks, for sure, that’s good. On this topic of change, we know, and there’s lots of interesting quotes out there that change is happening faster than ever before and it will continue. Really businesses need to be able to move and change and pivot a lot more than what they’ve had to in the past. I guess if you were giving some tips or advice for destinations or tourism businesses, how can they set up their business to stay agile or to adapt to change? To move with the pace that we need to move now? Maddie Clow: It has changed, the pace, we can feel it. There’s two different levels, for me, on this. There’s a product level and a way of working level, and there’s a people level. The people level, I think we need to let go of the standards, this nine to five, this … everything we can do to give people greater flexibility, the easier it’s going to be. Laptops, mobiles, like you said, new work apps. I think there’s a flexibility side where we need to be more agile in the way we work in the modern world. HollyG: We need to come a long way. Maddie Clow: And tourism has a lot of women in it as well today, so they’re allowed to have a job that’s interesting and they’re allowed to have a family, and I want interesting, intelligent women to work for me as well as I do men. I’m very happy to make it as flexible in the workforce so you can balance and fit in with peoples’ lives, which is also a priority. Afterwards, on the product side of things, we’ve recently, as well, in the last three years, we’ve looked at Club Med and we’ve prided ourselves on having resorts that have standards. Every resort you could find the same thing and you could have the same level. That’s actually something … we’re looking at trends, so once again taking time out to sit down and listen to trends or listen to talks, that people want local, people want authenticity. We’ve actually gone back and realised, we’ve got a lot of strong personalities in all our resorts. What can we do more to take those personalities further? For example, in Thailand, we’ve brought in Thai boxing, and then Thai cooking lessons, and Thai massage, all included in the price. We’ve stopped maybe some of the golf that we were including and just readapted it to keeping it local, keeping it with what people want. We’ve really revamped and looked at what could make each resort different and unique and like Marine said, can tell this story. What’s difficult is you’ve got to have a company that believes in change, because you can have all of these ideas, but the money’s got to come from somewhere, the teams who put it into place have to come from somewhere. I think in Club Med, we’re quite open to change. What’s interesting in our zone is in the board of directors, the sales teams, marketing sit alongside the people in charge of the resorts. We’re all one team, so HollyG: So, breaking down those silos. Breaking down internal silos Maddie Clow: Yes. So, we all work together and sometimes they look at me like I’m mad, when I suggest things. Sometimes they are a bit mad, the suggestions. Sometimes they’re good suggestions. Little by little, you can see that they start to think about it, and obviously they think about, “I want paddle boat by night in the [inaudible 00:32:49]. I want this, and I want safety,” but little by little they understand it and they get there. What’s great, afterwards, is they’re the experts in terms of the actual … so what you ask them to put into place is even better than what you could have possibly imagined. It’s a real teamwork, and it’s breaking down those barriers. I think one of the biggest innovations that we made in marketing was to actually mix marketing and IT together at our head office in Paris, which … IT almost had a heart attack I think, when it happened. I think the director was telling me that the first meeting she had for the board of directors and IT sat down which was all guys on one side and marketing, which is mostly women, on the other side, and they were like, “What are we doing in the same room?” And now, a year and a half later, they don’t know how they did it without being together. That was probably the biggest … and it’s really helped the company in turn. And there’s still more to be done. What you have in terms of means in Asia compared to France are sometimes totally different, but it’s definitely moving in the right direction. Marine B: I think to add to what Maddie was saying, of course keeping your finger on the pulse of what people want, what they’re looking for, how they want to travel, as well, is super important. One of the good things with the digital world we are now in is that you can actually do that for a much lower cost than you could before. You don’t have to do a big brand survey, which costs tens of thousands of dollars. You can go through social media tools, which are pretty affordable and that anyone can afford and that gives you a really good vision of what people are saying about your product or your destination, for instance, what they want, what’s missing, and just to get this live feedback of what’s going on at the moment, and that’s really interesting and precious, I think, in marketing strategies today. HollyG: Yeah, it’s a really good point, because you think back in the day you’d be doing these huge polls to get a sense of what people thought of your brand, but now there’s just that feedback all the time, so if you tap into that, and then convert that into something that’s usable, there’s a lot of value there for sure. It’s been so great to talk to you both. There’s a lot of things, and a lot of paths to go down. So how can people find out a bit more about you both personally and also Club Med? Marine B: About Club Med, you can definitely go to our website, clubmed.com.au or you can go on Facebook and find us. We’ve got a Club Med regular page and we’re got a Club Med for travel agents if someone was to listen. Of course on LinkedIn as well. Maddie Clow: Yep, so both of us are on LinkedIn. If you’re interested in the workplace by Facebook, I did a talk about a year ago, because we were one of the first companies to launch in tourism. I spent an hour explaining about how it all works, what the advantages are, so if ever you’re interested in having that link? HollyG: Yeah, I’ll link through to that through the show notes. Are you up for the bonus question? Now it’s time for our thousand dollar bonus question. I ask all my guests the same question. Maddie Clow: We have two different answers. HollyG: Yeah, so the question is, if you only had a $1000 marketing budget, what would you spend it on? So Maddie, do you want to begin? Maddie Clow:  For me, [inaudible 00:36:21] if you’re a small business and then there’s if you’re a big business, because in maybe even a big business we should be thinking like a small business. You look at $1000 sometimes and go, “It doesn’t get you much,” but it can get you a lot today. Marine had a much more of a target of how she would spend it and ever dollar is important. Marine Blanchet: So can I start? HollyG: Yeah, yeah. Marine B: So, I would definitely do a Facebook campaign because I would then be able to target exactly who I want to see my ad and do a great video, so I can ask my EGO to create a great video in the resort and then sponsor it on Facebook to the people that I want to see the ad. Marine B: You think that’s boring? Maddie Clow: I think that’s very responsible. I would probably take the $1000 and take my team out to celebrate good results, which isn’t marketing, that’s just what I would do. I think the biggest lesson, which made me think on this question, is it’s always good to think small. A lot of things we do in house, in marketing, we build our own tools, because if you do it cost effectively, you can do more. As I said, I think it’s a good question to ask, even if I didn’t spend the money responsibly. It’s a good question to ask. HollyG: I think as a general manager, your answer is pretty good. Cool, thank you so much. I think we’ll wrap it up now. Maddie Clow: Thank you. Useful Links Maddie LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/madeleine-clow-92149614/ Marine LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marine-blanchetier-a458a58/ Workplace by Facebook presentation by Maddie: http://www.hrmonline.com.au/section/hrm-tv/united-workforce-social-media-helps/ Club Med website: https://www.clubmed.com.au Ted Talk App: https://www.ted.com/about/programs-initiatives/ted-talks/ways-to-get-ted-talks You can subscribe to these podcasts on Itunes, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast service.   The post Evolving business to a new target audience chatting with Club Med – episode 83 appeared first on Holly G.

China tourism marketing – What works in Chinese social media, PR and trade marketing right now. Click on the player above Episode 82 of Tourism Upgrade is LIVE from our Tourism Upgrade LIVE Sydney event held at The Dolphin Hotel in Surry Hills and we talk  China tourism marketing. We had around 80 people attend this live event from hotels, airlines, tourism businesses and media. I host a panel with two fantastic guests: Saxon Booth from Dragon Trail Interactive and Kate Marsden from BridgeClimb Sydney. Ignore the background crowd noise and tune into the fantastic insights delivered by my guests. We didn’t record question time as the audio was too soft but if you have any questions please add them in the comments below. Enjoy this fantastic LIVE episode on China tourism marketing. China Tourism Marketing HollyG: Today, the topic is China tourism marketing, and so we are lucky to have with us two guests, to my left we have Saxon Booth, and Saxon has been working and living in China for five years and currently lives in Shanghai and he works with a digital marketing agency, that I’ve had a little bit to do with over the last few years and interviewed several times on my podcast called Dragon Trail Interactive. And they have worked with some of the biggest tourism brands including Los Angeles Tourism, Destination Canada, Scoot Airlines, Hard Rock Cafe, and there is quite a long list of who they’ve worked with. They target the affluent Chinese consumers through digital marketing campaigns. We also have Kate Marsden who works for BridgeClimb Sydney. Kate is the Marketing Development Manager, and she’s worked extensively with the China market over that time, seen it grow by 67% in the last twelve months alone, and it is now the third top inbound market for BridgeClimb. So, we’ve discussed a few things over coffee a few times and I’m really thrilled that you could make it today and we can pick your brain and you could join the panel. Photos from the Tourism Upgrade LIVE Sydney event, 25 May 2017 I guess we all know that over one million visitors from China came to Australia in 2016, and the majority of these travels are for holiday. We know that Sydney is the top destination of choice, and that China actually has the largest total spend and visitor nights. And we know that the China market use a lot of online sources, above average compared to other markets. My first question is, how do we know if our tourism business or if our tourism destination is suited to the Chinese traveller? Saxon Booth: Well, there’s some funny facts that you can kind of dig out when you look at the Chinese outbound market. So, one in three visitors to the North and the South Pole are Chinese consumers for example. So, that’s something that maybe not a lot of people would expect, and I don’t think those destinations were expecting that, they weren’t profiling the Chinese consumer for that to happen. I don’t think there is one Chinese consumer, maybe there never was and there certainly isn’t anymore. We can see that in objective kind of data about the way the changing evolution of the destinations that they are going to, the growth in long haul, the reduction in short haul, these kinds of things. I don’t think there is one Chinese consumer, maybe there never was and there certainly isn’t anymore. – Saxon Booth, Dragon Trail Interactive, May 2017 You can see it in a lot of the subjective survey data about what they’re looking for when they’re going overseas. The cliche is shopping tours and things like that, it’s not really like that anymore. These things are still important, I think group is still important, so those kinds of cliches I guess that people have about the Chinese market, they still hold true in some way. But, it’s a move to an experiential kind of form of tourism. I think that bodies like Tourism Australia have already acknowledged that and are moving in that space. So, I think if you are ready it is because, if you have a destination or a product that’s already ready for a long-haul visitor from another country, I think you are already part of the way there with Chinese, because they are wanting different experiences and are not wanting one kind of thing. I think then of course there are things you can do on top of that to be China ready. There are people that can train you, there are digital marketing tools and PR tools you can use in the market to sort of raise awareness. But, I think fundamentally there’s no one kind of Chinese consumer anymore, so everyone’s potentially ready. HollyG: Yeah, and I think that’s a really good point to make and that sort of preconceived idea of what we have or had of China sort of needs to go out the window. So, my question to Kate is how and why did BridgeClimb decide to go after this market that’s now the third biggest inbound market for BridgeClimb? Kate Marsden: We started targeting China about five years ago. So, compared to a lot of other attractions and hotel players and tourism upgrades in the market, that’s pretty recent. Basically, post GFC our two key markets, US and UK  was flat. So, the business really needed to diversify, we have been around now, we started in 1998, so the local market also, I wouldn’t say saturated, but a lot of Sydney locals had already climbed. So, it was really time to start looking to a new market. What Saxon was saying before about the group market, that was always there, so China wasn’t really suited for BridgeClimb when it was so over saturated by the group market, because we are a higher priced product and we go for about two or three hours. So, on a really condensed itinerary that these groups coming out from China are doing, we just weren’t suited. But, as the independent traveller started to grow, the business felt, well this is really a good opportunity to start to look at this market. So, I guess some macro-factors certainly were a key thing, and then basically we just started with looking at the China plan. So, it was a three/four month exercise. We were talking to a lot of the inbound tour operators, and basically creating a China plan, which culminated in launching a special climb that ran the same time every day, with a Mandarin speaking climb leader and then off the back of that all of the market assets and so forth that needed to underpin that new product for the market. HollyG: Very interesting. We talk about the five stages of travel or the customer journey. So, dreaming, planning, booking experience and sharing or similar, there’s a few different versions. I will direct this next question to you Saxon. How are we inspiring this market, or how are consumers hearing about our destinations or our businesses in the first place? Saxon Booth: I think they’re first hearing about it through word of mouth. So, for small and medium businesses that are already seeing a bit of foot traffic, they need to be doing more to create a good customer experience for Chinese consumers. Which is something that BridgeClimb is doing. They can open up even a personal social media account and get every customer that comes to BridgeClimb to scan and start pushing some information about them so that they have something to shout out to online and can tell their mother, their father, their networks about you. So, you get that word of mouth started there. I think, on the bigger scale for bigger brands that can afford and have the will to do big own kind of channels. In China, you have got WeChat obviously, so new data is out recently, nine hundred million monthly active users, 50% of them spend more than an hour on it every day. It’s an incredible platform, but with that opportunity for a lot of eyes on your content, it means a lot of other people are competing for it as well. So, I think being a bit annoying, getting back to basics, content is key. So, trying to do something localised and interesting for the Chinese consumer, because there’s not one kind of Chinese consumer anymore. So, not just giving them a typical top ten, top five, not trying to make them like you. I think you have to tell interesting stories to keep them engaged over time, and be a bit patient about how that converts. Then, of course there’s all these different kinds of things you can do to aggregate and kind of get more exposure. KOL’s, maybe advertising formats, you can look at other emerging video and live streaming platforms. It’s hard to give a specific answer in the time that we have, there’s a lot you can do and I think we can talk more in the question and answers about some of the specific things. I guess I will leave it at that for the moment. HollyG: And what’s BridgeClimb doing from a social media and digital perspective, assuming that this was a key part of this strategy? Kate Marsden: Yeah, so a key part of the strategy at the beginning was obviously setting up all of our key assets. So, not only collateral and copy, but also the digital assets of the .cn website. So, making sure it was housed on their side of the firewall where we can reach out and then right through to the distribution through the trade, which I think we will talk about later, but it’s such an important part of the mix. That probably took two years, it took a long time to establish those channels and get them kicking along and coming and us knowing what kind of content on social that our audience responded to. So, then two, two and a half years into our China plan and our moving into this market, we decided to embark on a really big research project with a Shanghai based marketing research company. Where we got them to basically map that customer journey for us. So, we said, “Tell us all of the channels that a typical Chinese independent traveller is going on, from the inspiration phase through to planning, through to even whilst they are on holiday to post holiday review, map those channels out for us and on top of that, and then overlay on top of that all of the BridgeClimb content and most importantly where there was no BridgeClimb content?” So, that told us where the gaps were, and what we needed to do to start to plug those gaps. And a lot of it’s come back to social. Saxon Booth:  I might add one thing there. I think everyone talks about WeChat, we’re kind of pushing a lot more this year that WeChat is really a service platform, so yes you know there are a hundred million people on it and they are looking at branded content. But it’s a service platform, it’s a chat platform, you can run payments through it, you can run bookings through it, you can have a CRM system built into the back end to kind of marry up your fans with your actual paying customers or other kinds of classes of fans if you like. It does so many things, so actually it’s not just something that you get on an inspiration phase, you’ve got a planning phase, you’ve got menus and reply systems that can help people evaluate the product. You can run the bookings of the purchase phase, you can tag your fans and work with partners to try and send them content and destinations targeted at a particular group. So, it has this cool range of functions that I think is not fully utilised at least in the tourism sector yet. The fast moving consumer goods and things like that, they are doing a lot on WeChat, but tourism’s a bit behind maybe. So, don’t just think of it as an inspiration tool, it’s definitely a service platform for your customers as well. HollyG: And can you mention about the payments in Melbourne? Saxon Booth: Yeah, so I’ve seen one WeChat payment facility in Australia so far, which was SkyBus the bus service from Tullamarine to the city in Melbourne which was really cool, but I haven’t seen it in Sydney just yet. And there are companies helping people set that up, so it’s available. I’m not sure how difficult it is to set up, I don’t have experience on the ground with it. But, if you offer that facility, you’ve got a talking point, that customers are going to go back and talk about that, at the point of sale, you have got the opportunity to get them in as a fan in your account. So, it has different kinds of benefits other than just being more convenient for the consumer. HollyG: Do you have other forms of payment set up than we have talked about? Kate Marsden: Yeah, so we don’t yet have WeChat Wallet, but it’s coming and to that point we actually, as a brand you maybe may know you can either set yourself up on WeChat as an official account or a subscription account. The official account gives you all of that functionality that Saxon was just talking about, two and a half years into to our China plan putting all of this content in our subscription of WeChat account, we just realised that for the long-term that was the wrong account for us. So, we cancelled that one and literally started from scratch with a new WeChat account that enables us to have this functionality. So, taking a long-term view, sometimes you need to take a hit in order to realise that it’s such a growing channel and we need to move with how things are going. But we do have AliPay, and AliPay very quickly overtook UnionPay within six weeks of us launching AliPay. AliPay is so much more than a payment gateway, I look at it as a content publisher, a way that I can drive tactical promotions. They have got a Sydney office here who are so easy to work with and really want to work with the tourism industry. So, I really encourage you if you want to run tactical promotions contact them or I will happily put you into contact. And they have got a Sydney guide within the AliPay app, so when a Chinese traveller lands in Sydney, they bring up this Sydney guide and there is all this content there. So, and then you can run tactical promotions within that. So, it’s such a powerful tool and it’s been a really important tool for us probably in the last six months. HollyG: Wow, that’s great results. Okay, I’m going to move off social now just to keep moving. I want to ask the question about where does PR fit into what you’ve done with BridgeClimb and I guess some of the experiences you’ve had from a PR perspective? Kate Marsden:  Yes, so we’ve really, really used PR as such an important tool for us. So, at the very beginning we did a load of PR stunts, and I shouldn’t call them a stunt, PR events on the bridge. So, that involves such things as having a 15 metre Chinese Dragon climb up the eastern arch of the bridge for Chinese New Year. We’ve had a Mahjong championship game at the very top of the bridge. We’ve had Chinese Valentine’s day up there, yoga. And we invite the local Chinese media who are so, so accommodating and they’re so easy to work with and also the stringers from say CCTV, Shinwha, People’s Daily, and that has been such a great way that we’ve been able to get our brand out there. The other thing that we’ve started to do with PR is actually create really curative PR events. So, we’ve worked with other attractions in Sydney, and one example was we got a bunch of Chinese travellers and gave them the ultimate introduction to Sydney. So, they had a climb of the bridge, they went up to Bondi to go surfing, the day ended with them at The Strand Arcade getting a Akrooba hat fitting, and we followed them around the whole day, a reality TV star filming them. And with our agency in China we chopped all that content up and they pitched and placed specific content to keep publications throughout China. And that was a really important tool for us. So, we got runs in Women’s Health in China, Condé Nast, and so mixing up between having these one-off events and these kind of campaigns that take a long time to develop but get you long film content in markets, have been a really successful part of our marketing plan. HollyG: And where do you see the PR hits in terms of that customer journey? I guess, is it more in the research phase? Kate Marsden: Yes, inspiration, dreaming, topical fun, chat stuff. It’s the way that we get them into the funnel and then hopefully get them onto our channels where we can push them down further. HollyG: Did you want to talk too this? Saxon Booth: A little bit. Obviously, we are a digital agency, so we don’t do traditional PR. But I think one of the things Kate said was interesting in that definitely traditional media is really important for exposure and inspiration. But also focusing on events I think that’s an important thing in PR. It’s become more important, I think PR has changed a lot. The way we would see PR from our perspective, is we kind of do some kind of digital PR, so obviously we