“traffic to travel websites increased more than 30% year over year in 2010, compared to just 3% for all Internet traffic.”

Clearly the big travel sites are growing strongly. But the growth is there for small operators too.

Traffic to Australian Online Travel Websites Up 30% in 2010

Once you’ve signed up, you get to have a content widget like this on your website.

Tourism Australia Content Widget

Goin' Off Safaris Blog

Lunch’s blog is a great read – his posts are personal and conversational, and create a vivid impression of the experiences on offer.

Recently Lunch has been talking about some shark cage diving tours with Rodney Fox, and also some tours up to Lake Eyre. Here are three of his most recent posts that give you a feel for how he goes about it:

• July Special: 3 Day Half Priced Great White Shark Cage diving
• Great white shark cage diving heats up!
• Goyders Lagoon turns lush green

Not only do blog posts let you tell the story of your own tours or accommodation, they help your profile with the search engines as well. Sites with active blogs are indexed more frequently by Google. And each new blog post is a new page in your website – websites with more pages have the chance to be found for more searches. And blog posts are a good way to help build links to your website as well.

So if you’ve been wondering about how to improve your search engine optimisation, get on to your blog and start getting your story out there.

Using a blog to promote your tourism business

eMarketer 2008: 61% of Active Adult Internet Worldwide Researchers have researched holidays/destinations

They have recently released some research showing what Internet users worldwide ages 16 to 54 research online.

Holidays/destinations are right there at the top, with travel close behind.

This is a very good reasons for tourism operators to have a website with good search engine visibility. And also to have a good understanding of what keywords people use to search for their destination or experience.

61.9% research holidays/destinations online

Billabong

Billabong Australia Tourism Campaign

The story opens in a busy city in the US, where a young woman is working way too hard and has just been told by her partner they need a break. Out of touch with her life, she learns she ‘sometimes we have to get lost to find our selves – sometimes, we gotta go walkabout’. Cut to a scene swimming in the Mitchell Falls in the Kimberley region of Australia, and panoramic images of the Mitchell Plateau.

This is a masterful piece of work. Watch it a few times and it gets even better. I can’t think of an ad that matches it.

Boabs

Boabs Australia Tourism Campaign

We start in Japan this time, night time, big city lights. A man is working too hard, disconnected from his partner. Our aboriginal guide reaches out to him ‘sometimes we have to get lost to find our selves – sometimes, we gotta go walkabout’. Cut to a scene where he is dancing on a table with his partner, under a Boab tree with the Kimberley’s Cockburn Ranges in the background.

Personally, Boab doesn’t engage as strongly as Billabong. We don’t get to know as much about the main character and what he is feeling.

Tourism Australia has put out some big campaigns before. This one is very different. Will a personal story work better than a more traditional glossy travel ad? Plenty of time to find out, the ads will run for almost a year.

The Baz Luhrmann Walkabout Ads for the Tourism Australia Campaign

There is a lot of debate about these here in Australia: are they too risky? Well, time will tell, but I think they are sheer genius when combined with Nicole Kidman’s waterfalls.

To understand the tie in, first have a look at the new US ad from Tourism Australia (made by Baz Luhrmann).

Now notice the beautifully timed marketing pitch from Nicole Kidman (from Women’s Weekly):

“I never thought that I would get pregnant and give birth to a child, but it happened on this movie. Seven babies were conceived out of this film and only one was a boy. There is something up there in the Kununurra water because we all went swimming in the waterfalls, so we can call it the fertility waters now.”

Sheer genius. Baz Luhrmann’s evocative imagery, Nicole’s magic, and a Tourism Australia campaign featuring the Kimberley, Northern Australia.

Like all marketing and advertising, we won’t get to know how good it really is until after it runs – it’ll be very easy to be an expert after the results are in.

I think aiming the ads at women, and making them so emotionally engaging, is a very smart move. People love pretty pictures, but Baz Luhrmann is telling a much deeper story here, and maybe that will persuade women to pack their bags and visit Australia.

If you haven’t seen the trailer for Australia yet, here it is:

Beautiful.

Diggers Rest Station

I am sure Roderick and Alida will be getting a lot more people out to the station to experience the Kimberley for themselves.

Thanks to Baz Luhrmann, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman.

Nicole Kidman: Outback Waterfalls and Marketing Australia

What are your customers going to find interesting? A great place to start is to review what they are already asking about.

Check Your Email Enquiries

Have a look through your recent email enquiries. (These are recorded on your site) You may find that if you put the question and your answer together your blog is 90% written. For example, “We had an enquiry the other day about …. ”

Remember Visitor Questions

It is so useful to keep a notebook handy for blog ideas. Particularly make note of questions your visitors ask when they are with you. Their questions are rich material for a blog. For example, someone wants to break their trip north by camping out overnight. You can post about camping being permitted in the National Park three hours drive away, and that you can arrange a permit by contacting Dave the ranger ….

