Marketing Niche Accommodation & Tours to Overseas Visitors
If you’re a niche tourism operator and you’d like to attract more international visitors to your accommodation or tours, you’re not alone.
Seppeltsfield Vineyard Cottage: marketing to the world from its own corner of AustraliaWe invited Australian tourism businesses to talk about overseas marketing from the perspective of a small operator. This article presents the most common challenges you face, and possible solutions.
Attracting overseas visitors to your niche in your corner of Australia isn’t an easy task - especially when you don’t have the resources to put into expensive trade shows, advertising and wholesale programs. Not only that but wholesalers and inbound tour operators (ITOs) may overlook you altogether because you are ‘too small’.
Online marketing & PR presents some exciting solutions for small businesses targeting a global market. Yet, for many, this presents a whole new set of challenges, and it’s easy to feel lost in a vast and increasingly complex web of information.
PublicityShip’s email database contains around 280 small tourism operators spread around Australia, so I invited those who market to an overseas audience to be interviewed about their experiences.
Twelve operators put up their hands, and I sent out a set of questions, including:
- What obstacles have you encountered and how have you overcome them?
- What are the best marketing strategies you have used, or seen used by other tourism operators?
- What are the marketing outcomes tourism operators most need help with?
- What are the top stresses, fears, or causes of failure for tourism operators?
What came out of this was a series of marketing challenges that many operators have in common, with examples of strategies for overcoming them. I have added to this my own suggestions for ways to meet these challenges, drawing on the potential offered by online marketing & PR, especially for small businesses.
Overseas Marketing Costs
The challenge
Many small operators find marketing to overseas visitors to be costly. Attending trade shows, placing ads and featuring in wholesalers’ brochures sucks up thousands of dollars. Attracting the attention of wholesalers and ITOs in the first place is hard when you’re a little guy.
Possible solutions
Market directly to your prospects
We are increasingly coming across small operators who are managing to bypass wholesalers and print media to reach their market directly.
By setting up an informative website that acts as a guide to your region, with lots of links and easy booking procedures, and thorough keyword analysis, you can attract customers directly - even from across the globe. Many may then book via an agent, but increasingly, travellers are not only planning trips online, but booking online too, via a site or by email.
This is where online marketing & PR gives small operators a chance to compete on a level playing field with larger tour companies and accommodation chains. The number of inbound visitors researching holidays online is on the increase, from an already significant 58% in 2006 according to figures from Tourism Australia. Of those, 48% booked online too. With targeted online marketing, even small operators can get a slice of this expanding cake without the level of investment required by traditional marketing techniques.
However, it’s important to create a site that actively works to attract visitors and bookings, not just an online brochure that looks great. There are plenty of web developers around who can assist with this, and many are very secretive about how they do it. But you can do it yourself with a little time investment and a self-managed site.
Our site gives lots of information on how to turn a static website into a marketing tool - browse the Online Marketing category of our blog for help.
Build packages
While you can’t take on the role of travel agent, you can offer full tour and accommodation packages that help to convert an enquiry into a booking, and attract wholesalers and ITOs.
Cosmos Centre & Observatory are currently developing a package to appeal to international wholesalers and inbound tour operators. By creating a more complete package around your tour or accommodation, you can encourage wholesalers and ITOs to take you more seriously and build you into a fuller tour itinerary.
Importantly, you can also attract international visitors to book directly. Sharyn Rogers of Seppeltsfied Vineyard Cottage has developed packages with other tour operators in her region, and finds that 20% of her bookings are for a full package - especially international visitors.
Bright Brewery is developing packages to incorporate beer tasting tours and accommodation specifically to encourage overseas visitors who are likely to be looking for a complete package, not just a half- or one-day tour.
Packages can be marketed effectively with a collaborative destination site (see below), enabling visitors to create their own package - an increasingly popular approach.
You can also offer easy links to sites that enable the visitor to plan all aspect of their holiday in one sitting. So for example, if they want to hire a car during their stay, a link to your recommended car hire company will help them.
Link-building
The challenge
Many of the operators said that building links with large online travel sites is perceived to be a vital marketing strategy. However, smaller operators can get lost in large regional or accommodation sites, and many directory sites are static, hard to navigate around, and carry a fee for inclusion.
Possible solutions
Link to other content-rich, relevant sites
Online marketing and PR presents many tools for building links, including blogging, online news distribution and contribution to social travel sites/forums. For example, Sharyn Rogers of Seppeltsfield Vineyard Cottage links to TripAdvisor and encourages her visitors to write up their experiences on the site. This kind of social networking can be more effective than a straight directory site, simply because online browsers can see what other travellers say about you - it adds credibility.
However, as a small operator, your efforts need to also focus on building links with other content-rich sites that are directly relevant to your niche, whether it be your destination or your style of travel services. Linking to other interesting content will encourage back-links to yours, which can be a much more effective way to help your target customers find you when they are searching online.
Do your own online research and see where it leads you. This will help you find the best sites for your destination or travel niche, and you can link to them with rich content, encouraging them to pay attention to you and reciprocate with content on their own site.
This doesn’t mean ruling out links on your regional tourism website or accommodation booking engines, both of which are useful online tools. Miriam Cooper of Mulberry Cottage B&B - also Tasmanian Entrepreneur of the Year for 2007 - recommends Channel Manager as an alternative for smaller accommodation providers to sites such as Wotif.