are setting up people on branded own channels. But then if they’ve got budgets to do some different kinds of advertising online the typical [inaudible 00:18:40] and banners and things like that, that’s their own. But we can hook them up with quite a lot of media entrepreneurs that are opening up media platforms on WeChat, so there’s a whole kind of class of media entrepreneurs in China that are kind of dropping out from journalism and things like that, seeing a niche and opening up a WeChat platform. They are running some really cool content, getting a following, monetising and then they’re becoming like an online magazine. And there are ones that just kind of come up out of nowhere that suddenly are more popular than any destination accountant would ever dream of. Running really interesting content around the world, local kind of interesting experiences, they are not pushing to groups, they are pushing to independent travellers. So, you can work with them on a content partner basis, or you can have advertising on their platform. So, that’s something that we kind of do in the PR space. Otherwise we just work with partners and when we are working from a plan, one with traditional PR. HollyG: Yeah, I think it’s an interesting trend and we talked about this at the Melbourne event two nights ago, about a shift away from the huge big publications into the small niche self-publishing sort of stuff that seems to be happening in China, but also we are seeing that all over the world. Now, is there any point doing any of this marketing activity if we don’t have distribution pathways? I guess the question is, how are people booking or how are you working with trade and how does trade fit into this whole picture? Kate Marsden: The easy answer is, no it would be pointless without distribution through trade. We do a lot of b to c marketing, but there’s still overwhelmingly booking through the trade. We would get probably 20% at the most booking direct on our .cn website, even though we’ve got Chinese payment forms and a .cn house website. So, the trade partnerships are so important, certainly for the independent travellers more and more the OTA’s are the key ones, and there’s so much focus in China of the top five OTA’s you know, the likes of Ctrip, BiChange, WhoKnew, we’ve focused on those, but we’ve found we’ve got most cut through through the medium to smaller OTA’s who are willing to work with you from a marketing point of view as well as a sales tactical point of view. And I really encourage you to look at if you are sitting in the middle, because from a marketing perspective you would probably be doing a lot more with them. Good luck with getting a tactical promotion through Ctrip, but it takes many meetings and hours and so forth. Saxon Booth: I would say the same, there’s a lot of stats coming out about independent travellers, and I think it’s absolutely true there’s a trend towards FIT in China, but I think a lot of that FIT is technically maybe in-between it’s a semi-independent traveller and it’s getting inspired, doing their own planning, doing their own research. But then parts of the trip they’re still going to go to a travel agent, whether it’s to book the flight on Ctrip or whether it’s to go to a travel agent to book an attraction, these kinds of things. So, you need to be looking at empowering the trade to not only become aware, create awareness in the trade, but empower them to sell. Give them really good information and training, whether it’s online or it’s in person, to kind of make sure that when they are inspiring these people to come in that they can close the deal effectively. I think that’s really important. Working with Chinese KOLs (Key Opinion Leader) HollyG: There’s one other aspect that I wanted to talk about which is the rise and rise of the KOL. Have either of you had experience working with KOL’s and maybe if you want to start to just give an overview of what a KOL is so that everyone in the room knows? Kate Marsden: Yeah, love, tourism and all the acronyms. Key opinion leader. So, it can be a range of things, so anything from a tier one to be a top celebrity down to tier two, tier three, like what Saxon was talking about. Even some of these ex-journalists for example have set up an aggregated site on WeChat and they’ve got one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand followers. They’re a worthwhile KOL too. We’ve worked as well, we get KOL’s kind of the T1’s through TA and DSW, but what we did was in a kind of off the back of that customer journey research piece that I talked about earlier, was a huge gap that we identified was user generated content, that was just lacking for BridgeClimb. And many of you know, you can’t take a camera up onto the bridge, so that automatic sharing for our product there’s a gap there. So, we saw KOL’s as a really good opportunity for us to start to fill that gap. Knowing that we can’t just fly a KOL over to Sydney from China and get them to do a bridge climb and put them on a plane, and get them to go back, it’s just completely unrealistic. So, we partnered with a bunch of other attractions including Sydney Opera House, some hotels and destinations in New South Wales and launched our own KOL programme, so we’ve hosted 24 KOL’s over three trips. Were we basically co-invested working with a PR agency in Beijing and the content output from that has been really really good. It’s been a great partnership across other attractions and tourism operators who are going after independent travellers too and who basically can’t do it alone and we all can meet. HollyG: Yeah, because it’s known to be quite an expensive exercise. Saxon Booth: Yeah, KOL’s are professionalised in China in a way that they are not in other markets, so they expect to be paid. So, they had to pool resources probably to be able to get some to come out. So, there’s even schools that we are seeing to train KOL, there are agencies and market places for KOL’s. So, I think there’s a lot of risk sometimes in working with them, you don’t know whether the stats and the data really adds up. I think the shift is away from the big kind of celebrity mega KOL’s that have a lot of followers they’re too expensive and they’re not targeted. So, there’s a lot of people we would consider KOL’s and maybe a professional travel photographer that’s got 400,000 followers on Weibo, that’s small for a KOL. But, he or she is going to take amazing pictures of your destination, you get great physical visual assets out of it. Plus, they’re going to be pushing it back to their following that’s all interested in travel photography. So, hitting these kinds of niches is really important. Using those self media on WeChat we were talking about as well is really important too. I think KOL’s it’s an interesting space, and I think the trend in western markets is similar to that people are looking to these niches now, because that’s a targeted group of people that are following that person that maybe are a bit warmer, they want to lead, they want it to convert. So, there’s a lot of options in China Weibo and WeChat to work with the KOL’s. But again it is the challenge of hitting that right target. HollyG:  Yeah, we are seeing them now called micro influencers, whether they have got a smaller amount of numbers or whether they are just working in a particular niche. And it’s interesting from what we’ve all talked about that it’s quite global, that trend. Now, my final question for the moment, I guess if a business or destination hasn’t strategically started with China at this point, are they too late? Saxon Booth: Absolutely not, I mean I have to say that, but it’s true. I think that maybe short haul destinations if you’re a tourism operator in Thailand or Korea you might have a little bit of a problem. We are seeing just recently this week, 7.5% reduction in Thailand in the first three months of the year, but they are getting I think 12 million Chinese tourists a year. So, maybe it’s not a huge impact, but it’s maybe a bit of a trend. We can see in the outgoing trends that long haul destinations are growing. Different kinds of niches are popping up, double digit growth in Morocco, they just libralized their visa last year. Different geopolitical things that are driving changes as well. Australia by 1.2 million I think last year, I don’t think that’s anywhere near where we can get. We’re a long haul destination, but we’re not that far away. It’s not a difficult flight. We have a great brand here and with that kind of switch away from short haul, I think mid 2016 was the first year that more Chinese tourists started going to places outside of greater China, so not just Hong Kong but Kowloon and Taiwan. So, that trend is just happening structurally and I think it’s a great opportunity for Australia to grow, to grow the business here. I think the other thing is the traveller profile is changing so potentially higher value tourists are coming in the next couple of years, even though the numbers might maybe not have the double digit growth. So, I think, yes it’s a good time for Australia with China. HollyG: I think there’s some stat out there that only 4% of the China population have a passport at this point in time. Saxon Booth: Yes, 5%. HollyG: So, that surely must present an opportunity. Kate Marsden: Yeah, I agree. And something else is all of the air routes that are opening up in the tier two cities, looking back at our PR at Outreach a huge focus of us now is going out and trying to get exposure through the tier two cities and their key publications. Because if they’ve got a direct flight into Sydney then that’s a new market for us that wasn’t there before. So, they often say you should chop up China into multi regions, and we do that based a lot of the time on the air access into Sydney and focusing on those mini markets that have the most potential for us. HollyG:  I really appreciate you coming, and I hope you’ve found it really valuable. Enjoy! You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher or your preferred podcast service. Tweet me with any comments or feedback @hollygalbraith or email is good too holly (at) hollyg.com.au We love to read reviews and reviews really make a difference to our ranking in iTunes. If you could take the time to add a review to iTunes this would be greatly appreciated and i’ll give you a shout out on an upcoming episode! Other China Tourism Marketing episodes you may enjoy Listen to Episode 75 here – Tips for your 2017 China marketing plan Listen to episode 55 here – China Ready for Travel & Tourism – a case study Listen to episode 50 here – Tourism marketing China 2016 Listen to episode 23 here – Insights into Chinese outbound tourism The post Tourism Upgrade LIVE – China tourism marketing appeared first on Holly G.

What is a style guide and why you need one for your tourism business In episode 81 we are chatting with Haydn Boschetti, Design Director at Swish Designs and we talk about brand, branding and why your tourism business should have a style guide.   You can connect with Haynd here. What is a style guide? “A style guide is a tool that gives you the rules and guidelines for using and applying your brand identity. It helps to build and maintain a consistent brand.” – Haydn Boschetti Haydn Boschetti: It helps to build and also maintain a consistent brand. That’s what a style guide should be for. You can have many pages, you can have a six to eight page style guide, PDF style guide or you can have up to 140 page, depending on how big your organisation is and how many rules and guidelines you need to include, and how many samples of your brand identity applications you’re going to have in that style guide. HollyG: Why is brand consistency so important or why is consistency so important? Haydn Boschetti: Basically in simplistic terms it’s telling your clients and your peers that you’re organised, that you are one unified company, not one that’s all broken up and a bit of a jigsaw puzzle to look at. It just says you’re organised and you’ve bothered to actually look after your visual material, your visual branding, and represent it to people in the best way possible. HollyG: It’s that level of professionalism, isn’t it. I often think there’s a trust factor when you see that consistency across lots of different touch points. It sort of makes you think that the organisation is professional and trustworthy. Haydn Boschetti: Yes, for sure because it says they’ve gone to the effort of offering their clients a unified visual front so to speak, so it’s easy for them to digest the information as well. HollyG: Other than say a logo, what are the sort of things that are in a style guide? Key elements of a style guide The main elements we have is usually as we mentioned before, the logo and usually when you put a logo into a guide you do a with and without a tagline. A lot of our clients have got taglines and slogans that work with the logo or around it, so include those as well. We often have an explanation of what the brand is, for people to see as well. Just an explanation of what the brand is and what the guide is, just a simple one page explanation at the start of the guide, explaining what it is to clients, so when they get it, they understand. Or suppliers when they get it, they understand the importance of the brand and the importance of the guide to help manage this brand. Then we have minimum sizes of the logo is really important. So a lot of it’s about the logo at the start. So it’s more for readability and respecting the logo’s readability at certain sizes and don’t go below those sizes. Then we look at primary colours for the logo and also what the logo looks like in greyscale, reversed out and what those rules are. Really important with the style guide, more so than most of the other elements, this is the one that most people need to know, that you’re sending your logo to, or your style guide to is the dos and dont’s for the logo. What do I do with this? What can I do with this? What can’t I do with this logo internally and externally? That’s really important. You know things like don’t change proportions or relationships to the logo. Please don’t stretch or condense the logo. I see a lot of that. The guide can definitely help you to manage that. They’ve got no excuses if they’ve seen the guide, whoever’s doing that. Then primary and secondary colours, primary colours are your logo colour and the secondary colours are again that supporting element we talked about before the supporting layer, just other colours that compliment your primary colours. Then you’d look into the corporate typeface as well because you have to present a unified typeface that’s organised as well. So it’s not just the logo, it’s the type that you use in your messaging and marketing material with the logo and the rules for that in the guide as well. What the typeface is, and what a secondary typeface is. If I don’t have that primary typeface, what’s my go-to for a secondary. So we usually cover that in there as well. Then after that you can go on, it depends how extensive you need to go into your guide, but that’s the core items I’ve just outlined. You can basically do all your key applications of the brand identity material to actual material, like to stationery, to corporate folders or to annual reports after that in the guide and outline what the rules are on placement of logos, and text, and imagery. It can be quite extensive but I’ve just explained basically the core elements of style guides that we do. HollyG: I think for my brand Tourism Upgrade, which consists of just me, you know just one person. But I still have that style guide, which has the logo, how it can be used, my two colours, and what they are and the little numbers that go with the colours so I can always use them. Then secondary colours, then the fonts. I think pretty much that’s about as far as mine goes but I know as you say with some of my clients they’ve got say what the business card looks like, what the letterhead is, the email signature, all that sort of stuff and you sort of just send the style guide out to anyone that’s doing anything with your brand to make sure you’re getting that consistent look. Haydn Boschetti: For sure and consistency is a huge word, it’s one I use most often in branding, brand identity, and brand management. It’s all about that and the style guide is essentially a brand management tool that creates, and helps create consistency for your brand. HollyG: When we’re talking about brand. I love how you talk about that brand management. When we’re talking about brand often we just think of a logo but brand is a lot more than that isn’t it? Haydn Boschetti: Yeah it is. I mean it’s important. I usually go through with our clients first, the difference between what brand is and what branding is because there is a difference there. There’s a lot of different schools of thought on it but essentially you know your brand is the more intangible form of how your business, services, products, and culture are perceived. It’s something that is intangible but very important. It’s who you are, what you do, why you do it, etc. The actual branding is separate because it’s the more tangible, the more visual form and that’s what I deal with a lot, is the brand narrative. That represents the brand on all your marketing, product, and sales material and offers a visual window to the brand so to speak. Brand verses Branding “Your brand is the more intangible form of how your business, services, products, and culture are perceived. It’s something that is intangible but very important.” “The actual branding is separate because it’s the more tangible, the more visual form and that’s what I deal with a lot, is the brand narrative. That represents the brand on all your marketing, product, and sales material and offers a visual window to the brand so to speak.” HollyG: What are some of the things that you come across or have come across in your 20 years experience in this industry, from clients that can be quite frustrating that keep coming up again, and again when you’re talking about, or when you’re working on different design projects? Haydn Boschetti: Often we’ll go to the effort of doing a great brand revitalization or at least getting a new logo rebrand out there for a client and start creating the brand identity elements, you know like the secondary branding and corporate typeface and secondary colours, and so forth. Then often I’ll see when we’ve rolled this out, we then roll these items out for a range of marketing material that’s relevant to the client. Often I’ll see six months down the track the email signatures that we’ve created for our clients they’ve been changed or botched often with just not using them properly, or even not using them at all. I find that’s a common one. HollyG: So you’ve gone to the effort to do it and it’s about, as you say that word, consistency must come up a lot? Haydn Boschetti:  Yes. HollyG: It’s about rolling that out. Haydn Boschetti:  Yeah we’ll your email signature now it’s become more important than ever because it’s basically you first port of call for a lot of people when they see or hear from on an email, is visually who you are, who do you belong to. That’s your email footer. It’s your email signature. That often has your logo on there and if that’s not presented consistently, say I’ve given you a business card two weeks ago and then I’ve sent you an email after that and you’ve got my business card, when you look at the business card and you have a look at my email and they look the same. They look like they belong together. That’s perception, that’s straightaway it’s seen as, I’ve got a consistent approach. Then that word professionality comes back up again. HollyG: Would you say that regardless of size of a business, so I just think in the tourism industry there’s a lot of businesses that are sort of mum and dad style operators. Is this still relevant for them? Haydn Boschetti: Yeah, it’s relevant for any business. I like to say, if I had to use an analogy, it the suit you wearing around. It’s how essentially you look. If I walk into a room and I’ve got a beautiful looking suit on and then I start addressing you in a professional manner, you tend to think that I’m professional. If I walk into a room and I’m not addressing you properly and I’m dressed in my thongs and boardies, totally different. So your branding is basically the suit your company wears to its mates. HollyG: What I often see as well is, when businesses just start, you know they might develop some of the elements. But as the business evolves, new elements are coming in and the business is maybe going in a slightly different direction to what they though, just little things creep in. Maybe different colours, or fonts, or styles and before you know it you’ve got a little bit of a mish-mash of things. I guess although you can do this sort of style guide or brand development at the start of a business. Even if you haven’t done that, you can jump in and do it anytime. Haydn Boschetti: Yeah, you’re gonna have a brand identity of sorts, most companies will have a logo, they’ll have a visual identity of some sort. They’ll have fonts they’re using. They’ll have some things in place whether they know it or not, that they are using. It’s really getting the best of the things that are in place, the elements that are in place and getting them together in a style guide form to help manage moving forward the consistency of the brand and help other people who are using, maybe the logo you are sending out to a sign maker or off to a designer. It helps them to create and respect the logo in the form that you want it to, that you’ve outlined in that guide. It doesn’t matter how big your business is, if you’re a business you’ve got to have a brand identity of sorts. You can go without it. So you’ve got to have a visual aspect of it and if that’s not looking consistent then it is going to affect your business. HollyG: That’s it, the style guide is talking to a broad range of people. Haydn Boschetti:  It is, everyone from a CEO or a CFO of another company, or an MD, to a signage supplier and designer. HollyG: It could be you’re sponsoring the local event or something like that and you want them to display your logo correctly. Haydn Boschetti: Yeah that’s it and they will want to advertise with you or put you on as their sponsor or thank you for the effort of being a sponsor but then they go and put your logo in the wrong colour and the wrong place, with not much clearance space. That basically sort of ruins that moment. HollyG: Yeah exactly. So is there any other points you want to make about the importance of having a style guide? Haydn Boschetti: I often see a lot of effort and I’ve been involved in teams putting brand identities together for companies of all shapes and sizes and there’s so much effort put into, even if we don’t do it, I understand the effort that’s put into it by the designers behind it or the company behind it. That all falls down if it’s not managed well and it’s up to everybody to try and help manage that brand but if they’ve got a tool like a style guide as one of the brand management tools that they can go to, every time, and add to as a company evolves. It’s an essential item. It’s an essential brand management tool but you know your brand falls down if it does become inconsistent and one of the first ways it becomes inconsistent is when people don’t know how to use it. How to use elements from the brand in a consistent manner, together. The clients realise the importance of it once they actually have it and are using it. Bonus question: if you only had a $1000 marketing budget what would you spend it on? Haydn Boschetti: that to me depends on how far evolved my business is and what stage I’m at but say that I’ve already got a logo, and I’ve already got a website presence. I would say if I’ve got those key things in place. Probably for me it’d either be as we’ve been talking about a simple style guide to help manage the brand that I’ve created or in case of a website maybe an SEO or digital marketing plan, even a simple one. To help my website work a bit harder for me. HollyG:Yeah good point. Very good point. I think sometimes with websites we set them up and forget about them. Which is a big danger, I think. It’s an ongoing tool. Haydn Boschetti: Yeah website’s just don’t work by themselves anymore, they’re is more of an ecosystem that needs to come together for a website to work properly. It’s a platform. HollyG: Well really good to chat with you Haydn. I think that’s been very useful for our listeners and I really appreciate your time. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher or your preferred podcast service. Tweet me with any comments or feedback @hollygalbraith or email is good too holly (at) hollyg.com.au We love to read reviews and reviews really make a difference to our ranking in iTunes. If you could take the time to add a review to iTunes this would be greatly appreciated and i’ll give you a shout out on an upcoming episode!   The post Style guide for your tourism business appeared first on Holly G.

