Newsletter : May 2013
Written by Steph Kendall
Welcome to the New Zealand Tourism Guide www.tourism.net.nz May 2013 issue. If you have news or comments, please email us news@tourism.net.nz.
In this May newsletter:
Demand for Quality at TRENZ 2013
International buyers at TRENZ 2013 have Qualmark endorsement in mind when seeking out and promoting quality businesses, says Cameron Lawrence, Qualmark New Zealand's Service and Accounts Manager.
Qualmark recently attended TRENZ alongside around 250 New Zealand tourism operators and 290 invited international travel and tourism buyers. Cameron says more than 85 per cent of the tourism products on display were Qualmark endorsed, sending a clear signal to international trade and buyers that the industry takes quality very seriously.
Find out more about Qualmark's star ratings for quality.
US Travellers Targeted During Low Season
A new joint venture campaign with Air New Zealand is working to entice US travellers to visit during the New Zealand winter. The campaign comes on the back of Air New Zealand's promotional $1,048 return air fair offer which was available for four weeks (ending mid-May).
The campaign is working to drive conversion through comprehensive online advertising featured on websites such as MSN, Expedia and Trip Advisor. Advertising on these sites directs potential travellers through to a campaign microsite on newzealand.com where they can purchase the discounted flights.
Activity runs until 12th May and promotes return fares from key cities Los Angeles, San Francisco and Honolulu though to Auckland.
The Marketing Plan
Written by Steph Kendall
Have you got a marketing plan for your business and if so, what does your marketing plan look like? Your marketing plan can establish a direction for your business. It can identify a marketing budget, set out a media and promotion timetable and state how you will review the success (or otherwise) of your marketing efforts.
The marketing plan outline below was originally published by Tourism Victoria, which also publishes some great resources on marketing for tourism businesses. Well worth a look.
What to Include in Your Marketing Plan
The basic elements of a marketing plan are:
- Overview
Business Description
Mission statement - SWOT Analysis
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats - Positioning
Positioning statement – what is my competitive advantage?
Consumer profile – who are my customers? - Marketing Mix (the 6 P's)
Product or service
Place or distribution
Promotion or selling
Price
Packaging
Partnerships - Monitoring
Review performance of as part of your Business Plan.
Five Essential Tips for Growing your Tourism Business:
- Stand out from the crowd
- Get your website working and continually updated
- Encourage your customer to share their experiences
- Find your target audience and join the conversation
- Be found in search engines
Read more about marketing plans to get you underway.
10 Tips to Improve Business
Written by Steph Kendall
- Proof read all your publications - digital and print - and make sure that you get any errors corrected as soon as possible. It makes your whole business look more professional.
- Spend extra marketing dollars optimising your website - great design alone will not gain search engine rankings or bring 'website searchers' to your online door.
- Review your booking processes - it is easy for people to contact you, book your accommodation or activity? - if it takes too many clicks, download time is too slow or the phone isn't answered, people may take their business elsewhere.
- Bring 'Googlers' to your website - everyone jumps online to research their destination nowadays, so why not write about what you know - your local area - and publish 'insider knowledge' on your website that entices potential customers.
- Update your marketing plan or create a new marketing plan, if you feel that your business is losing ground or its proactive approach to getting new customers.
- Consider your marketing distribution channels. Are you using all of these channels: direct to consumer, retailers (travel agents), wholesalers, tourist information centres and electronic distribution?
- Talk to your customers - are you using Facebook, TripAdvisor and YouTube to communicate with your online audience? Use these to interact online - post and respond to reviews, talk to 'fans' on Facebook and publish video reviews from your guests.
- Review your online marketing strategy. Does it include these three essential components: website and content management, search engine optimisation and online marketing (including social media)?
- Looking at a new website design? Talk to your web development company about using a template-based design - you will save a lot of money and time.
- Published new content on your website recently? If not, why not? Search engines and real people love to read new content - ensure you publish new pages on a weekly basis and make sure you use optimisation techniques to get these pages ranked on Google.
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 Rotorua Combos.
One of the best examples seen for a long time of a website that makes booking activities and attractions as easy as it can possibly be. Rotorua Adventure Combos invites its market of adventure seekers to book two or more activities in the local area. The pictures on the website are of particularly good quality showing young travellers having a really great time, the graphics depicting each activity are easy to understand (for English speaking and non-English speakers) and best of all, the calls to action - the browse product links, the booking buttons and the booking phone number are prioritised and in positioned in all the right places. Links to testimonials and social media are all there too.
The only let-down is the site optimisation. Keywords are crammed into the home page Meta Title with little thought to presentation on the search engine results pages. Optimisation techniques have not been applied to the website as a whole, so this website may well lose out on gaining rankings on search engines such as Google - essential for gaining web traffic and bookings.
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, 534 Colombo Street, Christchurch