Cost-effectiveness is a top priority for small operators when it comes to marketing.

If the experience of Elizabeth Fleetwood is anything to go by, online marketing seems to offer the best solution.

Elizabeth runs Hobart Historic Tours, and is relatively new to online marketing. The path that led her there is probably familiar to many small tourism businesses.

“I had made some efforts to join in Tourism Tasmania’s international marketing efforts,” she told me. “But I find it too expensive and cumbersome for my operation. For example, it would simply not be worth my while to go to ATE [the Australian Tourism Exchange], as the minimum cost would be about $10,000.”

Another avenue to reach international visitors is through the magazines that go into hotels that attract overseas visitors. But again, advertising in these publications is prohibitively expensive for a small operation like Elizabeth’s.

“I think the future is more likely to be on the web,” she concluded. “And I am more likely to look at marketing opportunities in that medium.”

So far, Elizabeth has concentrated on links, including Discover Tasmania, which brings most of her online enquiries, and the Tasmanian Travel & Information Centre, with brochures in the Centre’s physical office in Hobart, which still brings the majority of her bookings, thanks to a great staff who know her product well.

She has recently signed up with BookTasmania, an interface that places her product on travel distribution sites at her discretion on a commission-only basis, while allowing a booking system directly linked to her own site.

Linking out to other relevant sites to encourage back links is a good strategy for achieving higher search ranking, and you can read more about how Elizabeth is doing this in my blog post.

With the percentage of international visitors booking her tours now at 40%, Elizabeth’s attention is focusing on the quality of her product and marketing online. Getting these two things right will take her a long way towards building her business cost-effectively.

Here’s a tourism business that’s poised for success with an international market.

A River Bed is a self-contained retreat at Airey’s Inlet on the Great Ocean Road.

Already doing well domestically, Wendy Deighton is looking at ways to get the message out to potential visitors from overseas.

Given that the Great Ocean Road is a highly popular destination, we believe Wendy’s best bet is to have a presence on dynamic destination-focused sites, and this reflects her own plans to forge strong online links.

She is already listed on OzStayz, GreatOceanRoadHolidays.com.au and we have just put her in touch with Tim Kottek and Yvonne Hunter at GreatOceanRoad-Torquay.com.au.

These sites will certainly help to bring her attention from an overseas audience.

She is also keenly aware of the need for thorough keyword research to attract more visitors, and recognises something that we have also recently discovered - ‘kangaroo’ is one of the most highly searched wildlife terms!

Kangaroos have been seen on the front lawn and often on the other side of the river which guests can view from the studio - something that will definitely help her to get the attention of overseas visitors wanting a truly Australian experience.

Wendy also points to the difficulty some small operators face when clients want them to arrange every aspect of their trip for them.

Tourism operators aren’t travel agents, and you don’t want to spend time organising a complete holiday when you only benefit from one small part of the package.

Creative packaging with other tour operators in the same region can give overseas visitors exactly what they’re looking for though. Then all they have to do is book transport - very easy to do online.

In addition, each operator involved in the package promotes the whole deal, which brings more attention to you.

Beyond this, linking into the best destination sites and relevant online travel agencies means even if you get a direct enquiry from a high-maintenance client who wants more than you are able to offer, you can refer them to your affiliate site.

By funnelling destination searches into an effective site with recommended tours and accommodation neatly packaged - we believe operators such as Tim, Yvonne and Wendy could be onto a winner.

The third in my series of posts profiling small tourism operators looks at Bright Brewery in Victoria’s High Country.

The brewery uses fresh mountain water, local ingredients and craft brewing techniques to produce a range of beers. As well as being open every day for drinks and meals, and offering tasting tours, the iconic experience is the Brewer for a Day event.

While their key target markets are within Australia, Bright Brewery’s Fiona Reddaway believes this energetic experience is substantial enough to attract overseas visitors in its own right.

“We’re talking with Tourism Victoria about the most suitable markets, and the ways to reach these markets,” she told me.