Tourism accreditation to build trust, stand out and grow your business In episode 80 we are chatting with Sheridan Ferrier, NSW Program Manager for ATAP which is the Australian Tourism Accreditation Program about how through tourism accreditation, tourism businesses can build trust, stand out and grow bookings to their business.   SHOW NOTES   HollyG: Welcome to Tourism Upgrade, the podcast unpacketing marketing trends from travel, tourism, and marketing leaders. I’m your host, HollyG, and I have with me marketing and PR consultant Sherridan Ferrier, who among other things is the New South Wales programme manager for ATAP, which is the Australian Tourism Accreditation Programme. Welcome to the podcast, Sheridan. Sheridan Ferrier: Thank you, Holly. Glad to be here. HollyG: Nice to have you on. Now, before we get into talking about tourism accreditation and accreditation programmes, I thought it might be good just to I guess introduce listeners to a little bit about yourself, because you’ve been in the tourism industry since about, it must be coming close to 20 years now. Sheridan Ferrier: Yes. I think it’s about 18 fabulous years, and I’ve worked with everything from Sydney icons to the best wine region in Australia. I’ve been here, there, and everywhere across destination marketing PR and events. HollyG: And what are you spending most of your time on now? Sheridan Ferrier: Most of the time I spend on the ATAP programme, and look after all of the properties in New South Wales, and building that programme for New South Wales. There’s about 4000 operators across Australia, but within New South Wales, we have under 100. That’s about to change, and that’s what I’m focused on at the moment. HollyG: Okay, cool. If we’re talking about accreditation programmes, I just want to take a step back and just look at really how and consumers now booking travel, and how are they getting their information. How does that fit into what you’re doing with ATAP? Sheridan Ferrier: Yeah, well, look, more and more consumers are booking online, and if you look at Google’s travel trends from last year, it’s mobile devices that they’re using. They’re researching on their mobile, but then they’re going and booking on their desktop. It’s about 90% that use their desktop to book, but mobile and mobile apps are really, really important. And I guess that also moves across to social media. Word of mouth as well. And information that sort of comes left, right, and centre across the digital medium. If you’re not on line, you’re really going to miss out a lot of consumers heading towards your product. HollyG: When consumers are online, I guess, how are businesses able to differentiate themselves? Because we know that there’s so much information out there. How are consumer’s brains thinking, and what are they looking for? Sheridan Ferrier: I guess they’re really looking for that peace of mind that when they go to book online, that they’re going to be choosing a quality tourism operator that has all their ducks in a row, and they’re doing everything they possibly can to make them the best tourism business. And those that do perform really well are the ones that do have accreditation, they’ve won tourism awards, and they’re continually upgrading their business every year, bringing on new products, or doing things new ways, or bringing in new technology. HollyG: Cool. Back in the day we always had the Star Rating system, so maybe … Well, especially with, I guess, accommodation, which is a lot of the experience that I’ve had. Your three-star or four-star or five-star accommodation or something like that. Now, there’s been a whole lot of stuff happening with the Star Rating system here in Australia. Can you just give us a bit of an overview on, I guess, even starting back when they were looking to change the programme, and then where is it now? Sheridan Ferrier: I guess the Star Ratings, they made an announcement at the beginning of May that it will be taken over by the Australian Tourism Industry Council. And the Tourism Industry Council is set up in each state across Australia, and they run the ATAP programme. It’s licenced to each industry council, and within New South Wales, it’s licenced to the New South Wales business chamber. One of the roles of the chamber is looking at the accreditation, and also assisting the tourism industry to provide quality operators, looking at what’s best practise out there. When Star Ratings announced in February that they would be closing, the Tourism Industry Councils all got together to have a look at it, because it is really important for consumers to know what they’re booking, and the type of products that they’re getting. It aligns really well with the ATAP programme. We have a lot of attraction operators that have the ATAP accreditation, whereas the star ratings is going to complement that. We’ll be looking after both programmes to ensure that customers have somewhere to go. If something goes and they need some feedback, we can help to improve those industry standards. But also when they’re booking, it gives them that peace of mind that they’re booking the right product that’s going to suit their needs. HollyG: Was the … I guess the announcement, well, today, is that the star rating system isn’t disappearing, isn’t going away. Sheridan Ferrier: No, definitely not. It will be managed by each tourism industry council across the state, so New South Wales Business Chamber will take over the 1500 operators or accommodation providers in New South Wales, and then each state will manage the accreditation for those operators that are signed up to the star rating programme. No, it’s not going anywhere. It’s something that consumers need, and it is recognised as a standard of excellence right across Australia. HollyG: In the day and age that we’re in now, with TripAdvisor and other review sites, is star rating and accreditation programmes still valid? Sheridan Ferrier: Most definitely. It’s all about the quality of the product that’s there. With the star ratings, you know that you might be looking at a deal that’s out there, and go, “Oh, I’m getting a really good deal for this property, but it also aligns to the star rating that they have. You know if you’re booking a four star, you know the type of experience that you’re expected to have. That aligns with that accreditation. It tells the consumer what to expect from that property. And same as with the tourism accreditation, the ATAP programme, an operator actually has to meet a set of industry standards in order to gain that accreditation. HollyG: Okay, that’s a good sort of segue into talking specifically about the Australian Tourism Accreditation Program, and I guess how it works, and really understanding why operators should get involved. Sheridan Ferrier: Sure. Well, ATAP’s Australia-wide. We’ve got 4000 operators that have the accreditation. In some states it’s actually compulsory to have your accreditation to be listed with the state tourism body, and on their website. It’s not compulsory in New South Wales at the moment, but we’re certainly working towards that way, because it really, the programme is about quality tourism businesses. It’s a programme that’s done all completely online, and it looks at the practises an procedures in a business, and across all of your systems from having a business plan to your customer service policy. It looks at your risk management plan, how you manage your staff, and your operating systems including financials. It was set up by the tourism industry, and it’s managed by the tourism industry. Sheridan Ferrier: If you meet all of the criteria and you can provide documentation for your business that meets all of that, then you can use the tick, and use that to market your business. And that gives you a point of difference and a competitive advantage. HollyG: And I guess when we are … Going back to the fact that we know consumers are booking travel online and they’re researching online, I guess, as you say, it’s a way that you can stand out. But also we know that consumers are looking at up to, around 13 different touch points before they make a decision, and with all those touch points, what they really want is to go, “Do I trust this business? Does their Facebook page say the same thing as their website? Does what it says on trip advisor support all the other things that I’m seeing about this business.” I guess this is another piece of that trust, yeah, to get that trust in the business. Sheridan Ferrier: Yeah, it sure is. It gives you credibility. And when you’ve got people searching online, it’s things like having the tick with your business that helps to increase your search engine optimisation and to bring your listing up, because you are showing that you’re a credible business. The tick certainly helps with that accreditation, but it just gives consumers peace of mind that they know that they’re going to get a good product that they’re booking, and what their advertising says is what they’re going to see when they arrive. HollyG: Do we have some examples of businesses who are ATAP accredited, or any case studies or anything like that? Sheridan Ferrier: Yes, well, I guess the National Tourism Awards are a really good example of those with accreditation. And last year there was more than 60% of winners that held ATAP accreditation. That’s partly due to some of the states having compulsory accreditation, but the New South Wales operators that stood out at the awards also held accreditation. To give you one example, you’ve got Margan Wines. They have taken out a number of Australian tourism awards over the few years across wine and food tourism as well. They’re consistently looking at their business and what they can do, and they’re innovative, and they’re bringing on new systems. When they undertook their accreditation, it was actually really easy for them to get it done really quickly, because they ticked all of the boxes straight away. And if you have a look at their website, margan.com.au, you’ll see on their very homepage that they’ve got all the accreditations and the tourism awards that they’ve won. That helps them to stand out against other businesses. To give you another example, there’s Balloon Safaris who have been in business for over 35 years, and they say that to stay on top of the industry is that they continue evolve their product and service offering. They’ve held their accreditation since 2007, and they say that is an important point of difference between themselves and their competitors, especially when they’re dealing with the international market, because it provides a benchmark for them. HollyG: And I think, look, I know you’re a big advocate for entering awards, and whether it’s sort of on a local level or on a national level, as well, in terms of further setting yourself apart from your competitors. Sheridan Ferrier: Oh, look, most definitely. And if you look at what you can do for your business to make it stand out, I guess the first place to start is looking at your marketing strategy. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten. That strategy’s gonna set you in the right direction and help you to achieve your goals. And this is one of the modules that we do do within the accreditation. We look at the internal and external business, and then once you know who your competitors are, who your target markets are, then you can go about setting your marketing objectives. And within those, you may have entering the Tourism Awards as one of the key goals that you’ll have for the next twelve months, because when you enter the Tourism Awards you’re actually reviewing your business and your achievements in the last 12 months, and you’re setting your goals for the future. If you’re entering every year, your business is constantly turning over new ideas, and it’s also really motivating for staff as well to see what they’ve achieved. And what we’re doing at the moment, because there’s such a really good alignment with the Tourism Awards and accreditation, is we’re offering a fast track service for tourism operators that have entered the awards before and that have a submission. Because we can align half of the modules with your ATAP programme with the Tourism Awards, and then there’s only a few more documents that they have to provide, an they can fast track their accreditation, and especially in line for entering this year’s Tourism Awards. That will give them a step up when the judges are looking at their submissions and saying, “Okay, yes, well they have the tick as well, so therefore we can see that they’re really dedicated to improving the quality of their business.” HollyG: Yeah, great. And I like that idea of when you’re entering Tourism Awards and also looking at this accreditation programme. It’s taking that time to stop working in your business, and then taking a step back to look at it from a strategic point of view. And I’m sure if you do that every year then, as you say, you’re going to be implementing new things, going to be more innovative, going to be staying ahead of your competitor. Sheridan Ferrier: Yeah, that’s true. With the ATAP programme, we get people to complete their full submission every three years. By that stage, their marketing plan would have changed, because the way that digital technology is working, there could be a new app that they could implement to use their mobile phone to unlock their guest-room. Every three years you need to be looking at what you’re doing and changing that plan. Of course, doing it every year is much better, but with the ATAP programme, our standard is to review procedures and processes every three years. HollyG: Yeah. And how long has ATAP been around for, and what sort of, I guess, encouraged it to come on, to be created? Sheridan Ferrier: ATAP has been around for, I guess, many many years, but in different forms. You may remember back to when the federal government had put together the T-QUAL programme. That was so many years ago. Well, the T-QUAL programme started looking at the industry standards and what we could do, and then it got to the stage where it was up and running, and then Tourism Alliance took it over, and then it moved forward into the Tourism Industry Councils, and then off to each state to manage. It’s been around for quite some time, just in different formats. And within New South Wales, we’ve been looking after the programme since 2015, which is when the New South Wales Business Chamber took on the licence for the state. HollyG: Okay. The whole aim of the game, really, is about making … like the overarching theme is basically ensuring that Australia is delivering great quality tourism, so it continues to be important for our economy. Is that sort of the overarching theme of this? Sheridan Ferrier: Oh, look, most definitely. It’s certainly about quality assurance principles, and I guess setting some standards for the tourism industry. An that’s why the industry had put this programme together for all tourism sectors. Even if you’re a small operator that runs a B&B, or you’re you’re BridgeClimb that has a lot of staff, the programme works for you either way, because you’re meeting the standards according to the size of your business. If you’re a B&B operator, then you’re not gonna have a HR manual, but if you’re BridgeClimb, then you will need a HR manual for all of the staff. It’s meeting those standards for a small or large business, and the programme is flexible in that way. But yeah, it certainly makes sure that a business that has their accreditation, you can be assured that they’ve got a risk management plan, that they have their insurance and public liability, that if anything should happen, that they know what to do in those instances, because they’re prepared. They’re prepared to deal with any situation. They have customer service policies. They have booking procedures. We make sure that they’re available on the website for everybody to see before they book. I guess the program also tries to minimise any risk for a consumer as well. HollyG: And is there a cost for businesses to apply for the ATAP? Sheridan Ferrier: Yeah. The programme varies, and it is, again, based on the size of the business. For up to three people in your business, the cost is $289 per year. We do an annual renewal just to make sure insurances and everything are up to date, and then the costs go up from there. HollyG: Yep, cool. Now, do you have any other sort of final comments you wanted to make, or where’s the best place where people can get further info? Sheridan Ferrier: Our website is accreditation.atap.net.au, or you could email me NSW@atap.net.au. HollyG: Cool, and we can put those links in the show notes as well, to make it easy for people to click through. Sheridan Ferrier: Okay, great. Thank you. HollyG: Cool. Well, thanks for your time. It is a good reminder, really. I think sometimes we think as a business, “Oh, I might enter those awards, or I might go for that accreditation,” but we sort of seem to put it off. I think this is a good reminder to sort of just get it done, especially the accreditation. You put in the effort and it lasts for three years, so I think, yeah, it’s a good reminder for people. Sheridan Ferrier: Yeah, it sure is, and it’s also a god way to help you with your Tourism Award submission as well. It sort of goes hand-in-hand with the two. For the show notes for this episode, head to HollyG.com.au. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast service.     The post Tourism accreditation to build trust and stand out appeared first on Holly G.

Influencer marketing should be called relationship marketing, here’s why. In episode 79 of Tourism Upgrade I speak with Debbie Mundell, Head of Content at HYLAND, a Sydney based communications agency, about all the dramas that have been going on of late with Instagram – with fake accounts and fake followers – and cut through to why and how influencer marketing should be called relationship marketing.   The article that promoted this discussion can be read here http://behindthequest.com/instagram-created-a-monster/   SHOW NOTES HollyG: Now I’m very excited to talk about this on topic topic because I know we’ve been talking online, lots of people in the social media world online have been talking online, about influence of marketing and a few specific things, mainly related to Instagram. Now the reason that we I guess started this conversation is because probably about a week or so ago a travel blogger, or a blogger called Behind the Quest, released an article on her blog saying Instagram created a monster and she was saying a no bullshit guide to what’s really going on on Instagram. And I’ve seen a few other articles sort of which I call a confession article from Instagram as lately sort of saying, “Look, this is what’s really going on on Instagram.” What is the story with all these articles? What’s sort of going on here? Deb Mundell: Yeah well I think it’s actually a topic that’s been bubbling under the surface when it comes specifically to Instagram I would say for a couple of years. Because you know specifically Australian Instagrammers that I know and also that I follow and I’ve worked with, I’ve seen conversations that they have been having between themselves. It’s very much been driving around what specific Insta-users are actually doing to grow their follower numbers and grow their engagements and the bots and the apps that they’ve used to do that. And in the last couple of months it’s really come to the fore because there’s been a lot of travel influencers and I think it has crossed over into some other categories as well, but I’ve seen it mostly from a travel point of view, where they’re basically just wanted to … I guess it’s them wanting to express their authenticity and actually share with their followers what they actually feel about these fake accounts, about the bots that are being used, about the different tactics that are used by influencers on specifically for Instagram and how that’s affecting their engagement. And so people are basically just coming out and saying, “This is what’s happening, I don’t like it.” Or, “This is what I’ve done.” For example in this article that we’re talking about with Behind the Quest where she actually did talk about things that she has done, because I think she wanted to just come out and just be open and say, “Yes I’ve tried this before, I’m not doing it anymore.” Or, “I’ve seen people do this, I’ve never done it because of X, Y, Z.” And it’s yeah, it’s really them saying I want to be open and I want you guys to know why I’m not doing something and why you know … I’ve read articles about people saying this is why I don’t have 50,000 followers, because I don’t do this and I don’t follow these sorts of strategies. HollyG: And what I think is really interesting is how this is come out from within the industry, from other Instagrammers. And basically it seems like at the moment there’s a lot of Instagrammers putting their hands up and saying, “Okay,” you know, “Don’t judge me with everyone else.” Because there’s been so much Instagram bashing I guess saying you know, “We don’t know if people are real, we don’t know if people are fake, blah blah blah blah blah.” And the industry’s saying you know you can’t all put us in together. Yes, let’s be honest, these are the things that are going on in the industry, but that doesn’t meant that it’s happening to everyone. And we’ll get on to that in a sec. But the other thing I wanted to talk about, which I think a lot of brands might not know about, was the platform Instagress. Instagress? So I’ve found, over the last couple of weeks, this company or this tool called Instagress closed its doors. So basically however it closed down, it closed down. And after that happened I found, I also saw a lot of other Instagrammers going, “Wahoo, it’s gone, thank goodness.” Because that was sort of a tool that was really driving a lot of fakeness on Instagram. Is that your understanding as well? Deb Mundell: Yeah, exactly. So they’re by no means alone in what they provide in terms of assisting users to grow their follower numbers and their engagement numbers. And that includes things like going round and actually liking images on other users’ posts and adding comments on other users’ posts HollyG: So a computer system doing it. A bot or something like that doing it rather than a real person. Deb Mundell: Exactly. Kind of ties in with what Instagram seems to be doing online at the moment is that they as a platform also seem to be wanting to take charge of getting rid of these bot accounts. And there’s been another topic that’s been a big sort of conversation piece in the last few weeks, especially kind of around Easter, is shadow banning. Yeah, and that’s around hashtag use and also sort of about accounts. So I’ve even kind of been impacted by it with one of my clients where it seems like what Instagram has been doing is if a hashtag that they sort of say suddenly gets, starts being used by lots of separate users, like quite sort of surprisingly all of a sudden- HollyG: Like some random sort of thing. Deb Mundell: Yeah, like say for example it’s a static number and the brand’s using it on a daily or every two days sort of basis on their own posts and then all of a sudden there’s a big surge in people that are using that hashtag that they’ve been going in and actually sort of thinking, “Ah, maybe it’s a fake hashtag,” and that it’s a bot. And so they have been cutting that down and stopping access to those hashtags. So although there’s kind of lots of conjecture around what they are actually doing it actually ties in with this kind of story around Instagress where they’ve been asked to shut down. Where as Insta seems to also be taking it upon themselves to be doing it too. HollyG: It’s a little bit scary. You know like especially if you know I know what we do in tourism is we want a hashtag to take on. We might be doing a specific campaign where we’re trying to encourage a whole bunch of people to use the hashtag. So it’s a little scary to hear that, isn’t it? Deb Mundell: It is. It is. There’s a few questions around all of that. HollyG: Yeah. It’ll be interesting to see how that one rolls out. There has been quite a few articles about shadow banning and you know what’s happening there as well. So in light of this whole thing that you know as a brand we want to work with influencers in adverted comers and you know we know that it’s important for our brand’s story to be told through lots of people’s eyes. So we want different perspectives of our brands, we want our brand story told in different ways. You know we want to get the message out there and working with people who have bigger profiles can be a great way to do that. How do we manage this in the age of so much fakeness out there? Deb Mundell: Well I guess first of all when you look at you know an over action strategy for a brand and say they’re launching a new product or it’s a campaign, if influence and marketing is regarded as being a core element that you want to use to actually be part of that campaign, be part of the media that is actually being used. The first thing that I would say and this sort of [inaudible 00:09:15] in a proposal sort of sense is just research, lots and lots of research as much as [inaudible 00:09:23]. You need to make sure that you look at every social channel that they have. You also look at their blogs. You obviously look at their YouTube if they’re V-loggers. You know any kind of forms that they’re a part of. Because you want to make sure that influencer, yes, is legit, in terms of that they’re not, they haven’t you know gained 100,000 fans because they’ve paid them. And is there something weird going on when you look at their engagement numbers on different posts. So you need to, you know you really have to analyse their posts and also their engagement numbers and their follower numbers just to make sure that yeah, they are legit. And the other thing is you know know your category, know your influencers that are amazing in your category and be constantly keeping an eye out for the up and comers. Because quite often they are also really awesome to use in a campaign or in a promotion for a brand because they … and this is again another I guess topic is the micro-influencer, where you might mix in a big and a really strong and well-known influencer. But then you might want to utilise someone who isn’t as big in terms of maybe strength of awareness and follower numbers yet their audience is super loyal and very, very engaged. So yeah I would say my first tip is definitely research, and it’s something that you need to make sure that you’re given the time to do that. And yeah you’ve got a really strong opinion about that influencer. HollyG: It takes me back to my PR days, that it is all about building relationships. And we can’t be treating influencers any differently. We should be making sure we’re going to the events where we can network with them and get to know them. We need to be building relationships with influencers in our industry whether they’re the big guys or keeping our eye out on who’s up and coming and watching it and growing with them. A lot of the brands that I’ve worked with have been you know smaller or might have had smaller budgets and it’s the micro, the smaller influencers, where we have been able to get traction. And what ends up happening you build relationships with those smaller guys over time and before you know it they’re the top of the tree. Deb Mundell: Yeah. HollyG: And I’ve seen that so many times. We’ve just got to get over this whole big number thing and I think that’s what started a lot of the problem in the first place. When you were first on the platform of Instagram it was so much easier to grow your following and to get that traction and you know we see that with the influencers or the Instagrammers that have been on there for a long time that have those big numbers. But you know if you’re coming in now in the last year or so it is so much harder to get those big numbers. So we’ve really got to look at just beyond that big number, look beyond that reach and think about what else you are getting. Deb Mundell: And that again comes back down to your research. And again sharing that with the clients so that they understand that engagement and the positive community and follower base is exceptionally important when you’re trying to you know when you’re promoting your product, you’re educating the consumer about your product or your destination or whatever it is. But you want that to be going through to obviously your target consumer and that’s why you’re wanting to work with that influencer. But also that they are the right person and if they don’t have 100,000 followers or 50,000 followers or whatever it is that that’s not a bad thing, that’s actually fine. And you know you can prove that by sort of showing that their engagement levels are huge and they they have a really proactive and nurtured audience. HollyG: And you know often you’re working with these people because of their creativity as well. Deb Mundell: Exactly. HollyG: They’re displaying a level of creativity that you’re not on a day to day basis. Or it’s shown in a different way so it’s gonna cut through in a different way. Deb Mundell: Yeah exactly. And I think that’s also one of the criteria that when you’re looking at influencers and in that sort of first research stage is that you need to understand you know the content quality is like that they produce. And also you need to assess the different types of formats that they publish. Because a lot of the campaigns that you start to see rolled out more and more are the video star, whether that’s a long form or a short form video, you want to also make sure that when they produce videos that they’re of a high quality too. HollyG: So one thing I wanted to mention was around the new advertising standards around working with influencers that came out in Australia. So now people need to clearly label their sponsored content. How is that rolled out for you guys working with influencers? Deb Mundell: That’s something I’ve been asking them to do for at least a year already. Like I actually in my breaking forms one of the kind of criteria as a must is I’ve been asking them to include a hashtag sponsored or SP or ad, because I was reading a lot about what was happening in the States and I just kept thinking to myself it’s going to get rolled out here for sure. And so to me it was kind of no surprise that it eventually hit us. So to me it hasn’t really affected us because it’s something again that when you are creating content that that’s in the captions that you’re making sure already that it’s really evident. So that everybody is safe and aligned. HollyG: Because the onus isn’t on the Instagrammers or on the influencer, it’s really on the brand. And I know that if a breach of this carries a maximum fine of I think $200,000 for the influencer, but over a million dollars for the brand. So if you are working and paying influencers you need to make sure that that content is acknowledged. And what I’m mainly seeing is people using the hashtag sponsored or SP’s another one which I think is a bit weird. I think sponsored’s probably a little bit more transparent. Deb Mundell: Yeah, or ad. HollyG: Or ad Deb Mundell: Yeah and I think again I’ve seen articles where influencers have called out to their audiences and have actually said, “I hope you don’t think I’m selling out,” and that sort of thing. And those influencers who have a genuinely loyal and regarded as trusted in terms of their authenticity already by their followers they’re not actually the followers and the communities are actually saying and coming back and commenting and responding and saying, “You know what? We can see that it’s a sponsored post, but we trust that you would only ever promote a product that you believe in and therefore you know we’ll believe in. And that’s why you’re recommending it. So yeah, if you start promoting something which is not aligned to who you are in any way then yes, we’re gonna call you out. But if you’re not, then we can see it and we’re fine with it.” HollyG: Yeah. So to sort of wrap up a few things or just go over the key points, what we’re saying is that there is people on Instagram that are buying likes or buying followers and all that sort of thing. And as a brand you’ve got to be aware of what’s going on out there. If you want to work with influencers you should make sure they’re real, not fake, by developing a relationship with them or working with people who have relationships with these people. And also from a brand’s perspective making sure that you are aware of your responsibilities legally in terms of sponsored content and that sort of thing. And you know being up on what’s happening in Instagram world by reading some of these articles that Instagrammers are talking about. Deb Mundell: Yeah. And I think the other thing is you know be an active member of your favourite influencer communities that are in your category, where your clients are. Because again it’s going to mean that you know really fast and you know you might even have a list of who you would go to straightaway for that client because you’re an active user. You’re an active member of the community, sorry. You’re therefore, you know, you understand the inside out already. So you could go, “Yes, they’re perfect for your brand because of X,Y,Z.” So yeah, be part of their communities and follow them and chat to them and drive a conversation. HollyG: And I guess the final point is you know influencer marketing can be a great thing if it’s part of … if you identify that it’s part of your overall marketing strategy. Deb Mundell: Yes, yup, yeah. And again if you … it’s like should Programmatic be part of your marketing mix or should Out of Home or whatever it is. Because every campaign is slightly different and your objectives and your overarching sort of theme that you’re wanting to message and communicate is specific. So if influencer marketing or social media is regarded as being core to the success and the way that you’re going to achieve your objectives and you’re [inaudible 00:19:45] totally go for it, use it. And be really smart and really effective with it and you’re going to get really good results. HollyG: Cool. That is great. So where can people get further information about you or connect with you if they want to pick up this conversation further? Deb Mundell: So my twitter handle is @DebJMun and that’s actually the same for Instagram so you can follow me either place. HollyG: Perfect, easy, that’s great. Now it’s time for our thousand dollar bonus question. I normally ask my guests one, a bonus question and the question is: if you only had a $1,000 marketing budget what would you spend it on? Deb Mundell: Ooh, if I think specifically say about Tasmania, that I would commission potentially like a local photographer to ask them to go out and shoot X number of shots or images that could be shared across the brand’s social channels and use that almost … you could almost start it off in a niche sense that you’re just talking about one location. And then if you start to see the results, and sorry would also allocate some of that budget to use for promoting the posts, so investing into Penn media because then you know you know that it’s going to, it can be boosted and amplified out to a new audience as well. And you’re then going to grow awareness about who you are and see your follower numbers increase and also engagements. So I would potentially do that. I would actually start with a photographer shots that are commissioned that you could … I would start it out as being able to be used across social channels and boost that content. HollyG: I like that answer. Deb Mundell: And I’m a veery social person so I almost immediately think about social media. HollyG: Well that’s what we mainly talk about so you’re in good company. Well it is interesting because I do ask that question to most of my guests and so it is … I normally don’t put them on the spot as much as I’ve put you on the spot so sorry about that. I do normally give them some warning. So it is always interesting to hear what they say. For the show notes for this episode, head to HollyG.com.au. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast service.     The post Influencer marketing should be called relationship marketing appeared first on Holly G.