But increasingly, travellers are going direct to a range of travel sites that give them lots of useful information on specific experiences and destinations when they are researching their holidays. Set up reciprocal content with carefully chosen sites that attract those visitors, and you increase your chances of being found by the right people at the right time.
Create a collaborative destination site
Even better, a collaborative destination site can work wonders in bringing attention to all the businesses involved, as it is more likely to get attention from browsers researching a full holiday in your region.
We find that tourism operators are generally excellent at collaborating at a local level, presenting huge opportunities to collaborate online. Don’t be afraid to invite your competitors to contribute, because a richer site will draw more attention and more visitors to the region - benefiting everyone - and sharing the load can be a great help when you are already pushed for time.
Don’t leave destination marketing to your local visitors’ centre or RTO. Having your own site means you are in control of your marketing and can choose who to collaborate with. This Great Ocean Road site (created by us for Tim Kottek & Yvonne Hunter) is a great example of a small operator joining with other tour and accommodation providers to enrich a site that covers their region - a fantastic resource, carefully crafted using significant keywords, to attract overseas as well as local visitors.
Tracking Site Visitors
The challenge
Once you’ve created your website how do you know if it’s working efficiently? Bookings are one measure, but it’s possible that the site could be bringing in far more visitors and achieving a higher conversion rate.
Possible solutions
Tracking visitors with built-in analytics
It’s essential that your site has tracking tools built in, such as Google Analytics, to help you track the number of visitors to your site, how they find you, what they read when the arrive at your site, how long they stay and what they do when they are there.
Don’t be afraid to ask for help with this. The investment will be well worth it as you can continually tailor your content for a more efficient sales funnel. A self-managed site will enable you to do this cost-effectively.
Experimenting with pay-per-click and keyword groups
You can also experiment with pay-per-click campaigns and landing pages for different market segments and keyword groups to find out which bring the best results.
A Bright Brewery angel! Targeting beer lovers presents some interesting challengesFor example, Bright Brewery is targeting beer lovers in their 30s to 50s - not a tiny niche market, but an interesting one because there are so many ways to reach into this market. An online community reading content on brewing offers a great opportunity, and there will be some interesting affiliate marketing opportunities through both retail and tourism outlets.
So tracking the results of each strategy will be important for Bright Brewery, as they establish the best routes for marketing their tours and products.
Tracking your email marketing
This extends to your email marketing too. Setting up subscription lists for newsletters, special offers or your blog is an excellent way to market directly to prospects and customers.
Jason Miller of Rich & Lingering said his seasonal e-newsletter has been “a great way to broaden the net”. The newsletters can be forwarded, and a number of newsletter articles have been further used in blogs etc., which demonstrates the “viral” effect of email marketing.
Using a provider that enables you to easily track action taken by your recipients is vital in helping you to refine your messages. Here at PublicityShip, we recommend www.aweber.com
Positioning for a Personalised Service
The challenge
Most of the operators I talked to find that personalised service gives them the edge over larger businesses, and is an essential part of their marketing strategy. In my experience, this is true of most smaller operators. A great example is the comment by Jeff Rivendell of Huon Valley Apple & Heritage Museum that “Every tourist is treated ‘like gold’.” So how do you use this added value to position your business effectively in the marketplace?
Possible solution
The answer is in the content you put in front of your prospects when they are browsing and planning travel. Simply advertising your business as one that provides “personal attention” or a “tailored service” isn’t going to set you apart. These are terms that we read all the time when we research travel.
What you are really talking about is building trust in you as a specialist in your niche, and the best way to do this through authoritative, interesting content that carries a personal touch and conversational style - just as you would when talking directly to your customers when you meet them face to face. A self-managed, content-rich, blog-enabled site is designed to allow exactly this form of communication.
Wendy Deighton of A River Bed told me they recently had kangaroos on their front lawn - something that has huge appeal for overseas visitors. What a great piece of content for a blog or e-newsletter!
Jason Miller named “good content on your website” as the most important marketing strategy as it “shows you know your stuff”, provides value to the reader and attracts search engines.
“Our key online strategy is to drive traffic to our site“, he said. “This has been achieved by having high Google rankings for specific searches (e.g. ‘private/luxury wine tour south australia’), but also a broad range of links and other good relevant content (e.g. travel tips on other sites).”
What you’re really doing is treating every site visitor “like gold”. Don’t wait until they book - start right now.
My thanks to the following operators for their input
Sharyn Rogers, Seppeltsfield Vineyard Cottage
Tony & Julie Smith, Rawnsley Park Station
Miriam Cooper, Granny Rhodes & Mulberry Cottage
Jason Miller, Rich & Lingering
Wendy Deighton, A River Bed
Jane Morgan, Cosmos Centre & Observatory
Anne Grebert, Anangu Waai!
Phil Walcott, The Rainbow Connection
Elizabeth Fleetwood, Hobart Historic Tours
Fiona Reddaway, Bright Brewery
Jeff Rivendell, Huon Valley Apple & Heritage Museum
Neil Schults, Prime Mini Tours
These 12 businesses will all receive profiles on our new site devoted to online marketing for tourism to be launched shortly, which I hope will become a valuable resource for all small tourism operators. One of the first articles published on the site will tackle an essential question raised by Wendy Deighton that I’m sure every tour operator would love to have the answer to: How do you turn hits (visitors to your site) into bookings?