Newsletter : March 2014
Written by Steph Kendall
Welcome to the New Zealand Tourism Guide www.tourism.net.nz March 2014 issue. If you have news or comments, please email us news@tourism.net.nz.
In this March newsletter:
Insights into Wine Tourism in New Zealand
New research about the wine tourism sector released by Tourism New Zealand (TNZ) reveals that thirteen per cent of all international holiday travellers visit a winery or participate in wine tourism activities each year. The markets that provide the most wine tourists to New Zealand include Australia, USA, UK and Germany.
Key insights about wine tourism include:
- Winery tourists spend significantly more than a typical visitor during their trip to New Zealand: $3,700 compared to $2,800.
- The international wine tourist's length of stay is an average of four days longer than the average tourist's length of stay.
- The most common accommodation types used by wine visitors are hotels and motels.
- International wine visitors tend to be more interested than others in art and cultural tourism activities during their stay in New Zealand.
TNZ's other priority 'Special Interest' areas include cycling, golf, skiing, fly-fishing, walking and hiking.
Latin America – An Emerging Market
It could be time for New Zealand tourism operators to brush on Spanish and Portugese language skills, as Tourism New Zealand's program of developing interest from emerging markets scores its first success with a media delegation from Brazil.
Back in November 2013, five media outlets from Brazil were hosted for seven days. Results from that trip have now appeared in print and online, with stories syndicated across multiple papers and online channels.
The publications included:
- Estado de Sao Paulo with a week day circulation of around 174,000
- O Globo newspaper, with a week day circulation of 250,000 copies
- Viajar pelo Mundo Magazine, one of the most important travel magazines in Brazil with a distribution of 55,000 copies monthly
- Correio Braziliense. A very influential newspaper located in the capital Brasilia with a circulation of 125,000
- Folha de S.Paulo newspaper with a weekday circulation of around 300,000
Tourism New Zealand says the trip was the first of many as the organisation seeks to build awareness of New Zealand as a holiday destination across Latin America, "This is the first time we have really focussed on this corner of the world but many Latin American countries are developing markets with growing economies and growing trade links with New Zealand. For example, outbound travel from Brazil grew 180 per cent between 2006 and 2013."
How to Publish a Quality Website
Edited by Steph Kendall
Understandably, everyone has a different idea of what 'quality' entails when it comes to publishing. However, the opinion of the giant of search engines, Google, on what constitutes 'quality' web publishing is probably the most important one that you can heed. After all, how Google perceives your website can decide its fate in the search engine rankings and affect what numbers of visitor your website receives. Here's an overview of what Google says:
- Make pages primarily for people, not search engines
- Don't deceive your users
- Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings
- Think about what makes your website unique, valuable or engaging
- Make your website stand out from others in your field
What Not To Do
Techniques to avoid include:
- Publishing automatically generated content (which generally results in low-quality duplicate content)
- Participating in link schemes (buying online 'word of mouth' connections)
- Cloaking (presenting different content for search engines and real people on the 'same' page)
- Sneaky redirects
- Hidden text or links
- Doorway pages (a poor quality, essentially meaningless page from a real person's point of view stuffed with keywords)
- Scraped content (content taken from other websites with little or no original comment or authorship)
- Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient (or real) value
- Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
- Creating pages with malicious behaviour
- Abusing rich snippets mark-up (loading up micro data for content that is irrelevant)
- Sending automated queries to Google (beware the optimisation company that supplies auto-generated ranking reports, their reports send automated queries to Google which Google sees as skewing their real results)
Good Practice
- Monitoring your site for hacking and removing hacked content as soon as it appears
- Preventing and removing user-generated spam on your site
10 Tips to Improve Business
Compiled by Steph Kendall
This month, we've also included some great tips for those small business owners thinking about or approaching retirement:
- Plan for retirement - planning for retirement is a marathon, not a sprint. Meet with your financial advisor and start planning now.
- Assemble a team of trusted experts - Working with trusted professionals including a financial advisor, tax specialist and lawyer will help you better understand your future options and tailor solutions based on your full personal and professional financial picture.
- Prepare for the unexpected - Having a retirement plan includes preparing for any roadblocks along the way including illness or disability. Work with a trusted professional to ensure you have the right life and disability insurance requirements in place.
- Have a tax strategy - There are a variety of tax implications that small business owners need to be aware of when planning their retirement. Working with a trusted tax professional can help you better understand all the tax implications of being a small business owner.
- Revisit and refresh - Life throws curve balls so plans should never be written in stone. Make sure to meet with your team of experts on a regular basis to review your current retirement and succession plans, check on your progress and course correct if need be.
- Update your email lists - Clean out any bounced email addresses, duplicates and otherwise inactive contacts so you can focus on engaging your most interested customers.
- Offer great content in your email marketing - Send relevant, valuable content to people who have opted to receiving communications – content that people will look for. Use an enticing subject line and make sure they recognise who the email is from.
- Refresh your online listings - Identify the places that your target audience is turning to when searching for businesses similar to yours, and make sure information about your business on those sites is accurate and up-to-date.
- Make your business mobile friendly - If a potential customer can't easily find the information they're looking for from their mobile device or if you send an email that doesn't look good on a smartphone or tablet it could cost business.
- Pay attention to what people are saying - Pay attention to what people are saying about your business on all social networks. Look for opportunities to engage with your most loyal fans, respond to a customer's question or thank someone for a positive online review whenever you can.
More Business Tips
You'll find more business tips in our newsletter archive, alongside:
Top Tourism Site of the Month
This month's Top Tourism Site Award goes to Tower Road Motel.
This clean-looking website really makes a great use of 'white space' to create a quiet, uncluttered web publication that is easy to read and navigate. The simplicity of the design echoes the uncomplicated nature of the business and the modern look of its facilities in an 'unflashy' environment. All the necessary features are included: clear main menu, quality photographs, links to social media, easy booking procedure and additional local information.
The motel may benefit in terms of visitor numbers from promoting its 'Lord of the Rings' backdrop more, as lots of people use 'lord of the rings accommodation' type searches on search engines the world over. To capitalise on that traffic, the words 'lord of the rings' would need to feature in the web pages in prominent places such as the home page and a dedicated sub-page.
Nominate a Site
If you think a New Zealand travel or tourism website deserves a 'Top Tourism Site Award', let us know about it. (View further information about the award criteria).
About the Top Tourism Site Award
The New Zealand Tourism Guide confers a Top Tourism Site Award to websites that:
- Enhance New Zealand as a travel destination
- Publish useful and informative content
- Are laid out in a professional and aesthetically-pleasing manner
- Are designed effectively for the World Wide Web
- May demonstrate easy functionality, interactivity, originality, outstanding graphic quality and marketing reach.
We welcome any feedback — send your comments to: news@tourism.net.nz
Kind regards,
The Team
Ph 0800 14 65 49
www.tourism.net.nz
New Zealand Tourism Guide
Head Office: Level One, 518 Colombo Street, Christchurch