Governance for Tourism Boards and Destinations Welcome to Tourism Upgrade, the podcast unpacking marketing trends from travel, tourism, and marketing leaders. I’m your host, HollyG, and today we welcome Airbnb expert and host and governance and strategy consultant, Jodie Willmer. We’ll be having a discussion on governance for tourism destinations and specifically talking about some issues impacting marketing activities. What is governance, and is why is it something that tourism destinations need to have on their radar? Jodie Willmer: Sometimes people think governance is actually something that’s quite complex and a bit ethereal and difficult to understand, so part of my passion is to help people, make it clear and simple and give them the tools and the confidence to be able to do things better. In a tourism context, there are already existing structures for organisations. For example, there might be a local Chamber of Commerce, there might be an incorporated association and there’s also regional tourism bodies that might have representatives from different parts of the region or some specific skills. That regional tourism organisation might have the overall responsibility to market the destination outside the region and have cooperative partnerships with destinational marketing state bodies as well. There are already a number of organisations who have boards and committees. Essentially governance is actually the way that organisations operate lawfully, transparently, and accountably to achieve their strategic goals.  “Governance is actually the way that organisations operate lawfully, transparently, and accountably to achieve their strategic goals” – Jodie Willmer If we think about it quite simply, members to a regional tourism organisation are like shareholders or stakeholders, and so when they pay their membership fees, they’re paying to contribute to a number of functions. That could be professional development training. It could be advocacy or representation. It could also be cooperative marketing. We’re actually entrusting those boards and those people employed in those organisations and volunteers to use that money wisely and also make decisions that are in the best interest of the greater good and not for specific individuals’ benefit. Governance is really about the systems, the processes and the activities that help people make really transparent and accountable decisions and that help them achieve their goals. Governance is not just about lots of meetings and I’m not sure if you’ve been on any committees or boards, Holly, but I know a lot of people who I work with feel a huge sense of frustration about meetings that are unproductive, that are unfocused, strategies that people don’t really embed and understand. What I like to do is help them make it simple and clear and so that they can navigate through all of those concerns and actually achieve the goals that they want to achieve. HollyG: I think it’s a great way to look at it. What sort of work have you been doing in this space? Jodie Willmer: Just recently, we’ve conducted two governance evaluations of different types of tourism marketing organisations. There’s different structures obviously in different states and territories across Australia, but the most common ones are an incorporated association or a company limited by guarantee. That has to do with different regulations and different types of liability. Essentially, the work we’ve been doing is working with the boards of these organisations who are in tourism marketing to focus in on what are the things that those board members need to be doing in their role of governing the organisation and bringing their experience and their networks and their skills to that organisation. That includes looking at their strategic direction, understanding the board’s discussions about risk and compliance and are they in fact aware of the things that they need to comply with? Are they paying their BAS on time? Are they making sure that the work cover is being paid for the employees? Are they doing things lawfully and in accordance with different standards? We also look at finance. Are the financial reports clear? Are they being reported to the board in a timely manner? Basically, we look at a range of different areas of responsibilities that boards have. What we’re not looking in at is say the marketing activities and … But we’re actually focusing in on what are the outcomes of that work and how is that being reported back up to the board to help them be assured that they’re actually on track? HollyG: Yeah, because I know from my experience of being on some regional tourism boards that a lot of people including myself at that time … You’re coming in with not that sort of experience. My experience and others’ experience is about running a business or being able to market something. People on tourism boards and I guess especially in different areas, they might not have had that experience in understanding their responsibilities and what’s required. Jodie Willmer: Yeah, I think it goes vary and it varies for a range of different reasons. Most people have had some sort of exposure to committees and boards, so they might work in an organisation and they report up to the CEO and the CEO deals with the board, so they’ve had a bit of a at an arm’s length involvement. Or they may have seen and heard about boards but not really sat on one themselves, so I guess in a part of my role in working with boards is helping them set people up for success. One of the ways that that can be done really effectively to help people who may not have had any board experience is to have a fantastic orientation or induction process for the board members. I’m just in the middle of doing a board evaluation for a very well known and well regarded regional tourism organisation at the moment. People, as part of this evaluation, do speak very openly and frankly, which is fantastic. A number of people said, “It took me probably 6 to 12 months to just get my head around all the acronyms that people were talking about and trying to understand who’s who in the zoo.” There are some really good solutions to help people be more effective in their decision making and to bring those talents and skills to the board more quickly, by having a stakeholder matrix that helps them understand who are the different tourism and other stakeholders and how does the organisation interact with them and then how do people keep in touch and communicate. There’s very essential, basic tools like that that if you induct people well in the beginning just as you would an employee, those board directors or committee members can really hit the ground running. I think you made a great point there about your experience, Holly, about running a business. What I like to equate it is that if you run your own business, you want to keep an eye on cash flow, you want to make sure that you’ve got a marketing plan, that you’ve got budgets and that you’re actually being effective in evaluating your work. It’s really much the same sort of work being on a committee and board. Sometimes people say that, “Oh, I’m not a committee person. I’m a business person.” What I like to encourage them to do is say, “Well, wear your business hat and how would you run this business if you were actually responsible for all aspects of it?” HollyG: Yeah, great. So many good points there. Are there any specific governance issues that impact either social media or marketing specifically? Jodie Willmer: Many organisations, especially if they are quite small, may not have the written policies about dealing with the media to start with, so mainstream media and social media. They might not have business continuity planning. For example, if they’re in a bush fire prone area and they might not have a written document that says, “This is what we’re going to do to prevent any issues for people working within the organisation or say volunteers at the visitor centre or even our visitors and guests in the region.” Where I see a lot of difficulties occur from a governance point of view is that sometimes there’s just a lack of written policies to start with. That can be a reputation risk for the organisation. It might mean that there’s just a lack of communication when it’s appropriate and when it’s needed and in a timely way. It could also be there might not be clear standards that are set out to employees and volunteers and board members about their use about social media or speaking to the media representing the organisation. I see there’s huge benefits of having very simple documents that explain to people what their responsibilities are, but also who are the designated people who are authorised to speak to media, because especially if there’s a crisis, there can be some terrible things that can be reported because the person who’s dealing with the media might not have the training. HollyG: Are we seeing any changes in governance over time moving into incorporating more corporate social responsibility in that line rather than just the economic side of things? Jodie Willmer: Yes, absolutely. I think in regional tourism organisations, there might already be established relationships with charities or for-purpose organisations, environmental groups, landcare, that sort of thing. I’m saying that there’s a little bit more of a focus of how can we bring in these non-traditional partners and engage with them in a meaningful way that is of benefit to the broader community, but also helps people establish new types of relationships and new types of experiences for the visitors coming to the region. Traditionally, many non-profit organisations don’t tend to partner with other non-profits in a corporate social responsibility sort of way, because really what they’re doing is already providing some sort of community benefit. I am saying particularly marketing organisations think about how they can provide meaningful opportunities for their employees to engage with non-profits or charities, and especially millennials who are looking for different types of employment objectives. They’re looking for generally – I am generalising – but many people are looking for some sort of corporate social responsibility commitments from their organisation they work for. One of the organisations I did a governance evaluation for, which is a regional tourism body, actually have two charitable partnerships with two organisations that are aligned with their purpose and that provides a great opportunity for their organisation’s members who advertise in different publications for tourism to also contribute donations to the charity. It’s quite interesting to see the different types of partnerships that are evolving. HollyG: Yeah, fantastic. Is it different in different countries or is it quite similar say between Australia and the US in terms of governance issues? Jodie Willmer: I think the main difference between say Australia and the US about governance is there’s obviously different types of regulations. In Australia, there’s different types of the Corporations Act and the Australian Charities Not For Profit Commission and then there’s state-based incorporated associations as well. In the US, what I see is that the boards tend to be bigger. It’s not uncommon for a non-profit board in the US to have up to 20 directors. Jodie Willmer: I used to be a CEO reporting to a board. My board, we had 12 people. We did a governance review and then we had 8 positions. Generally, in Australia the mantra is a little bit less is best, but in the US, the governance function of those really big boards is often a bit more of an advisory process and they tend to be made up of various stakeholders, where in Australia, the boards, especially in tourism, tend to be representative of different parts of a region and then maybe some individual skills-based appointments. What we’re seeing in Australia emerging more and more so in tourism boards is that there are independent chairs that are appointed jointly from the organisation and from government, especially if there’s government funding. That’s quite different, where we’re seeing I guess more of a sophistication and professionalisation of these boards. HollyG: I guess I’ve got two final questions. I’ll ask them both and see. Would you be encouraging people who work in the industry to get board experience or to participate and do you need to have done a certain course is there any sort of things if people are thinking about getting more involved, what would you say that people should be doing? Would you be encouraging people who work in the industry to get board experience or to participate? Jodie Willmer: They’re great questions. I’ll tackle the first one first about participating on boards. I would definitely encourage people in the tourism industry to think about ways they can contribute above and beyond their day job. A nice way to start, to dip your toe in the water, might be to volunteer for a local sporting club that you’re passionate about. It could be a welfare charity. It could be doing something like some sort of food bank type thing. It doesn’t need to be tourism related and I think doing some sort of voluntary work to start with helps people get in the mindset of being of service. Doing something that’s unpaid and doing it for different types of motivations. When I do governance evaluations, I always talk about the importance of understanding people’s individual goals and how can we help develop them to be the best board members they can be. It’s holistic. It has to be about the whole person. If an individual person has some ambitions and career goals to one day be the CEO of a regional tourism organisation, well, one of the great ways to build that knowledge and expertise about dealing with boards is perhaps to be on a board. That’s actually what I did. I got out of the tourism industry, got onto some boards, built that experience and expertise, and then came back in as a CEO of a non-profit in the tourism industry. The pathway isn’t linear and I think people can really benefit personally. When I say benefit personally, I mean in terms of skills and experience, but also in terms of building their networks and relationships. Especially regional tourism organisations might be part of a leadership programme where that’s people from local government and other types of industries who come together, even doing a leadership programme like that is a fantastic experience that can help build your skills and experience to identify potential opportunities. Jodie Willmer: Second question was about courses and pathways. I guess the benefits of being on a non-profit board is that there are fairly low barriers to entry, but that’s also a disadvantage. As a basic first step, I would recommend if people are really serious about getting onto boards to do a Certificate IV in Governance is a fantastic course. I did it myself and I thoroughly enjoyed, but I’m a bit of a governance geek. If people are serious about doing particularly high level government appointments or large organisations doing the Australian Institute of Company Directors course. It’s more costly. It’s more involved, but again, the best experience is the practical experience. We’re always learning and growing and if we’re not, then we shouldn’t be in the role. HollyG: Yeah, good point. Jodie, thank you so much. I think it’s fantastic and I didn’t even know about the cert four in governance and I think that could be definitely a good starting point. I love the idea as well as maybe starting just to be a volunteer in something and using that as a bit of a stepping stone to get into that mindset of contributing. I think that’s a really really good point as well. Jodie Willmer: Yeah, and it’s also a great thing to discuss with your employer. I spoke to a lady a couple of days ago as part of governance evaluation I’m doing of a regional tourism board. She said that the way that she got onto the regional tourism organisation was talking to her boss and having it built into her performance and that professional development plan and her boss leveraged some relationships to introduce her. Now, she still got onto the board with her own merits, but she recognised that there was some things that she really wanted to learn, particularly for her about finance. One of the ways she could do that would be to be on a board, so be open with those conversations with people, whether they’re at service clubs like Rotary or whether it’s somebody who you know in your own networks, because most people would know someone who’s looking for someone on a board. HollyG: Great. Now, where can people find out a little bit more about you and connect with you? Jodie Willmer: They can connect with me on jodiewillmer.com and I’m starting a new podcast about governance. People can also connect with me on LinkedIn. It’s great to talk to you, Holly. Also check out Jodie’s podcast on iTunes or click here. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher or your preferred podcast service. Tweet me with any comments or feedback @hollygalbraith or email is good too holly (at) hollyg.com.au We love to read reviews and reviews really make a difference to our ranking in iTunes. If you could take the time to add a review to iTunes this would be greatly appreciated and i’ll give you a shout out on an upcoming episode! The post Lets talk governance for tourism – episode 78 appeared first on Holly G.