One vital strategy has been to create packages and full experiences. For example, the Brewery has been working with other microbreweries and local tourism authorities in North East Victoria to create Victoria’s High Country Beer Trail - an initiative that packages the diverse beer experiences of this cluster of microbreweries set in stunning locations.

Bright Brewery’s local packages include accommodation and have been publicised in the print media through North East Victoria Tourism Inc. (NEVTi), which has promoted Brewer for a Day at Bright Brewery as one of the top five High Country experiences.

“We are working with organisations like NEVTi to promote the Brewery Trail as well as Brewer for a Day to international visitors, and to tap into Tourism Victoria programs currently targeting the international market,” said Fiona.

The overseas market for Bright Brewery is interesting - committed beer lovers from Europe, Japan and New Zealand who are predominantly male and in their 30s-50s.

Publicity has helped get the word out and is highly valued by the team, with a segment on Getaway that was aired around the world driving more traffic to the Bright Brewery website. The bulk of bookings for the Brewer for a Day experience have come through email marketing to the Brew Crew subscribers, with some arriving via online search.

The Bright Brewery website works well - it’s easy to see what experiences are available, how to book them, and how to subscribe to the Brew Crew newsletter.

So the core overseas marketing strategies chosen by Bright Brewery are:

• Work with regional and state tourism organisations to glean advice and tap into promotional programs.
• Work collaboratively with other operators to create full experiences and packages.
• Pursue publicity through print and broadcast media.
• Market online to an opt-in email list and funnel site visitors into bookings.

The world of the web is a bewildering place for a small tourism operator. There are so many huge travel sites out there that it’s easy to feel like a very small fly caught in a vast web waiting to be eaten alive by the search engine spiders.

How on earth do you get attention amongst all the noise and flash?

First, have faith in the search engines.
Second, be authentic.
Third, be brave.

Search engine spiders don’t look for glossy, flashy websites. They don’t care how big your business is. They look for rich, relevant content. How great is that? This means you being authentic - talking online about your expertise, the experiences offered by you and your destination, and the people involved.

Make sure you optimise your site too, which simply means making it easy for the spiders to read the content. If you’re nervous about how to do it, this article demystifies the process.

Another important factor is inbound links. If there are other authoritative, high-ranking sites pointing to you, Google will take this to mean that you must know what you’re talking about.

Our travel sites zoomed straight to a 4/10 PageRank after just a few months of going live simply by paying attention to these factors: content, SEO and links.

What’s great about search engines is that they’re constantly onto those who try to fake it. So if a site tries to buy or sell links, they get penalised. Inbound links need to be genuine links prompted by excellent content on your site. And an inbound link is worth a lot more than a reciprocal link (i.e. you link to me and I’ll link to you).

Here are two of the best ways to get inbound links:
1. Have useful, relevant content on your site AND use your blog to link to useful content on other sites. Not only does this add value for your readers, but you’ll attract the attention of those other sites, and if they like what they see, they’ll add value for their readers by linking to you.
2. This is where being brave comes in - write articles about the travel experiences you offer and post them on article syndication sites, such as ezinearticles.com. Getting an article published on a site like this will automatically get you up to 3 inbound links from a high-ranking (6/10) authoritative site.

So the secret to getting search ranking comes down to:
Having faith that Google will rank you for the right reasons without bias (not forgetting SEO).
Being authentic in your content and your intentions when you manage links.
And being brave enough to publish your content beyond your own site.

Internet and e-business research analysts, eMarketer, recently reported a drop in online travel customers. At first glance, I was a bit concerned - given that our business depends on travellers researching and booking online.

But when eMarketer senior analyst, Jeffrey Grau, applied his nouse to the findings - which came from the Internet-savvy US, he discovered that it’s the large online distributors and agencies who are seeing the drop. This fits exactly with the trends we are both observing and predicting.