List What Is In Season

What is happening at this time of the year in your region? Visitors are often interested in what is happening in nature each season. What produce is available, what is happening with the weather, what plants are flowering?

List Animals That Can Be Seen

Visitors are keen on animal life. Find out about the species of animals, birds and fish that are native to your region and do a blog on each group. Eg. How To Identify Local Frogs By Their Call

Read The Local Paper

You can profile a local sporting or cultural event – especially if it is something unique to your area. Give visitors advance notice of the agricultural show, festivals, travelling exhibitions, outdoor performances, craft markets etc.

Use Local History

Summarising the history of your region can make for an interesting post. For example, Five Things You Didn’t Know About the Great Ocean Road. Find out the name of indigeous people who lived or continue to live in the area. Did they have stories about the geography of the area?

Blogging does get easier. What I notice is that after a while you’ll find good blog topics jump out at you. Remember to keep a little note book handy to record your ideas for later use. Happy blogging!

Six Easy Travel Posts

The website has been put together entirely by the festival organisers. It is clearly laid out, and it is easy to find out who you can see, where you will stay and how to book.

There is already a lot of interaction going on – the site makes use of page comments as well as post comments, which means a lot of the ‘frequently asked questions’ don’t need a separate page, they are out in clear view.

It will be interesting to see the site develop in the lead up to – and during – the festival.

Launching Nanga Music Festival 2008

This set me thinking about what takes people that extra step from reading your stories to responding to your stories by commenting or making contact with you.

My colleague felt that trust might be an issue. As soon as someone clicks, responds, signs up, asks a question, they reckon you’re going to zoom in on them with the hard sell.

Another colleague recently mentioned the issue of confidentiality – many in his profession don’t want to lay themselves open to others and are reluctant to ‘trust’ the web medium, such as blog comments and forum posts.

We already know that building trust is an essential objective for all small businesses, and that this can be done by blogging your story to the world, by being authentically you and conveying your experience, expertise, track record and authority.

Then I came across this Smart Company blog post: Sell Like a Woman. If you’re male, don’t let the post title put you off! There’s an interesting point made here.

You can tell your story in two essentially different ways, and getting your head around this is important if you are going to market your tourism business effectively.

When you tell me a story, it can be all about you … or all about me. Yes, of course all your posts are going to be about you in some way – but the point is to look at what you are essentially conveying.

Are you saying to your readers “We do this” or “We offer that” or “We are great because”, or are you looking at your business from their point of view and enabling them to engage with you from their starting point? Are you essentially saying “You can do this” or “You can have this experience” or even “Look at these guys – they did it and so can you”?

For example, have a look at this blog post: Planning Your Great Ocean Road Drive Holiday.

Yvonne Hunter is a great blogger who understands how to give people what they want in order to build trust. The effect is to get you thinking, this looks interesting, I’d like to do that, I CAN do that. The post is about the reader, not about Yvonne, although it is based on her experience and she includes a link to the most relevant page on the website.

You will rarely, if ever, find a blog post by Yvonne that talks about her accommodation and how great it is. And yet, as her partner, Tim Kottek, told me recently:

“The site is now getting about 1000 visitors per month. The blog as well as the authority pages have helped the home page to a Google Ranking of 4 out of 10, with internal pages ranking at 2 and 3 out of 10. Three of the 10 most viewed pages are from the blog. And it is those popular blog pages that have lead to e-mail requests.”

So it is possible to build trust through your site content, which leads to enquiries, especially by blogging.

For some businesses, this takes longer than for others – and I suspect this is the case with my colleague – but persistence invariably pays off. In tourism, our experience is that it doesn’t take long at all to see a significant improvement in traffic and enquiries – but only if you are blogging effectively, keeping site content up to date, and giving people plenty of opportunities to click and contact you.

Getting website traffic but no enquiries?

Wineries are in a class of their own when it comes to marketing. They’re an attraction and a store, and often a restaurant and accommodation provider too.

VA Clare Valley’s focus is on selling produce, and the site has two objectives:

1. to attract potential visitors to South Australia’s Clare Valley wine region and encourage them to visit the cellar door, and
2. to enable produce to be sold online.

Our keyword analysis told us the words and phrases potential visitors and customers are keying in, and this guided us in structuring the site content.

Searchers are likely to find the site through destination searches on Clare Valley, and product-related searches. Google Analytics will enable VA Clare Valley to monitor this and adapt their content accordingly.

Many of the destination visitors are likely to be self-drivers, so the Getting Here section, with clear maps, is vital for conversion.

The Cellar Door & Shop enables VA Clare Valley to take orders online using PayPal, which takes a commission on sales of between 3.5 and 4%.

This article explains the benefits of using PayPal to sell online, and how to set this up yourself.

Above all, the site has engaging content likely to appeal to its prospective audience and convert them into paying customers – whether online or face-to-face.

Marketing a boutique wine business