Designing a social media strategy for tourism Welcome to episode 77 of Tourism Upgrade, the podcast unpacking marketing trends from travel, tourism, and marketing leaders. I’m your host Holly G and today we will be discussing designing a social media strategy for tourism. I have with me on the other end of the Skype a digital media specialist, Rachel Beaney. Welcome, Rachel. Holly G: I guess a social media strategy is one of those terms that seems to get bantered around a lot, being something that everybody says that they need but they’re not really sure I guess what one is. Be great to discuss that and also starting off like, how do you know if you need a social media strategy? How do you know if you need a social media strategy? Rachel Beaney: Yeah, sure. I think that one of the best ways to think about whether you need a social media strategy is to think about whether you need a marketing strategy. Social media is basically just a form of marketing, and social media is a medium for that. If you already need marketing to run your business and you’re using social media as a method for using that, then you need a social media strategy. I think that in the end, if you’re looking at targeting a specific audience or you’re looking at trying to get involved in a certain community, you need an approach for how you’re going to do it, because social media is just such a gigantic place with a new social network popping up every week. You need to know who you’re targeting and why so that you can be strategic. Holly G: When we’re talking about what’s involved in a strategy, I guess what’s the different between, say, a strategy or an action plan or is an action plan involved in a strategy, or what does a strategy actually look like? What does a social media strategy actually look like? Rachel Beaney: Yeah. I think that’s actually one of the things that when people … as you say people throw around the term social media strategy, people aren’t always thinking about strategies, some of them are thinking about the day-to-day. I guess when we’re defining a social media strategy, we’d be looking at things like the big picture, the big vision. It’s where I want to be in a year, where I want to be in five years. It’s looking at what are your big business goals, what are your big business values and who are you trying to talk to? That’s basically the core of a social media strategy, is those big concepts. But when you talk about an action plan or tactics or campaigns, they’re smaller little projects that you do that might go for a month or a week, which help build up to compliment your strategy. You might have 10 tactics or 10 action plans throughout a year, all of which build up to help you meet your big strategic goal. Holly G: I feel like I have people that come to me and say, “I want a social media strategy,” but really they don’t want a social media strategy. They just want maybe someone to post for them on Facebook a couple of times a week or that sort of thing. Do you find that as well? Rachel Beaney: I get asked all the time about tactics instead of strategies. Just the other day I had someone who was asking to create a Instagram strategy for their business. I think part of the risk with that is that they’ve jumped straight into the tactics without actually having a strategy. What they’ve done is they’ve said, “I need to be on Instagram because everyone’s on Instagram,” without thinking about who is their audience, where are they online, are they receptive to this kind of content, what are their brand values, can that be reflected in a visual medium? There’s heaps of questions that come into a social media strategy because what they might find is, oh actually it might be a … imagine it’s a B&B somewhere and they’re targeting a certain demographic who has a bit more money. Maybe Instagram isn’t even right for them because that demographic isn’t even on Instagram. A social media strategy really interrogates what are you after overall in your business? Who is your audience? How do you get to them? If you jump straight into the tactics, you might accidentally choose the wrong channel. It’s not uncommon at all. A lot of people say, “I need to be on Facebook. I need to be on Snapchat.” That’s where all the action is, but they haven’t thought about whether that’s the right channel for their industry, or their business and their audience. Holly G: Yeah. I think that’s a really good way to explain it. You talked a little bit about identifying who their market is, how you reach that market, what their brand values are, what are the bigger picture overall that the business is trying to achieve. What are some of the other things that we should look at when we are developing a strategy? Or maybe rephrasing that to say, where should I start? Where should I start? Where should I start with a social media strategy? Rachel Beaney: Yeah. Look, it’s actually not as complex as it sounds really. There are two main aspects, and there are other questions that come off those arms. The main things are, who are your audience? It’s really defining who your audience is because there’s no such thing as I’m advertising to everybody, because even if you were advertising to everybody, the messaging you send to an 18 year old is not going to be the same message that you send to a 75 year old. You always need to think about your audience. From that, you can spin off and say, “Okay, where are my audience online?” That might be “Which social networks are they more likely to hang out on, what time of day are they hanging out on there?” The other aspect of a social media strategy is really thinking about your business. This is in terms of both … how are you paying your rent? What kind of product or service are you selling? Whether it’s booking people in for a tour or booking people in for a hotel, what service are you selling? Then off that is the values you want to be sharing, what’s your brand story? How do you want people to think and feel when they’re interacting with your brand? What do you want them to go home and tell their friends and family about about the experience? It’s what are the warm and fuzzy’s you want them to take home, and it’s about identifying those values so you can tell those stories throughout your social media content to help reinforce that. Holly G: I love that idea of identifying your brand values by thinking about what stories do you want your customers to tell when they go home. I think that just makes it so much more real, and it come to life a little bit more than maybe just some marketing jargon or that sort of thing. Rachel Beaney: Yeah. Totally, because word of mouth is so essential for tourism. If you can help cement those stories that you want to tell, it means that it’s going to be so much more powerful for getting return business and through word of mouth. Holly G: Where would you find out maybe answers to some of those questions, about who your audience is and where they hang out online? Rachel Beaney: Yeah. In terms of finding out where your audience are online, ideally … I’d answer that in two ways, one of which is finding out your audience. Hopefully you’ve already … if you’ve been established in business, you’d have a bit of an idea who your audience is looking at your client list or even looking at your Facebook page data. That kind of information is unique to every business and hopefully every business has a good idea of that, or they can do surveys and that kind of thing to find that out. In terms of finding out which demographics are on which social networks, it’s pretty straight forward because there’s heaps of data and industry-based reports that are on that. One of the most recent reports announced is the Sensis Social Media Report. That’s one that I wrote an article on on my website a few weeks ago, and I’ve covered in detail around which demographics are on which platforms. I can pop a link to that in the notes. Holly G: Yeah, we can do that. We also did episode 51 is about the Sensis Social Media Report. What I always say, and I bet you’re exactly the same, is the day that that report comes out, or actually you and I I know both got it early, but it’s like Christmas to me. I’m so excited to have a look at what the current research and data says about who within Australia are on what social media platforms? Rachel Beaney: Australian data is essential because we are quite different to other markets. The US market might have a certain demographic for, let’s say, Twitter, but the Australian market is quite different. Holly G: To have in mind when you’re looking about who your audience is, also what sort of countries and things like that you’re trying to target as well with your social media activities. We talk a lot about China, so obviously when we’re looking to attract a Chinese visitor, we’re looking at a whole nother suite of social channels. There is quite a bit of data around that as well. Yeah. It’s a great place to start when you’re trying to work out where my audience is hanging out online. Rachel Beaney: Yeah, definitely. Holly G: Is there anything else you wanted to talk about in relation to developing a strategy or some of the strategy essential elements? Three elements for designing a social media strategy. Rachel Beaney: Yeah. I think that in terms of when I’m designing a strategy, I think the three elements that I think about are … well look, it’s not dissimilar to what I spoke about earlier, but it’s really honing your culture, your community, and your business goals. The way that I would think about that is it’s really identifying each of those aspects, and then coming up with a goal for each of those. When you’re coming up with your business goals it’s looking at what’s the objective of my marketing, and so that can be a big picture thing. Depending on how big your business is or where it is in its business cycle, you might have totally different social media goals. You might have a goal where it’s about retaining customers who have already been on your tours or used your product or services, and it’s about reengaging them to try and help spread word of mouth to building a community. You might have a goal that, if you’re just starting out, you want to spread awareness and word of mouth. Or it might be around pushing people through to book to a tour from your social media. Having a business goal that actually reflects what you’re trying to do with your marketing is really important, and having those key KPI’s or key performance indicators, which reflect that is really important. Holly G: Yeah. I think that’s a really, really good point. It’s like, are you trying to create that awareness of your business? Do you already have that and you’re trying to keep a relationship going with existing customers or past customers, or is it … yeah, something else. I think that’s a really good point. Rachel Beaney: Yeah. I think as a starting point for a social strategy that’s essential, because you want to be making sure you’re measuring the right data. A lot of people measure things like page likes as success, but if what they’re trying to do is retain their existing customers and build a community, then page likes actually doesn’t matter, because what they’re doing is trying to create a depth of a community and have those people engage with them more on their social platform of choice I suppose. Holly G: Yeah. Some of the things you would be measuring then is about the level of engagement and that sort of thing. Rachel Beaney: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that’s precisely, it is. Coming up with your business goals … well, your marketing … I guess your marketing goals to reflect what you’re trying to do with your business. The other two things that I think are essential with a social media strategy is the culture and the community. Those are kind of warm and fuzzy terms, but the way that I see that is coming up with … for culture it’s looking at how you’re coming up, how you’re reflecting your values with your business. As an example, if you’re a bush walking tour company, maybe your values are around, okay, we want to be talking about our local wildlife, maybe we’ve got endangered species in the area. Maybe it’s about environmentalism. Maybe it’s about meditation. It’s thinking about how we’re reflecting our brand values in our social media content. Coming up with those ways to really reflect what you’re trying to do and how are you setting that culture and that brand story throughout your social media. Holly G: I love that, because that means that the things that you’re talking about are going to be unique to you. It’s going to be more reflective of what you’re actually offering. Rachel Beaney: Yeah, exactly, and because people … people, when they buy from a company, they’re buying from a company who … they have values they reflect or they trust or they like the person who is selling it. There’s a lot of emotional exchange that happens when you’re buying. It’s not just around, okay, this is the cheapest offer. It’s not always a financial decision. A lot of it’s emotional. That’s why this culture stuff is so essential, because it’s about making sure you’re telling that story that really connects with your audience based on values that your company finds important. Rachel Beaney: Finally, the last thing that I think is essential for a social media strategy is coming up with how you’re approaching your community. This is a way of looking at things. If you’re reengaging your existing customers, how are you reinforcing your brand and your brand culture? This community could be done in a whole bunch of different ways, and for some people that’s things like running competitions if they’re a big brand. It might be a case of sharing pictures of their staff. Maybe it’s the tour guides birthday so they’re sharing a picture of their tour guides birthday. It could be that you’ve got a local hiking club that comes up hiking every month, and so it’s taking a photo of their latest accomplishment. Community is about how are you actually engaging those people who have engaged or will engage with your business in a really tangible way to keep them coming back to your business, keep seeing your values, and keep reinforcing that culture. Holly G: Yeah. I can really see how those three elements just work together so well once you’ve identified them, and they just almost feed off each other and complement each other. I guess that’s how you know when you’ve got it right maybe. Rachel Beaney: Yeah. I think so. I think that some of the times they overlap a bit as well. I run social media classes and I often get students saying, “Is this a culture kind of post or a community kind of post?” I say, “You know what. It’s kind of both, but that’s okay.” Even if it’s your business goals and your culture combined, if you’re talking about I’ve got a latest sale, but this post is absolutely hilarious, or it’s something that really taps into the desire of my audience, that’s even better. You’re making something that’s multilayered in terms of being able to really connect with that audience. Holly G: Yeah. I can imagine that getting those three elements, really nailing those three elements would take, yeah, a bit of time. Not just time, but just a bit of being in the right space. Rachel Beaney: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It’s really about being in the right head space to really come up with that. There are some hard decisions you need to make sometimes. It’s saying, “Maybe I would like my business to be this, but actually maybe the culture is more like this,” and maybe you hadn’t really thought about it that way. Maybe it’s about saying, “Actually I thought I would be targeting these audiences, but maybe it’s more strategic to just focus on this audience for the next six months.” For example, with the hiking group, it might be targeting everyone, but then you say, “Oh actually, maybe only it’s tourists who are coming to the local area who I should be focusing on, or maybe it’s just young people, so I should be focusing on university groups.” Sometimes when you come up with this you need to come up with those hard decisions that are like, “Oh actually, I really didn’t expect that.” I did one exercise a few months ago, or one of the one’s I do in my classes is around, you sort of … there’s a scale of different brand terms and you choose which one your brand is most like. Often when you do that, you don’t really realise how you thought of your business brand until you actually need to say, “Well it’s this, but it’s not this.” It’s amazing that you … it’s putting up a mirror, and it’s a bit surprising sometimes. Example of Brand Values from Canva.com Holly G: Yeah. You even do that … it’s the beginning of a new year and there’s lots of things floating around, and so sometimes you’re even doing that in your personal life, when you’re planning your personal goals. You’re like, “Okay. Well, who am I? What do I want to be? Which words reflect me the most?” Doing that with your business, yeah could … because I always find that surprising. Yeah. That’s a cool idea. Rachel Beaney: Yeah, totally. I think it is just about deep diving into each of those aspects. If you’re looking for your brand story, for your culture, there’s actually loads of places online where you can say, “What is my brand story?” You could even get a branding coach if you really wanted to help define your brand story. For the community, it’s looking at who are your regulars and maybe getting an idea of how do you engage with them and how do you connect with them, and then can that be extended to a wider audience? Your business goals, well ideally that’s what are the things that are really paying the rent? Holly G: I guess when we’re developing this strategy, it’s also making sure we’ve got the right people in the room. Whether it’s the owners and the managers and maybe even some key staff members, because I often find that you might have different viewpoints on the business depending on who you’ve got in the room. Rachel Beaney: Yeah. That’s a big one. Yeah. There’s often a huge disconnect between a strategy based on who’s approaching it. I think that one of the challenges is that there’s a bit of education that needs to go on within a company to make sure that everyone’s on the same page, because often people will view social media from a different perspective. You’ll have your CEO who says, “How many sales are we getting from social media?” You might have someone on the ground who’s saying, “Oh, but we’re building a community here, and those communities are building trust and reputation and loyalty, so that then those people will come back,” but that’s really hard for different departments to see, that sometimes the power of social media isn’t necessarily in those initial sales or the initial acquisition phase, but it’s actually in retention and building up loyalty and building up relationships, and then that leads to returning customers or word of mouth. Part of the big challenge is how do we get everyone in the business on the same page so that they understand what we’re trying to do with our social media strategy. That can be really challenging when everyone’s seeing it in a different way, for sure. Holly G: Yeah. Do you have any advice for overcoming some of those challenges? Is it literally about getting people in the same room at the same time to work this through? Rachel Beaney: I think that sometimes too many cooks can be troubling, and especially if people … Look, I think it’s useful to get everyone’s needs in. For example, if you have a sales team that have goals, if you have a marketing team that has goals, I think getting everyone’s needs is definitely useful, and putting that all into your goals and your business goals and your objectives for the year. I think it’s essential to get collaboration, but I think that usually having a lot of people in a room to come up with a social media strategy will probably lead to chaos a little bit. I think that it’s best for one, maybe two people to actually pull all of that together and come up with a plan that meets all of those needs. Holly G: Yeah. Yeah, great. Once you’ve written a social media strategy, then what happens? Once you’ve written a social media strategy, then what happens? Rachel Beaney: Yeah. Coming up with a … after you come up with a social media strategy, you need to … well look, actually one of the first things that I’ll highlight is that … I guess this might be going back a step, I’m not sure, but your social media strategy needs to be realistic and based on what you can actually deliver. I guess part of having everyone in the same room is that it’s understanding what are your resources? It’s no point saying, “Let’s post a million posts on Instagram this year” or whatever, because if you’ve only got one person working on this social media account for one hour a week, it’s not going to happen. It’s really important to actually be realistic about what you can actually execute. It’s not to say that you can’t have big pictures and big ideas, but have the big ideas, but then also add a layer of, actually what can we achieve this year, or what’s the balance? Is it us taking a bit of money out of maybe a TV budget and putting it into hiring someone who can spend a bit more time creating Instagram content? It’s coming up with that middle ground. Holly G: Yeah. I guess … yeah, that’s sort of … because I was just thinking then, have we missed a step? If we’ve done this bigger picture, who’s our audience, where do they hang out, and really defined it in terms of culture, community, and business goals, then is there another layer that is around what that actually looks like from an execution point of view? Rachel Beaney: Yeah, definitely. That’s where things like campaigns come in or tactics or however you want to call it. This is coming up with a series of maybe short-term campaigns and spreading them throughout the year, in order to help meet your strategic goals. If you’ve got a goal to meet a certain amount of people to click through from your social media through to your website, it’s saying, “Okay. Maybe we need to come up with a Facebook ad every month in order to meet this goal.” It might be if we want to reengage our community. Maybe we’ve got a Instagram competition for people who come on our bush walks, so that they can share that with their friends or something like that. Coming up with tactics is what’s really important, so tactics that support that main goal. You’re always going to have unique tactics based on what your objective is. As I said, if your strategy is coming up with a … awareness for example, so you’re a new company, your strategy is … you’re a new B&B somewhere, and you want to raise awareness. Your strategy for that is actually, okay, well if we need to get a certain amount of people finding out about us, we need to come up with tactics to do that. It might be, okay, we’re going to run some Facebook ads or we’re going to run a campaign where every visitor who shares an Instagram post of our venue gets a free breakfast or whatever. If you compare that to someone else who’s already got an established business, and that’s about getting other people to refer friends. Maybe they’re coming up with tactics which relate to that, so it’s about how are you getting people to talk about your business or share it with their friends? It might just be Holly G: Yeah, when they’re in the experience, yeah. Rachel Beaney: Yeah. Maybe that’s setting up a beautiful selfie area on your tour. Maybe just happen to say, “Oh, this is a wonderful area for Instagram selfies,” and maybe put a modem out there just so everyone has a bit of Wifi. Holly G: Yeah, that’s it. I know there’s some good examples of tour operators all around the world who put Wifi in their buses and things like that, and see a significant increase in people talking about their experience on social media and building that business through word of mouth online. Yeah, it’s not such a crazy idea. Rachel Beaney: Yeah. Even just doing things like, in the real world, like putting your hashtag on your bus so people know, actually if I’m going to be talking about this, this is what I should be using. If you want people to talk, it’s about what am I doing to encourage that, or how am I going to go about doing that? Holly G: Yeah. That’s after we’ve already established the bigger picture and the bigger strategy. I think really that’s the piece that people miss. I think we can sometimes be pretty good at coming up with tactics, but sometimes we need to actually just take a step back from that and have a bigger overall strategy and be really clear about what we’re trying to achieve. People always say, “How do you know if your social media is working?” Well, you sort of know when you do have that strategy and you’ve really defined what you’re doing it for. Rachel Beaney: Yeah, exactly. 100%. Yeah. As you say, people are so familiar with coming up with ideas for tactics. People say, “I’m going to run a competition on Instagram or I’m going to set up whatever on Facebook,” they have these ideas for brilliant tactics, but it doesn’t always mirror with their key business goals, because they haven’t really been thinking about it that way. They’ve just been thinking about, “Okay, let’s try and create something which gets people talking,” but as to whether or not that actually suites their business needs is a different question. Holly G: In tourism, we often talk about and use the term always on. We’ve really moved in the last, I don’t know how many years, say seven years or so, we’ve moved from being very campaign focused to where we would just … yeah, we’d run maybe a summer campaign and a winter campaign to be now always on, is what we call it. Does that come across in other industries, and do you have any thoughts about that? Rachel Beaney: Yeah. Look, I think always on is something that is where things like your culture and your community stuff is always a layer that’s always … it’s always happening. While you might have your big campaigns that are like your big tent-pole events that might happen once every quarter, having content that always reflects the brand’s story that you’re trying to tell is really important. That’s why it’s important to define your culture and your community, because that’s … when you are doing your always on content, when you’re doing all your other communication, that’s the story you want to be telling all the time. Holly G: Yeah, great. I think that’s one of the advantages of using social media in your marketing, is that you can always be on and it’s about iterating those culture and community messages consistently over time. Rachel Beaney: Yeah. That’s one of the great things about social media, is having things like data to be able to say, “Did this actually hit the audience message? Are people responding in the way that I thought they would? Did this hit home and create that feeling that I wanted to create?” If it didn’t, you can think about maybe why it didn’t and try again in a few weeks time with another approach. It’s not just one big advertising and if it doesn’t work it doesn’t work, it’s you creating an ongoing culture really that is malleable and you can always keep changing and iterating it and learning. It’s always about constant experimentation and learning and building on what you’ve done before. Holly G: We mentioned a little bit about measuring. What sort of things are people measuring or would you recommend that people measure when we’re talking about your social media strategy? What sort of things are people measuring? Rachel Beaney: Sure. Okay. One of the things that I see people measuring a lot is, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of people measure things like their likes or their follower count in order to determine their success, but I think that one of the challenges with that is that people can’t always see if that’s actually reflecting your business purpose. If you’re a whale watching tour and you’re selling tickets on your website to your whale watching tour, if you’ve got a million Facebook followers, that number doesn’t actually tell you if any of those people are buying your whale watching tickets. What you should be looking at is perhaps how many people have come from your Facebook page to your website. Looking at things like your Google Analytics and adding campaign tracking. UTM tagging is a way you can do that in order to track how many people have come from your website and bought those tickets. If that’s your main business goal, then that’s really clearly reflected in what you’re trying to do. I think that it’s really important to know what you’re trying to do so that you can measure the right goal. Holly G: Yeah. Yeah, I love that Rachel Beaney: I might just add to that as well in saying that one of the things that I often hear people say around needing a lot of Facebook likes is that they say … you often hear people saying that if I have more Facebook likes I will look like a more reputable business, or people will trust me more because I’ve got larger likes, or larger number of likes. But some recent data and I think it might of actually even of been the Sensis report maybe, I think maybe, was around saying that actually people don’t consider the volume of likes you’ve got when they’re choosing to use your business. It’s just not a factor. The idea of measuring Facebook likes is something that’s a bit of a … I guess it feels important to us, but to our customer, they don’t keep that into account at all. Holly G: Yeah, yeah. As you know, I do a lot of speaking and workshops and things like that, and often I’ll start with doing a bit of true false. We’ll do a bit of social media true false. Rachel Beaney: Myth busting, I love it. Holly G: That is actually one of the questions that I ask, is true or false, do people find you more reputable if you’ve got a larger number of likes on your business page? Pretty much most people always get it wrong, because the actual stat was I think 30% said yes, and the other 70% said either no or don’t know. Yeah. It was overwhelming that no, that doesn’t mean that they’re going to trust you more. It’s more based on your content and what you’re delivering. Yeah, good point. How can people find out a little bit more about you or connect with you? Rachel Beaney: Yeah, sure. People can find out more about me through my website, which is rachelbeaney.com or they can get in touch with me on Twitter. My handle’s beaney, so @beaney. It’s not like the hat, it’s a bit different. Yeah, anyone can feel free to get in touch, ask a question and have a chat. I’ve also got a Facebook group called Bean Social that people can come and hang out in as well, so there’s plenty of ways to get in touch and have a chat. Holly G: Cool, excellent. Now, are you up for the bonus question? Rachel Beaney: I’m up for the bonus question. Now it’s time for our thousand dollar bonus question. If you only had a one thousand dollar marketing budget, what would you spend it on? Rachel Beaney: Okay. Based on the fact that a lot of tourism is based on things like referrals and reengaging those relationships with your customers, what I would do is I would use things like Facebook retargeting to reengage customers I’ve already got. Either looking at uploading my own mailing list and targeting ads towards them, or targeting ads towards people who have been on my tours, or people who’ve been to my website, or successfully bought a ticket on my website. I’d reserve them ads around whether they want to visit again, or perhaps refer a friend. I’d use that to reengage my customers who have already had a great experience and who might want to spread the word. That’s how I’d use my one thousand dollar budget. Holly G: Well done. Great answer. I really, really liked that. I don’t think we’ve had that one before, which is really good. Well done. Yeah, yeah, really good. There’s often this myth that because you’ve already had someone do your tour then there’s no point communicating with them again, but as you said, it could be around them referring their friends or just … yeah, friends, or relatives and visiting friends and relatives is a really important market in tourism. Rachel Beaney: Totally. Holly G: Let alone them doing one of your other experiences. Yeah, I think it’s a really good point. Well, thanks for your time, that’s really good. For the show notes for this episode, head to hollyg.com.au. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher or your preferred podcast service. Tweet me with any comments or feedback @hollygalbraith or email is good too holly (at) hollyg.com.au We love to read reviews and reviews really make a difference to our ranking in iTunes. If you could take the time to add a review to iTunes this would be greatly appreciated and i’ll give you a shout out on an upcoming episode! The post Designing a social media strategy for tourism – episode 77 appeared first on Holly G.