“Online travel distributors’ booking tools were made for mass consumption of uniform goods,” Grau said. “They have yet to switch to to an era of individual consumption of unique goods.”

Quoted in the latest eMarketer newsletter, Grau said that the personalised service offered by traditional travel agencies had revived their popularity, posing a real challenge for large online distributors.

Significantly, Grau said that online travel distributors “must become more flexible by allowing travellers to put together travel packages that fit their unique needs.”

Here’s the point

The point is that while the Internet has enabled mass distribution of information, we are rapidly becoming - and regarding ourselves as - a global collection of very individual people, able now to fulfil our unique and specific needs through searching for exactly what we want - online.

If travel distributors respond with a faceless, mass marketing approach to travel, then online browsers will simply switch off.

And here’s the opportunity

The opportunity for smaller, niche operators is to offer exactly what travellers - or the best travel agents - are looking for: authoritative collections of information around a niche area, with easy links to enable a full tailored holiday to be researched and booked online.

Travel agents know this because it’s only the niche agencies with specialist knowledge and experience that are surviving. Those who do this well online will not only survive but thrive.

The new online travel distributors are also smaller and focused around a niche travel experience or location.

Travellers now make travel decisions based on where they want to go and the experiences they want to have. Get together with industry affiliates (partners) to market online, and you have a powerful marketing too.

This is backed up by tourism strategist and consultant, Anna Pollock of Desticorp. She describes these new online distributors as ‘brokers’, who will be ‘element-focused’ (e.g. accommodation), ‘destination-focused’ or ‘activity-focused’.

So if you’re looking at putting together a site that draws together operators in your destination or travel niche, you’re on exactly the right track. Think about what your visitors are looking for, and help them find it.

The recent Tourism Directions & Distribution Conference in Sydney brought to light some important changes taking place in the tourism industry, which put you as a small tourism operator in much bigger shoes.

Giving the keynote address was Anna Pollock of Desticorp, whose views caught my attention and led me to read the white papers published on her site.

In describing the rapidly disintegrating travel distribution model of the 20th century, she lists three groups of providers:

1. Large global and national distributors, including wholesalers, ITOs, airlines and hotel chains
2. Systems providers and intermediaries, such as Galileo and Sabre, which include only the larger corporate suppliers in their databases, and
3. “The rest! Hundreds of thousands of small to medium-sized enterprises [SMEs] located throughout the globe that offer both direct travel-related services (accommodation, dining, transport, recreation and entertainment) and ancillary services (insurance, software, content, finance, weather, news, maps etc).”

I put the last point in quotes because these are Anna’s words, and it’s this large group of providers who are putting together the new model of distribution, which functions primarily online.

Anna goes on to say that this group is “waiting and ready for affordable, flexible, practical solutions that can connect them to a global market of demanding, capricious and valuable consumers hungry for the new, the unusual, the unique and boutique” (my emphasis).

If you sat up and said to yourself - that’s me - you’d be right. Small tourism enterprises have a huge amount to gain from the new distribution model that’s emerging across the world.

Says Anna: “There’s a revolution brewing that threatens to crumble the edifices of the corporate world.” (Don’t we all love to hear that?)

She’s talking about the same revolution described by Chris Anderson in “The Long Tail”. Chris explains that the ability you now have as a niche business to sell directly to prospects across the globe via the Internet means you can siphon off your corner of the market from larger businesses without depending on centralised distribution channels.

The problem for wholesalers translating a top-down model onto the Internet is that large, faceless sites, which are little more than a directory-cum-booking-engine, can’t interact, respond quickly to change or engage users with their personality and depth.

The threat to wholesalers comes from you - and others like you - the more focused sites and distribution systems (the brokers described by Anna Pollock), which are able to:

• beat the generic sites in the search rankings through authoritative content in a niche area,
• build trust and engage users through strategic blogging,
• maintain a personal conversation through targeted email marketing, and
• provide a fuller service through partnership with industry affiliates.