Creating awesome media famils Tips for making media famils awesome. Welcome to episode 76 of Tourism Upgrade, the podcast unpacking marketing trends from travel, tourism, and marketing leaders. I’m your host Holly G., and today we will be discussing tips for creating and running awesome media famils, and I have with me Emma Castle. Emma works for Intermedia Group and is editor of industry publication SPICE news, and is Deputy Editor of Hotel Management Magazine. She also blogs at shegoes.com.au, and is co-founder of Women in Tourism Leadership Events with me, so welcome to the podcast, Emma. What is a media famil? Emma Castle: Famil is an abbreviation of the word familiarisation. When you hear people say, “Oh, we’re going on famil,” it just means they’re going on a media familiarisation, or it could be a travel agent familiarisation. There’s lots of different ones, and the itineraries are quite different on those different styles of famils. HollyG: And their purpose is for someone to get to know a destination or a product essentially. Emma Castle: Exactly, yeah. Usually so they can sell it or so they can write about it. A famil is an abbreviation of the word familiarisation and is an in person experience to get to know a product, business or destination with the purpose of mutual benefits. Types of famils HollyG: And you’ve been on or involved in a few different types of famils. Emma Castle: I have. I’ve organised famils. I’ve been on blogger famils, I’ve been on kind of consumer-facing media famils, and I’ve been on trade media famils, and they’re all completely different actually. The objectives for the coverage that the client wants out of it is also quite different. Types of famils may include blogger famils, media famils, photography famils, consumer facing media famils, trade media famils, influencer famils, travel agent famils, travel trade famils – and i’m sure there is even more! Famil Objectives Emma Castle: There’s objectives for the people in the destination, too, because sometimes the people organising the famil, they have a mandate to send a certain amount of media or bloggers to that destination or get a certain amount of articles in media publications. It’s almost like sometimes these agencies or whoever’s organising the famil, you’re actually helping them meet their KPI’s simply by being there. That can actually influence what you end up doing when you’re on the media famil as well. HollyG: Yeah, and I guess it’s important in organising a famil to look at it from both those objectives. The destination’s got objectives to get media into the destination to create stories and coverage and awareness of the destination, and then the blogger or media person going on the famil obviously wants to get stories to write about. Emma Castle: Oh, absolutely. The thing is you kind of, from the media person’s point of view, journalist or blogger, you want to get as many stories as possible. I mean, a lot of famils are designed so that it’s sort of like a single angle, so it’s like outdoor active or it’s romance or it’s family or whatever. Sometimes I think that you could potentially look at actually running kind of more angles on the famil, like you could actually kind of weave more storylines I guess, for want of a better word, into a famil. Yeah, so that’s something I think destinations could think about, yeah. The destination’s has objectives when running media famils to get media into the destination to create stories and the journalist also has objectives, being aware of both is a great start. HollyG: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so then potentially there’s more opportunity for coverage or story ideas. Emma Castle: Absolutely. The thing is, good journalists will be able to spot these stories themselves, so I’ll be able to see the angle. Because sometimes people in destinations don’t actually know that what they’re telling you could be a really great story coming out for, like a honeymoon special. Or maybe your title particularly deals with openings or refurbishments. It could be kind of anything, like it could be manta ray season. There’s so many different angles. Without confusing the people who are on the trip, it’s good to kind of offer up a few different angles for that itinerary if you can. Tip for running media famils HollyG: You’ve been going on famils for a lot of years. Have the way that we do famils, have they changed much in 10 years or so? Emma Castle: Not as much as you might think. The only thing that I’ve really notice change is the social media, the push for social media, which is completely understandable. Any journalist worth their salt will be happy to assist with that because, I mean, it’s good for their publications usually, good for their own profile. Destinations do put a lot of money and time into famils, and the least you can kind of do as the journalist who’s there is actually tweet, Instagram, Facebook,  and check in to things. It’s a very easy thing to do if you’ve got mobile reception, so I guess one piece of advice is just to kind of make sure that media or travel agents or whoever’s on your famil, make sure they’ve always got the wifi cards for the hotel. Even if you’re just doing a side inspection. Because it means they can broadcast live, essentially, from the destination without having to have roaming on their mobile, because a lot of people don’t want to do that. HollyG: When we were discussing this topic and planning to talk about it, we put the question out on a private travel writers Facebook group that we’re both part of to ask them for their tips. Someone came back with that they would love a one or two-page document that includes the social media handles of all the places that they’re going, and the web addresses and hashtags and things like that. I thought that was a really, really great tip, and I think something that can easily be included. Emma Castle: Yes and it just requires pre-planning. So basically rather than having a whole bunch of people there in the destination kind of going “Oh, what’s the wifi card? What’s your hashtag?” Sometimes you’ll get a director of sales or you’ll get someone who actually isn’t maybe that social media savvy, and so they actually don’t know and so they get back to you later, or they don’t get back to you. To have that information up front, that’s just gold because it just kind of means that all the preparation’s been done and you’ve done everything you can do to ensure that the people included in the famil are going to get as much coverage as possible. HollyG: Now, what are some other specific tips for businesses or destinations who are organising and running famils? Emma Castle: I would definitely say try and get the itineraries out to people with a little bit of advance notice, because the one thing people will complain about is if they get their itinerary really, really late, like they get it the day before or they’re not ticketed until the night before it. I mean, we’re still travellers. All travellers have a sense of anxiety if they don’t know when they’re going, what time they’re supposed to be there, what they’re going to be doing when they’re away. But what it also does is if you don’t get your itinerary until really late, you can’t plan your stories. You might have a rough idea of what you’re going to do, but if you’re sending freelancers to a destination, they need time to pitch those stories to their editors and research those activities, those destinations that they’re going to be visiting. Often they’ll come back from a trip and pitch stories because then they’ve got a much more holistic idea of what the angle is, but a lot of people break it. So to not give people an itinerary until really late will probably just frustrate the people who are going to be attending your famil. Yeah, I mean, it’s the same as you if you weren’t ticketed for your flight and you didn’t know what time you were supposed to be at the airport until the day before. It’s not a good feeling and it sort of sets things off on a bad course. HollyG: Yeah. Yeah. What about when putting together group famils and group dynamics and that sort of thing? Emma Castle: That’s actually a really tricky one, because often journalists haven’t met each other, the host might not have met people. Often the first time you’re going to meet your group is at the airport lounge. Sometimes you’ll meet in the business class lounge or you’ll just meet at the airport at the gate, or even sometimes you don’t even meet the people until you get off the plane in the destination. You kind of don’t know what the dynamic’s going to be. For the people setting up the famil, I would certainly say give everyone a call or email them some questions, try and find out about their preferences. Just get a sense of their personality, and also try and suss out if there’s any competitors on the trip. With freelancers you’ll often have two people who might write for the same titles, and so you sort of don’t want to invite people who are competing for the same story because that sets up a pretty bad dynamic from the beginning. But also some people just don’t get along, and so there’s only so much you can do to avoid that because if you talk to anyone, they’ll say, “Oh, yeah, it was a really amazing itinerary but the group dynamic wasn’t that great.” Or “The trip itself was pretty stock, standard stuff, but man, we had a good group.” Emma Castle: Yeah. You can try and influence that just through good planning and through a bit of pre-interviewing the people who are coming along. Boy, you’ll have a much better time. HollyG: Yeah. And also, I guess two things, is: If you actively participate in building relationships with journalists and freelancers and media ahead of time, then you can better pick your group. If you’re actively going to different lunches and different things like that and getting to know people, then that can be a great thing, just for the long term. Emma Castle: Yeah, definitely, and sometimes you can actually, once you’ve kind of confirmed a couple of people … If, say, you’re going on a famil that is like a outdoor active family focus, you can actually ask some of the people who are going to be coming who else you know that writes for this space. Because obviously there’s competitor titles. But one thing about the travel industry, it’s just uniliterally extremely friendly. I go on famils with my competitors all the time, like from competing MICE publications. Because they’re MICE famils, and there’s only a handful of us in Australia so it would be weird to run individual famils when you can kind of send us all in one go. You can actually ask your other participants which other writers they know might be able to kind of cover a similar territory but for a different publication. I know that kind of goes against what I said about not inviting competitors, but I think if you’re up front about it, if you communicate about it and actually give people a chance to invite journalists that they might have a really good working relationship with or just good friendship with, you’re kind of setting up a positive dynamic. It’s not cloak and dagger. It’s not like two people from the Sydney Morning Herald are going to show up and be like, “Ah, what are you doing here?” Emma Castle: You’ve already sort of talked to them about it HollyG: I think, yeah, that was going to be my other point, is about letting participants know who are the other people going on the famil ahead of time. I’ve never, ever had that. It always seems to be a bit … You don’t tell who else is going to be there, and it’s just like “Surprise,” and I’ve never quite understood that. Emma Castle: Well, actually I’ve been on famils where they have actually told us who’s going to be there and even supplied you with a link to their LinkedIn profile. Or there’s been a group email to sort of introduce everybody prior to the trip, and then people have a bit of banter before they go. It’s not commonly done, but I have definitely seen it done. It certainly helps because it also means that if you can look people up on LinkedIn or whatever, you know who you’re looking for at the airport. HollyG: Yeah, totally. Emma Castle: Which can really help. HollyG: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Okay, any other tips or must-do’s or don’t’s? Emma Castle: Relevance, I have to say. There is nothing more frustrating as a journalist and being sent on a famil that is completely irrelevant. I did go to a destination in the last couple of years where obviously the tourism boards had funding to promote their regional … This is an international destination that had funding to promote their regional centres, but this is a destination that’s only just emerging for Australian, in my case, meeting planners. So you would probably only send a meeting group to the capital. But instead of showing us the capital, they showed us all these kind of [inaudible 00:16:15], regional areas, which from a personal perspective was interesting, but was completely useless from a coverage perspective because … Our duty is to our readers. We’re supposed to be creating content that’s relevant to them. By sending me to somewhere in the middle of nowhere, it’s totally useless because my readers would never book an event there. I mean, it’s hard enough to get them to consider the destination first and foremost and then to get them to kind of consider sending a group to the capital city. So just always keep relevant in mind. You might have pressure as a tourism board [inaudible 00:16:58], as a hotel, wherever you’re coming from. You might have pressure to kind of attract journalists to whatever it is you’re doing, but always think “Is this relevant to them?” Because if you do invite them, you’re sort of wasting their time and they’re not going to be very happy about it. HollyG: Yeah, yeah. No, I think that’s probably one that should be at the top of the list, is that relevance. It can be discussing this with maybe some media that you were considering ahead of time, or maybe instead of planning group famils you’re looking at individual famils because then you can sort of hand pick it for people that it might be relevant for. Emma Castle: Ah, definitely. Individual, like doing a whole heap of individual famils, is undoubtedly a lot more work. You’re setting yourself up for heaps more work, but you might get a much better result because there are also some journalists who don’t like to travel in groups. They’re introverted people and the thought of spending a week with a loud, friendly group of people is their worst nightmare. Because if you’re kind of thinking about the type of people who are attracted to writing as a profession, particularly freelance writing, they might be quite solitary creatures. You could be sending them on something that they just will hate purely because of their nature. The other thing you can do is within a group famil, you are still able to tailor aspects of that itinerary to any individual. I’ve done that before- HollyG: Yes, this is a good point. That’s a good point Emma Castle: You can still fly everybody in together, do the welcome dinner together, maybe do some activities together, but you can always … This is a much easier way to do it, is send individuals off to do their own activities during the day, or they can go to a dinner by themselves, or they can have a free day when everyone else is on a tour together or something. People might get a bit weird and jealous [inaudible 00:18:56], but ultimately you’re making less work for yourself if you kind of can actually get everyone in together, solve their problems on the ground when you are actually there in person, because- HollyG: Yeah. I think it’s a really good point and something, yeah, definitely for businesses and destinations to consider. Emma Castle: Yeah. Yeah, because the thing is, when you’ve got the advantage of having a host there … Hosts are just there to pay for things and solve problems basically. You can kind of guarantee that a group famil is going to have less problems than an individual famil, because things do go wrong. It’s travel. It might not be due to your planning. It’s just that if you’ve got someone who’s kind of familiar with the destination right there and who knows some of the operators, they can solve problems so quickly, whereas your journalist might not know who to talk to. Or how to talk to them. HollyG: What about someone else … When we put this question out to a group of travel writers they also said definitely allow some spare time for story uploads, for checking emails, for social media and that sort of thing. Emma Castle: 100%, and the same would be said for travel agents. I mean, I think travel agents are actually a little bit more tolerant than journalists, to be honest, when it comes to this stuff. Just giving people a chance to check their email. If you do want social media coverage, give people time to actually load up their photos or whatever, because there’s also the problem of slow Internet speeds. When I’m away for work for my SPICE [inaudible 00:20:41] I still have to do newsletter, so regardless of where I am in the world I still have to write six new stories twice a week and load them up and get them sent out. That can be a real challenge if you’re using hotel wifi that’s really slow or whatever. Yeah, you might end up with a really tired group if you’re kind of getting them up early, giving them activities back to back all day, giving them half an hour to get ready for dinner, taking them to a dinner. Often these things are quite boozy. You might end up having a really big, long banquet dinner with lots of wine. Then you’ve got to come home and do three hours of work on slow wifi, so you really just have to take into account what they need to do while they’re there for their actual jobs, and also just be kind to them [inaudible 00:21:33]. If you’re in a week-long famil, you need to give people free time because they’ll start to fall apart after four or five days of these kind of lots of eating and drinking and lots of activities. Yeah. HollyG: Yeah, yeah. What about being a host, so the host themselves and things from a host’s perspective? Because I know we’ve talked about a vast difference in some of the hosts that we have encountered. Emma Castle: Ah, absolutely. Look, I think 100% if you are a tourism destination or an operator. Put someone who loves your product. Make sure the person hosting the famil is a lover. They need to be passionate about what they’re talking about. You can’t have someone who’s sort of ambivalent about what they’re showing you. They need to really love it, and ideally they need to have established relationships with the people they’re introducing you to so there’s kind of already this beautiful rapport and energy. Obviously that’s not always going to be practical, but you definitely need to have someone who loves what they’re doing. You need to have someone who’s practical, who is a good problem solver, who’s punctual, someone who’s very, very clear about giving instructions. I used to be really shy about this because I’m a very laissez-faire sort of person, which actually makes me not the world’s greatest famil host because I’m like, “Everybody do whatever you want.” That does not work when you’ve got a bunch of sort of high-strung [inaudible 00:23:04] journalists. Five minutes late at every stop means that you have awfully late at the end of the day. If people go missing because they’ve gone shopping or they’ve gone to the toilet, everyone gets really frustrated, and it’s usually only one or two people. You have to be yeah, really, I guess, assertive about the itinerary and about your group, and you have to be approachable. You don’t want people to be scared of you, but your job is to make sure that everything runs on time and that everyone gets on the bus. Yeah. HollyG: Yeah. So it’s that balance of being really passionate about your destination, because I think that is so important, but also just having those skills to keep things on track and knowing that that is actually part of your job. In reality that’s part of your job as a famil host. Emma Castle: Yeah. Oh, one thing I would add is follow-up. Obviously people love to hand out their shiny media kit. They love to give you these beautiful piece of print production that they’ve spent a tonne of money on. A lot of journalists don’t like that. They don’t want to carry around 50 press kits, or they’ll throw them out. So you’re kind of wasting your money. You’re better off to either get their business card and send them an email after they’ve visited you saying “Hey, what do you need? Here’s a Dropbox link to the images that you actually wanted.” Or give them a USB. That’s another option. Not my preferred option, either. I prefer a follow-up email after I’ve visited, either from me or from them, but if you want to be proactive as the destination, get everyone to email the journalist or get a essential point of contact to email the journalist and say, “Hey, what do you need?” Because they’re going to need information. There’ll be stuff that they’ve forgotten, there’ll be images that they … Their images didn’t turn out well or whatever. That is a much more efficient way than handing out these big press kits with wedding packages and stuff, because that is not relevant. HollyG: Yeah. I’m really glad you mentioned that. That follow-up angle is yeah, is very, very, very important. Yeah, I think you’re more likely to cover off someone who interacts with you than someone or one of the places you visited that doesn’t, so yeah, really good point. Emma Castle: Yeah. Well, also it means it opens up the lines of communication for you, whether it’s your hotel, your destination, whatever, to have an ongoing relationship because that’s the goal, is … Okay, you’ve managed to get the name, managed to convince them that this is a great place. Okay, so what else can you do? You need to keep updating them. You need to keep telling them hotel openings, new activities that are launching, activities that might be changing or updating. The lines of communication are now open. You’ve basically got permission to communicate with this person, so milk it. You’ve invested. Do, do whatever you can to kind of continue that relationship. HollyG: I know you also wanted to mention the money thing, if people need to tip, buy meals or put hotel holding deposits on their personal credit cards, they need advance warning as it’s so embarrassing to run out of cash on a work trip! HollyG: We’ve covered: plan a few angles, its ok to have diversity in the itinerary create opportunity to build relationships while on the famil share social media handles, hashtags and wifi codes ahead of time get itineraries out as soon as possible (even a draft) be aware of dynamics on group famils and trying to manage that beforehand as best you can make sure the itinerary is relevant to the media on the trip don’t over-schedule the itinerary – ensure some time for people to work, check emails, post on social media etc be a great host, be passionate and tapping into a local host can add huge value ensure clarity about extra expenses, tips, holding deposits and money in general follow up HollyG: Where can people connect with you? Emma Castle: Ah, definitely. For my work stuff, for SPICE Magazine, my website is www.spicenews.com.au, or www.hotelmanagement.com.au. You can kind of find my work through there, and you can email me. My email address is ecastle@intermedia.com.au. I’m on Twitter and Instagram, @sheg0es. So that’s S-H-E-G-zero-E-S, because that’s what was available. I also have a blog, so www.shegoes.com.au is my blog. You can always find me there, too. HollyG: Awesome. Now, are you up for the bonus question? Emma Castle: Yeah, always Now it’s time for our $1000 bonus question HollyG: Awesome. I ask all my podcast guests the same final question, and that is: If you only had a $1,000 marketing budget, what would you spend it on? Emma Castle: Well, truthfully, I would say famils. From a media perspective, or even from a buyer perspective, just get the most important people, the people who have the most influence in whatever sphere you’re trying to reach, and send them on a famil, send them on the best famil you can possibly afford. Hopefully people in the destination will comp you stuff, like they’ll give you stuff for free, so your $1,000 will go a long way. Hopefully that is just going to have to cover flights and a few incidentals because with destination support, hopefully everyone will offer FOC because they see the opportunity in having these really, really high priority people in their destination. HollyG: And, I mean, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a group famil. You could just pick one publication or one journalist and really impress them, and you’re going to get a great return on your $1,000, right? Emma Castle: Ah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, especially if you get someone who has an interest. That’s another point, is sometimes if you can kind of invite someone who has a personal passion for whatever it is you offer, like say you’re a wine region and you happen to find a journalist who’s got a really huge interest in wine, that’s a relationship that will just keep giving as well. HollyG: Yeah. Cool. Well, awesome to have you on the podcast. Oh, actually we should mention for those people who are based in Sydney. International Women’s Day we are running an event, that’s the 8th of March, 2017, yeah, talking all about men’s roles in women’s careers. It’ll be a beautiful lunch event, so people should check that out. Emma Castle: Yeah, yeah. We’ve got really good speakers, so Hayley Baillie from Baillie Lodges, Simon McGrath from Accor Hotels, and we’ve got Peter Hook from Hook Communications as the speakers. Yeah, it’ll be very enlightening I’m sure. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher or your preferred podcast service. Tweet me with any comments or feedback @hollygalbraith or email is good too holly (at) hollyg.com.au We love to read reviews and reviews really make a difference to our ranking in iTunes. If you could take the time to add a review to iTunes this would be greatly appreciated and i’ll give you a shout out on an upcoming episode!   The post Tips for creating awesome media famils – episode 76 appeared first on Holly G.

2017 China tourism marketing A huge thanks and welcome back  to George Cao, Co-founder and CEO of Dragon Trail Interactive based in Beijing, China. Dragon Trail Interactive is a travel focused digital marketing agency helping clients reach and engage with affluent Chinese consumers online. In this episode, George runs us through where the opportunities are for 2017 China tourism marketing, while bringing us up to speed on the past year.   I also chatted to George in Episode 50 of Tourism Tweetup the Podcast and that episode is one of the most popular episodes to date. Much of what we discussed then is still relevant and useful so please after you have listened to this episode, have a listen to episode 50 too. In this episode we discuss What was some of the big changes that happened in the China travel market in 2016? New player to keep your eye on from a China social media perspective. What marketing tactics are being employed by other destinations marketing into China Will the appointment of Trump impact visitation to the US from China? With such an increase in destination competition, how is the traveller choosing where to go? Looking forward to 2017, what will you be spending your time doing, and what are things that people should be giving their energy to when it comes to marketing into China? “…for 2017, our advice to our clients and our friends is to focus attention on partnership management, look for new partners, train them, empower them, leverage their networks, and monitor how they do. I think partner relationships and partner joint marketing efforts will pay off more probably in the next few years than they have been. So we would suggest keep an eye on partnership marketing for 2017.” “I think, at least for 2017, I think we need to prepare ourselves, especially some of the short haul destinations, for relatively flat growth, single-digit growth, and try to find ways of creating interesting, inspirational content for people to start thinking about their destinations again. But for long haul and emerging markets, I think the opportunity is here, for you to really get into the market and start providing that alternative experience people are looking for. When they don’t go to the more familiar places, they will be looking for something different. I think South America, come on to China and do a heavy push. Emerging markets, come over, and this is your time.” I also ask George the $1000 bonus question and this is if you only had a $1000 marketing budget what would you spent it on. He gives a great answer, you’ll have to listen in for that one! HollyG: How’s the best way for people to connect with you, George, and Dragon Trail? George: I think my email address is public. It’s George@DragonTrail.com. Our website is at DragonTrail.com. It’s very easy for people to find us online. We also have a WeChat account. For people who do have WeChat, you can look us up on WeChat. The ID is DragonTrail, all in one word. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher or your preferred podcast service. Tweet me with any comments or feedback @hollygalbraith or email is good too holly (at) hollyg.com.au We love to read reviews and reviews really make a difference to our ranking in iTunes. If you could take the time to add a review to iTunes this would be greatly appreciated and i’ll give you a shout out on an upcoming episode!   The post Tips for your 2017 China marketing plan- episode 75 appeared first on Holly G.

Three tools to help you grow and manage social media. Welcome to Tourism Upgrade. The podcast unpacking marketing trends from travel, tourism and marketing leaders. I’m your host HollyG and today I’m going to share with you three tools that I use that help manage social media. Also in this episode I am going to ask myself an answer the $1000 bonus question. For those that don’t know what that is, at the end of every podcast episode I ask my guests the same one question at that is –  If you only had $1000 marketing budget what would you spend it on? Some find it tougher than others and I always think – what would I answer – well in this special episode I’m going to give you my answer! But first let me share with you a couple of tools that i’ve started using in managing social media which i’ve found to be super valuable. I did a similar episode to this in the last podcast series, it was episode 37 and I shared that the right social media tools can help you better manage and deliver your social media plan. I find you can have a fantastic strategy or plan but the downfall in often in the execution of that plan. And thats why sometimes tools can really help you.   Three tools to manage social media 1) LATER Later is a great tool for planning and scheduling Instagram content. It allows you to plan from your desktop upcoming Instagram posts and schedule them for a specific date and time and then via an app you download onto your smartphone you get a notification that its time to post on instgram and with a few very simple presses of the button your post goes goes out live. It won’t automatically post for you – there is some manual element there but its minimum and easy to use. There are the free and paid version. I like that it doesn’t post automatically as it gives me a second opportunity to look over the post, to decide if I feel like its the right time to post it, I may have posted something live and spontaneous early so I don’t want that post to go live until later, or the weather may have changed or some huge crisis happened etc.. The other great thing is the visual planner so you can visualise what your account is actually going to look like. For me with my Tourism Upgrade Instagram account I have a pattern going for my Instagram so I can plan it out and see what it looks like ahead of time. 2) CrowdfireApp My next favourite tools is called CrowdfireApp and if you have used this in the past and then ditched it well its time to look at it again because they have just launched a major upgraded to this tool. I use this tool to grow Twitter and Instgram followers. I find it challenging to grow your followers on these two platforms without using a tool. Basically you log in each day on your desktop and a bot walks you through a serious of suggestions for your twitter or instagram account. For example is will say Unfollow these 20 accounts that are not following you back – you can then choose to unfollow them or not. Then it may say follow back these 20 accounts that follow you. Then unfollow these inactive accounts Then reply to these people that have mentioned you you Then follow these 20 accounts from your competitors Check it out for yourself using their free option and see what you think. 3) Facebook Scheduling Tool Built in to Facebook is the ability to schedule posts. I honestly don’t know how people manage social media without using this tool. Read all about it here from the Facebook help centre.   In the comments below please let me know your favourite to help manage social media. If you only had $1000 marketing budget what would you spend it on? I believe one of the most over looked marketing assets we have in the tourism industry is our customer database. If I only had a $1000 marketing budget I would be using the funds to set up something like Mailchimp – which is an email communication tool. Setting up Mailchimp is not going to cost me anything depending on the size of your list. Then I would be engaging my graphic designer to create a nice looking, on brand newsletter template. I would then plan out what useful and interesting email newsletters I could send to my database that they are going to find informative or entertaining or useful at some level. If you are worried about the time commitment think about just doing 1 a month, and they don’t need to be very long. Just a couple of paragraphs. It is so important to keep a relationship going with past visitors, guests or customers. Repeat customers are more likely to buy from you, they are also more likely to refer you. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher or your preferred podcast service. Tweet me with any comments or feedback @hollygalbraith or email is good too holly (at) hollyg.com.au We love to read reviews and reviews really make a difference to our ranking in iTunes. If you could take the time to add a review to iTunes this would be greatly appreciated and i’ll give you a shout out on an upcoming episode! The post Three helpful tools to manage your social media – episode 74 appeared first on Holly G.

How to create customer personas for your tourism brand. Welcome to Tourism Upgrade, the podcast unpacking marketing trends from travel, tourism, and marketing leaders. I’m your host, HollyG, and today we welcome back to the podcast, Bronwyn White from MyTravelResearch.com, and we’ll be chatting about how to create customer personas for your destination. What is a customer persona? Customer personas are a fictional  representation of your ideal customer or visitor. You may have a few personas representing the different key segments you attract or want to attract. It is a way to keep your customer top of mind and clear in your mind when you are making business discussions. We talk a little about create customers personas in episode 67 when we talk about customer first marketing. Bronwyn: Look, I try to think about persona as your best friend or, better still, your fictitious business partner, because we’re in business and basically everything begins and ends with your customer. We should be extremely intimate with that person so you need to run all of your marketing and business decisions by them first. So the aim is to create one or two or even three profiles and really get to know these people extremely well. What sort of details are in a customer persona? Bronwyn: All sorts of things. As we say to some of our clients and our customers, the details you probably already know a few. You probably know them better than what you think. Anything from demographics to … Demographics is sort of an old way to produce your personas. We talk more about attitudes, lifestyles, in this sort of day and age now with personas. Their types of interest, their attitudes, their special interests, internet habits, what are their purchasing habits, where they live, where they travel, what’s important to them in life, what are they seeking. Are they seeking things like to educate themselves, rest, R&R or immersive type experiences? There’s a whole range of things. demographics attitudes lifestyle choices special interests internet habits social media habits purchasing habits where they live where they travel what is important to them in life Things they are seeking (physically and emotionally) Special offer from MyTravelResearch.com to podcast listeners, gain access to the MyTravelResearch.com Premium Membership Site free for a month! Click here for the details. HollyG: You mentioned that a destination might have maybe two or three or four personas. How does that sort of work? Bronwyn: So if I’m a destination or an accommodation, or caravan park, at the moment I might be interested in seniors, which then makes me interested also in the accessible travel market because as the seniors are ageing we’re seeing an emergence of the accessible travel market. So for example in that sense, “accessible”, we all think “just people in wheelchairs”, but as people age what we’re seeing in our research is that people do not want to stop travelling but they realise they have to change the way that they travel. So that’s a really good, efficient way to cut across markets, if you like. Then you might have that caravan park or holiday park accommodate pets. So they might also cater to the niche market, travelling with pets, which is also a trend and emerging market that we’re seeing, and then they could be families during the holidays. So, picking at a very, very basic level, who do you see? Who’s coming in? Who do you see driving down the main street, walking down the main street? HollyG: Yeah, so identifying what markets you’re attracting currently and potentially even what markets you want to attract, that is going to suit your destination or your business going forward. Sort of identifying those categories broadly and then creating a detailed focus on each one. And the reason we’re creating this detail focus … I guess why should we have these customer personas? Bronwyn: Okay, basically it helps you make a better decision. So if you’re making decisions based on you know if you go in blind- HollyG: And we’re talking marketing decisions. Bronwyn: Marketing decisions, any marketing decisions you are making without intimate knowledge of your persona or who’s coming in there. What we say to people is, “You’re relying on hope-marketing, you just put it out there and hope-marketing is right,” and hope-marketing is costly. It’s costly not only on your time, but also on your bottom-line, on the budget. So knowing everything about your customer, how they’re buying, what they’re buying, what they’re interested in, what their pain points are, what pushes their buttons, is really, really important in helping you promote your product or your destination. HollyG: Yeah, I can see why having someone, really clearly in your mind when you’re rolling out marketing activities can help you make sure that you’re hitting the mark. What are the steps to create a persona? Bronwyn: At a very basic level I would look at who’s coming through the door, you probably get a good sense, you probably already have a good sense of who’s coming in, but start talking to your customers and ask them … Ask what they’re interested in, ask what they’re coming from. We see lots of places and we also hear this is when people ask for our postcode or where they come from, just informal conversations with your clients. You can make it more formal by having a little survey, a feedback questionnaire when people get home, to ask them more about themselves and what they’re interested in. And there’s so much free research out there on the internet, if you’re looking for information about seniors or any sort of niche market, for example, fishing or food-and-wine, that sort of thing, there’s so much free information about what drives these people out there. So just looking at certain attitudes, what pain point are you solving for these people? So, do they want a family-friendly holiday? How can your destination or product help them with their family-friendly holiday, or how can you help me unwind, how can you help me experience the best of food-and-wine, how can you help me with local knowledge and local immersion? So just doing a bit of product matching with your customers and getting a feel for what drives these people. Are there tools we can use to help gather information for our customer personas? Bronwyn: Yeah, Google Analytics will help with things like geographic location, and what type of devices they’re coming in from and how they’re searching, and what types of words they’re searching for. Absolutely, there’s a lot of information in there. HollyG: And what about our own, if we have got a customer database or something like that, is there things that we can pull from that. Bronwyn: Yeah, you can probably survey them. A lot of people are too afraid to send a survey out, and I’m here to tell you, that sending a survey out to your customers to improve your product, tells them that you care … that you want to improve your product because of them. And believe it or not, sending a survey out to your customers is a fabulous PR exercise for your business or destination. So never be afraid to do it. HollyG: Yeah, and what about many of us have social media or Facebook, is there information from that that we can garner? Bronwyn: Absolutely, there’s social-talking, social-chatter, there’s a whole range of tools that you can use to find out what people are talking about. But the type of social media should also be a part of your persona that you’re building. Some are on Facebook, some might be on Instagram, we’ve got “Gen Z”, coming up now, they’re more interested in Snapchat and YouTube. So for each demographic, each market you may have a different type of social media outlet. HollyG: Yeah, sure. I mean I find that with my clients, the person that we’re sort of talking to on Facebook, is actually different than the person that we’re talking to on Instagram. Bronwyn: Yeah, completely different. HollyG: And is there any other research or sources of information that we can use, that’s out there now, specifically, for our personas? Bronwyn: Look I would say just do a Google search, just get on and search for “seniors travel”, or “seniors travel research”, or “family travel research”. We actually on our membership site- our premium site, we have ready-made personas already done, for our premium members. So on a few of our products we do that for you. HollyG: I’ve had this idea, just say that I’ve got a database of, say, like 10,000, if I went through and saw what was the most common name in that database, just say it was “Jan”, then maybe include it in my customer persona when I’m developing it up, it might be like: “Jan Smith age da-da-da”. So, just pulling bits and pieces from wherever possible to bring it together, is that essentially what we’re trying to do? Bronwyn: Absolutely, absolutely. Now, always give them a name because it brings them alive. And I can go through Bob and Cheryl if you’d like? HollyG: Oh okay, sure. An example of a customer persona in travel and tourism Bronwyn: So, I’ve brought one with me to go through. Bob and Cheryl, they were looking at the pet niche, travelling with pets. So, Bob and Cheryl are recently retired and they love to travel. And they are planning their dream travelling around Australia trip, and want to take their dog, Lucky, with them- they’re really worried about their dog. And Cheryl’s the main travel planner of the house, and Lucky has been with the family for nine human-years, and he’s a central part of the family, they couldn’t possibly think about leaving her at home, it’s quite traumatic. So they’re worried how best to travel with Lucky, so this is one of their pain points. You have to think about how you can solve, how you can minimise the risk associated with travel for Bob and Cheryl. So, travelling with Lucky, she wants to plan quite heavily and map out the best places that will cater to Lucky. So what I would say to the destination marketer or tourism marketer is make sure you have plenty of content around the fact that you can take pets, so that she can find you. She’s looking at caravan parks, parks and attractions that she can take Lucky, and the one thing, they’re willing to pay a premium to ensure Lucky is catered for, as well- they’re not going to skimp. But she’s worried about the limitations, what they can do with Lucky, and if there’s places they can and cannot take her. We look at someone like Bob and Cheryl, who are travelling with their pets, but sometimes Bob and Cheryl appear as a VFR host, as well. Bob and Cheryl, they live in Queensland, they just moved to Queensland and their son and daughter come up with their grandkids during the school holidays, and so Bob and Cheryl might be VFR hosts in the school holidays, taking care of the kids. They have another persona as well, with different pain points. HollyG: So it depends what hat their wearing at the time. Bronwyn: That’s right, yeah. HollyG: So what we’re saying is around developing detailed customer personas we get broad things like demographics, but its about looking at their attitude, their lifestyle, and what’s important to them, and really identifying their pain points. Bronwyn: Absolutely. HollyG: And then when we’re looking at executing our content or marketing, we really want to make sure that we’re ticking those pain points, or including those sort of things in our communication, on our website, in our social media activities, so these particular people feel this destination or this business is a good match for me and I’m gonna come and stay there. Bronwyn: Absolutely, and they’re more likely to choose you over other businesses or destinations that don’t have that information available. HollyG: Ah, yes, that’s right. Cool. Some people think that by developing a persona, like the one about Bob and Cheryl, that we’re getting a bit too specific, so that’s going to limit our marketing. What do you think about that? Bronwyn: It’s better to be specific, than not be specific. You need to talk to the audience, they need to be able to resonate with you and what you’re offering. If you’re not specific and you’re trying to be all things to all people, not only is it confusing to your customers, but also confusing to the search engines. So persona development is more important than ever, especially in the age of semantic search, where not only do customers need to figure you out, but the search engines need to figure you out. If you’re not consistent in what you’re saying, and who you’re talking to in you’re marketing than the search engines will not be confident in presenting your product or destination in a search. HollyG: Yeah, great. And can you just give us a definition of semantic search? Bronwyn: So semantic search was an algorithm change, it wasn’t an update, it was a complete over-hall, about 8 months ago when google switched over and basically the search engines became more about semantics, based on true meaning, where they’re trying to match the best websites and webpages to the customer query. So it’s more intuitive now, and it’s machine learning. So, you hear all the time about artificial intelligence and machine learning … basically the Google algorithms are trying to learn what your website is all about. So if you’re consistent in talking about certain things, on your site and social media, the search engines are confident that this person, this site knows what they’re talking about, so therefore I’m going to present them in a search. So I’m sitting there looking for family beach holidays, Google goes, “well who’s the best page to present?”, based on my history. So it’s exciting and scary at the same time. HollyG: Yeah, that’s right. How do you see social media can be used for general, regular consumer insights, or customer personas, is there a role there? Bronwyn: Absolutely, because you can keep an eye on what they’re saying, as well, and you can keep an eye on what people are sharing. So what’s happening, you really nee dot keep a close eye on your social media content, what you’re pushing out there, because one of the things, as well, is that the search algorithms look at the social media as an indicator of what is being engaged with, what is being shared. If you’re putting content out there thinking “Oh I’ll just put it out there”, if it doesn’t relate to your persona, isn’t liked, isn’t shared, or commented on, then it’s not appealing to your persona. It’s a fine line you’ve got to tweak constantly. HollyG: Do you have any final comments around the development of customer personas or any final tips? Bronwyn: I would say that it’s never been more important, for all of those reasons, to develop your customer personas … Both for your marketing, and just pure efficiency as well for your time and budget. Just have a go, it’s not that hard. Just start really basic and it will evolve over time. HollyG: Yeah, yeah great, and I love that idea of surveying our customer and not being scared to do that, because I think it can be a little bit scary or it feels a little bit scary. Where can people find out little bit more about you or connect with you? Bronwyn: Okay, they can go to our website on MyTravelResearch.com, and in-fact as I mentioned, we have a whole rang of pre-made personas on our premium site, and we also have a persona checklist available … We also have survey templates, as well. HollyG: Yeah, great, excellent. Cool, well thank you very much! Bronwyn: It’s a pleasure. Special offer from MyTravelResearch.com to podcast listeners, gain access to the MyTravelResearch.com Premium Membership Site free for a month! Click here for the details. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher or your preferred podcast service. Tweet me with any comments or feedback @hollygalbraith or email is good too holly (at) hollyg.com.au We love to read reviews and reviews really make a difference to our ranking in iTunes. If you could take the time to add a review to iTunes this would be greatly appreciated and i’ll give you a shout out on an upcoming episode!   The post How to create customer personas for your tourism brand – episode 73 appeared first on Holly G.

2017 Tourism Marketing In this episode we discuss some of the tourism marketing activities and highlights from 2016 and look towards 2017 planning with Isaac Mizrachi Director of Tourism for the destination of Tel Aviv. 2017 Tourism Marketing. Please PLAY above to listen!   HollyG: Welcome to episode 72 of Tourism Upgrade, the podcast unpacking marketing trends from travel, tourism and marketing leaders. I’m your host, HollyG and today we welcome Isaac Mizrachi, who is Director of Tourism at the City of Tel Aviv in Israel. We will be discussing 2017 tourism marketing. I met Isaac about four years ago and I think you were speaking at SoMeT Conference in Wollongong? Isaac Mizrachi: Yeah, that’s right. What a great experience it was. HollyG: Now what we wanted to talk about today was, I guess, get a bit of a sense of 2016 and also look at 2017. I know that you’ve been in sort of planning mode, so I thought it would be great if we could have this conversation and turn it into a podcast. Yeah, maybe we could start off by telling us a little bit Tel Aviv and tourism and maybe what are some of the things that you’ve been doing in 2016? Isaac Mizrachi: Sure. To be begin with Tel Aviv as a destination, just because not many people know Tel Aviv, I’ll just say that it’s the biggest city in Israel. It’s in the Mediterranean Sea, not too far from, about one hour flight from Greece, Cyprus, three hours flight from Italy, so quite a central destination. It’s 52 square kilometres, so it’s a tiny city. Most tourists that come here do that because of the ocean, because of the beach life, because of the urban lifestyle. We have excellent bars and pubs and a great food scene. Lots of vegan restaurants. Tel Aviv apparently is the friendliest vegan city in the world, which is new to me as well. Isaac Mizrachi: Yeah, there you go. It’s a very cool city, very different to most cities around it in the Middle East. It’s very liberal, very open. We have a very strong LGBT community, so LGBT tourism is quite strong here too. Roughly one million tourists a year, so not a lot. It’s growing though. That’s Tel Aviv on a nutshell. What we did in 2016? Well in 2016 we launched our biggest ever campaign, which is a collaboration with the City of Jerusalem, which basically invites tourists to discover two cities in one break. It’s a $10 million campaign that targets our European markets only at this stage. It was a bold decision because we basically said, “Let’s bring another brand into our offering and go to the end consumer with a single message.” Combining these two cities it’s not something that we did before. I’m not sure if I remember any similar campaigns that took two different destinations and try to sell them as one. Yeah, we hope it will bring good results, we’ve started a couple of months ago. So far impression wise and click-through wise and interaction wise it’s going really well, but we would like to see some more bookings and some more tourists and we’ll be able to measure that probably after the current winter. We’ve just started our winter season, so in about two or three months we’ll know if it did well. HollyG: Yeah and what markets? Isaac Mizrachi: Well our top five markets are Russia, Italy, U.K., Germany, France and Spain. The U.S. is another big market for us, but this particular campaign, as I said, only targets Europe at this stage. In the U.S. we’re doing different things. Yeah, these are our big markets. China is also fairly new to us. We’ve started doing smaller activities, mainly in social, Weibo, WeChat. We have a representative in Beijing and in Shanghai, so we’re doing some little activities there, but it’s an emerging market so I can’t say we’re putting everything that we have there at this stage. HollyG: I love that idea of partnering with another destination, two cities in one break. Are the destinations, like how close together are they? How do people travel to both? Isaac Mizrachi: Oh, it’s only a 40 minute car ride, so that’s basically why we decided to combine the offering. HollyG: Oh, so close. Very close. Isaac Mizrachi: I know, it’s like if you’re in Melbourne you just drive to Mornington Peninsula and it’s just it’s out there, you know? The difference between these two cities is so immense you get all the modern lifestyle and the beach and the beautiful people in Tel Aviv and then you want something different you go to Jerusalem and experience 3,000 years of history and these amazing palaces and churches. It’s the birthplace of the three religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in one city. You really get a good value for your holiday, for your buck when you combine these two destinations. Yeah, we hope it will do well. HollyG: Yeah, we should do a follow up one in about a year’s time and see how the campaign went. What are some of the main sort of mediums you’re using in your marketing activities? Isaac Mizrachi: Well in this particular campaign it’s all the traditional channels, so obviously TV ads and print and online. We started experimenting a little bit more with Snapchat in the past few months. In Tel Aviv we actually have this new initiative that we call inclusive tourism. Perhaps I’ll talk a bit more about it later when we talk about 2017. In general it’s all about involving residents in tourism planning, in our tourism work, because we feel that residents are those who control … Well, they’re the real bosses of the city, not DMOs, not us. With Snapchat we allow our residents to run it for us. We select different residents every week and a different local and we give him or her the password and they just post whatever they want, they tell the story of the city through their eyes. Inclusive tourism:  residents are the real bosses of the city, not DMOs. HollyG: Oh, I love that. Isaac Mizrachi: Snapchat is something where … Yeah, it’s going well. It’s nice. People love it. We get lots of interactions from that initiative. HollyG: I can say that it’s been such a common theme in the last six months or so of relaunching this podcast and talking to people about the impact that locals have on a destination and how to get them involved in marketing. I love that you’ve brought that up, because, yeah, it’ll be great to talk about it. When you’re looking, I guess, I know that you’ve just been in planning mode for 2017, planning out your activities and what you’re doing. What does sort of your planning process look like? Isaac Mizrachi: Well we ran a series of meetings with the different stakeholders that we work with, whether it’s the hotel association, the ministry of tourism, Airbnb that we work a lot with, and many others, and we try to synchronise everyone’s thoughts and needs and insights on tourism in Tel Aviv and based on that we’re currently developing the marketing calendar for 2017, media planning, new initiatives, more traditional stuff, like choosing trade shows to attend and so on and so forth. Basically that’s the essence of our planning process. I really believe it’s all about involving all the relevant stakeholders rather than to work in isolation. HollyG: Yeah, and I like what you said there, it was about understanding their needs and what they want, but also getting their insights and their intel. Isaac Mizrachi: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean we all know that marketing is all about data and insight and we never do things without asking our tourists and our stakeholders and all people involved what exactly is it that they need, what exactly is it that they feel about trends in tourism and so on? It’s always about learning from real life and then improve based on that. HollyG: Yeah. How do you get feedback from the visitors that are coming into the destination? Isaac Mizrachi: We try to mix traditional and nontraditional ways. We hand out surveys on our information centres to begin with. That’s a bit old fashion, but you know what, it helps us a lot. We get plenty of responses and then we analyse the data, the responses, and come up with a monthly summary. Exactly. We learn from that and we change things. Another thing that we do is we conduct particular … Well we choose particular events and we conduct research works around these events. Let’s say the gay pride parade last year, so it’s a one week long event, we have plenty of tourists, LGBT tourists coming from all around the world and we wanted to make sure that we’re running a proper event, that people feel safe and that they’re happy and that the content is right for them. We worked with a couple of researchers, university researchers from the University of Jerusalem and we drafted a survey and we conducted interviews and focus groups and there were lots of research activities around it. Just one example, we put a research stand right at the LGBT beach in Tel Aviv, so basically that was the focal point. All the gay tourists that came to Tel Aviv participated in that research and we came up with some really interesting insights, like most visitors felt that Tel Aviv was very safe for them. The perception of safety that we sometimes have problems with apparently wasn’t an issue for the LGBT tourists. We also learned that most of them thought that Tel Aviv is a pricey destination and so for this year’s event we’re starting to work with many hotels on creating more affordable packages for LGBT tourists and try to make it more affordable for them. These are the more traditional options for research and for measuring user satisfaction. Other than that, we use all the digital tools, whether it’s Facebook insights. We try to learn about our demographics, where people come from, what did they say, how did they respond to our posts? Yeah, so digital tools that are available. Nothing that you haven’t heard of before, Holly. HollyG: Yeah, but it’s interesting, I think, to just … I think especially hearing it from a bigger destination, such as yourself, to any sort of smaller destinations, is getting that continual feedback is really part of, helps in your planning and that constant improvement all the time and it’s you need to make sure you’ve got that system of feedback setup. Yeah, you can monitor what you’re doing and also really help with your planning when it comes to sort of planning time. Isaac Mizrachi: Absolutely. We have to. We can’t isolate ourselves from what our tourists are saying. It’s essential. It’s an essential part of the work of any DMO, I think. HollyG: Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Now, what are some of the key projects or opportunities that you have identified that you’re going to be looking towards actioning for 2017? Isaac Mizrachi: We learned about the problems that some European cities are facing with their residents due to the crazy number of tourists they have, let’s say in Barcelona or Amsterdam and Venice in Italy, so the lack of control and so on, so following that and in effort to reduce the risk for something like that to happen in Tel Aviv we decided to launch a project called inclusive tourism, which basically says that the city belongs to its residents and therefore we should involve them more often in tourism planning. The city belongs to its residents and therefore we should involve them more often in tourism planningClick To Tweet That’s why we invited locals to participate in writing our tourism master plan. That’s why we promote local travel tech startups and integrate them into the tourism infrastructure of the city. That’s why we work a lot with Airbnb and help current people who host in Airbnb to become better hosts. Inclusive tourism is definitely a key project for us in 2017. HollyG: I love that idea so much. I haven’t really heard it termed like that. You mentioned about the travel tech startups, can you talk a little bit about what’s happening there? Isaac Mizrachi: Yeah, sure. The idea is that we as a DMO shouldn’t develop new technologies to improve visitor satisfaction, but rather to use what’s out there and help it grow faster. Now Tel Aviv is well known for its startup scene. There are more startups here than almost any other place in the world, except for Silicon Valley, of course. Lots of entrepreneurs, lots of cool different projects. Sorry. Many of them belong to the travel industry. Many of them are travel startups. We as a municipality basically can offer these startups the support they need in the early stages, so we give them a free working space and we give them exposure to global media and we introduce them to potential investors. In return we get their product. Now when I say, “We get their product,” it sounds bad, but in other words it’s we embed their products in the local tourism infrastructure, so if I, for example, if I have a startup that allows users to book hotel rooms faster and for me, embedding my product into a hotel is a great, because then I could test my product, I could validate it, I could see how real users use it, get their feedback. We have, just a real example, a startup called Artbeat that is made in Tel Aviv. It allows you to when you visit a museum you can scan in any artwork that you want and it gives you all you need to know about the artist, about the artwork, about similar artworks from the same period and so on. It improves visitor satisfaction in a museum. We took this startup, we helped it grow and then we introduced it to various galleries and museums around the city and now they all use it. HollyG: Great. Isaac Mizrachi: It’s great for the tourists because it improves the visit. It’s great for the startup because it allows it to learn and get real time feedback from visitors and it’s great for us as a city, because we are able to offer visitors a better experience and market ourselves as an advanced destination. That’s smart tourism in a nutshell. HollyG: Yeah, that’s great. It’s really looking at quite different partnerships than what we would’ve traditionally looked at five or 10 years ago looking down this path, do you think? Isaac Mizrachi: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. We strongly believe in that. The tourism industry can be very old fashioned and very anachronistic, but with all these emerging travel tech startups and with Airbnb, step-by-step, becoming a huge travel company, you just have to work with these stakeholders. You just have to identify them and try to connect with them despite those voices that say, “Hey, work with us because we know tourism. We are the traditional stakeholders and you should focus on us.” I keep saying that it’s best to just stick with the new powers of tourism, plus it’s what the market demands. You see all the millennial tourists, they expect you, as a DMO, to offer these services, they expect you as a DMO to work with companies like Airbnb to talk about the sharing economy, to offer amazing apps and improve the visitor satisfaction using those digital tools. It’s a tourist’s expectation, so you can’t just ignore it. HollyG: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, very, very true. You’ve mentioned Airbnb a couple of times, what sort of relationship do you have with them and how does that work? Isaac Mizrachi: In Tel Aviv we have about 8,000 Airbnb listings, which is- HollyG: Wow. Isaac Mizrachi: Yeah, that’s exactly similar to the number of hotel rooms that we have here. It’s big. It’s big in Tel Aviv. We get lots and lots of tourists that wouldn’t have come here otherwise, because Tel Aviv hotels, although they’re great, they tend to be a bit pricey, so Airbnb helps in that regard. We get many budget conscious travellers and we thought we can’t ignore it, like most DMOs unfortunately do, and so we decided, we approached them last year, they were happy to work together. We started with creating an online neighbourhood guide for Tel Aviv neighbourhoods. They produced it, they sent photographers and writers and we suggested all the shooting locations and we helped with content writing. It was a real collaboration between us and them. The end result is phenomenal. We love it. You’re welcome to check it out, Tel Aviv neighbourhood guide. It’s really cool. HollyG: Yeah, I’ll put a link in the show notes as well. I’d love to check it out. Isaac Mizrachi: Fantastic. Fantastic. Other than that we’re currently working on, as part of that inclusive tourism initiative that I was talking about, we’re working on [inaudible 00:20:34] workshops that will allow current Airbnb hosts to learn, sorry, to teach potential hosts how to join Airbnb, how to play the Airbnb game. We’re going to do it in a speed dating format that will have different potential hosts and different current hosts just switching tables and helping each other to become better hosts. That’s another thing on our plate. We’ll do some things in the MICE industry, so the meetings and events industry. We’ll see how Airbnb will fit into that, because once we have those massive conferences sometimes the hotels just don’t have any rooms to offer and so Airbnb may help. These are all planned for 2017. I hope that some of them will become a reality, but to be honest they are great partners. I strongly encourage DMOs worldwide, in Australia and worldwide, to work, to collaborate with Airbnb, they can bring a lot of value to the destination. Of course that doesn’t mean that we support Airbnb regulation. We feel that the phenomenon that is the sharing economy should be regulated, there should be a fair competition between hotels and Airbnb and other rental providers. That doesn’t contrast one another, you can still work with them and on the other hand still call for proper regulation. HollyG: Well interesting to, yeah, to hear your thoughts on that, especially given that you’re in that relationship at this point. Yeah. In last last week’s episode, episode 71, we talked a lot about opportunities for tourism destinations in relation to Airbnb and the sharing economy and it is a little bit of a changing of the mindset, but, as you said earlier, it’s what the visitor expects now. They want that person-to-person contact. They want a more personalised experience. They want to meet locals and immerse themselves in the destination. Is that what you’re finding as well? Isaac Mizrachi: Yeah, absolutely and you know what? You see that in all aspects of the visitor experience, not just the housing. We get to see more and more tourists now using tools and startups like EatWith … Have you heard of EatWith? HollyG: Tell us about it. Isaac Mizrachi: Yeah. Sure. It’s a startup that allows you to have dinner in someone’s home, but to have dinner with a local and you can ask them questions of their life and what they do and just to visit their house and to see how it is, to spend some time in a locals house. HollyG: For the show notes for this episode head to hollyg.com.au. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast service. I was just going to ask, I guess, what you’ve been doing or what you see from a social media perspective, what sort of stood out for your for 2016 and is there things that you’ll be sort of keeping your eye on in 2017? Where do you think we’re at from a social media perspective? Isaac Mizrachi: Well, I think video keeps growing. It’s a bit repetitive, but from year-to-year we see how popular video is and so we’ll be putting a lot of effort on creating cool, meaningful content on video, video content. I think that we should create videos based on the platform, so when we’re creating content for Facebook the videos for Facebook they have to be different than what we create for other platforms out there. Plus I think that it’s about time for most DMOs who aren’t doing it already to focus on Chinese social media, so whether it’s Weibo or WeChat, it’s super important to just hire those people who can run these platforms for you or if you can have someone in-house to do it for you. It’s just too late not to be there and not to work there in 2017. HollyG: Now it’s time for our $1,000 bonus question. If you only had a $1,000 marketing budget what would you spend it on? Isaac Mizrachi: Well with a $1,000 I would probably focus on one market that’s important to us, let’s say, China. I’ll invite a top blogger to Tel Aviv and make sure they spread the word on Chinese social networks. I think that $1,000 would cover the flight here, so that would be what I’ll do. HollyG: Okay. Great. What if you only had a $100? Isaac Mizrachi: Well then I’d probably buy a pair of jeans and go home. HollyG: Speaking of influencers, are you doing much work with influencers in your marketing activities? Isaac Mizrachi: Yeah. Yeah, lots of works with bloggers and other influencers. We put a lot of effort on choosing the right ones though. We really do extensive research and check the engagement levels and the post quality and the target audience that each of these influencers is working with and then of course we create a great itinerary for them once they’re here. We put a lot of effort on making the most out of these influencers just to make sure that we get a good return. HollyG: Yeah. Yeah. I think there was talk that the influencer marketing might fade off a little bit, but I don’t see that happening and I see a lot of destinations getting some really good results. In terms of getting great stories from different perspectives out there online to their target market. Isaac Mizrachi: I think it’s super important. I agree with you and I think it’s super important especially for destinations that are less well-known or destinations with image perception issues, like Tel Aviv, where many people think it’s not very safe to come here, so we really need to bring those bloggers to actually say, “Hey, it’s great and it’s safe and you can come here and feel great and go for a jog at 11:00 p.m. and that’s perfectly fine.” I think it’s also important for some part of Australia, places in western Australia. I remember when I was working for Delaware North and I was their digital marketing executive for a while and places like the The Kimberley or King’s Canyon or Wilson Island not very well-known and with influencers you can spread the word faster and better. HollyG: Just a final question, do you see any big challenges for 2017? I’m sure there’s quite a few, but is there any sort of on your radar that you’ve identified? Isaac Mizrachi: Challenges in Tel Aviv or globally? HollyG: Globally, I guess. Isaac Mizrachi: Oh, sure. Well we see much more terrorism in Europe and things are becoming a bit unsafe so the tourism game is changing a little bit. People these days understand that travelling is not 100% safe anymore, unfortunately, so this may affect tourism numbers. Hopefully not significantly, but that’s something that DMOs should think about and talk about and make sure that the safety issue is a high on their agenda. It’s important to educate tourists about safety issues. HollyG: Now where can people find out a little bit more about you and connect with you? Isaac Mizrachi: Oh, well, just LinkedIn me, I’ll be happy to answer any questions and collaborate, in Tel Aviv we’re very happy to collaborate on anything basically. If you have an idea for a cool travel tech startup and you need some support or some introduction to a [inaudible 00:30:05] startup or if you’re a DMO and you wish to work with some of our startups and learn about our technologies or you want to do a joint collaboration with, I don’t know, Airbnb and I’m open. HollyG: I’ll put your LinkedIn link in the show notes as well. You’ve just definitely moved Tel Aviv up on my travel bucket list. Isaac Mizrachi: Great. HollyG: It’s really good to talk to you. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher or your preferred podcast service. Tweet me with any comments or feedback @hollygalbraith or email is good too holly (at) hollyg.com.au We love to read reviews and reviews really make a difference to our ranking in iTunes. If you could take the time to add a review to iTunes this would be greatly appreciated and i’ll give you a shout out on an upcoming episode The post Plans and ideas for 2017 tourism marketing appeared first on Holly G.