You don’t have to create a whole new website to get better at online marketing.

Live History is an example of a site that we have converted to our platform, giving the business owners, Judith and Chris Cornish, more opportunities to get their story out to their target audience.

The new site has the same look and feel of the old one, and the content has been transferred to the new structure. So why is this one better?

Because it has all the online marketing tools that are vital for positioning the business, bringing in traffic, encouraging conversation, increasing conversion and boosting bookings. For example:

• Keyword analysis told us to put Hobart into the domain name to attract more searchers wanting things to do when they visit the city, helping to put Live History on the Internet highway instead of the backstreets.
• Like all OM4Tourism sites, this one is designed to be highly visible to search engines, bringing more traffic to Judith and Chris’s door.
• A blog with email subscription enables Judith and Chris to post regular news and updates to keep visitors engaged and enrich their site content.
• Clearer testimonials and accreditation are important conversion tools - they tell site visitors that this is a good quality experience.
• Easy access to booking and travel information with a prominent contact form helps visitors to incorporate the tour into their holiday and encourages them to enquire and book online.

In addition, Judith and Chris now have access to Google Analytics to help them track where their site visitors are coming from and what terms they key into Google to get to the site. They can then incorporate these search terms into their content to attract even more attention.

Here’s Judith’s response to the site set-up process:

Thank you so much to both you and Glenn for getting us set up with this new site. I know that it won’t be long before I am blogging with the best of them and our testimonials are flowing in from satisfied clients!

As Live History develops, Judith and Chris will be blogging their news regularly and uploading more images and testimonials. As they develop new performances, they can add new pages to the site very easily - if you can manage Word, you can create a page in an OM4Tourism website. And as the content builds over time, so will the authority and PageRank of the site, turning it into an online magnet for Hobart visitors.

Using video improves online conversion rates.

At least, that is what is reported by eMarketer in Videos Help Increase Online Sales.

I like eMarketer’s fact-based approach to marketing. Here is an excerpt from their findings:

Research … has shown a 35% increase in the sales conversion rate between shoppers who took rich media sales tours, including video, and those who didn’t … shoppers who viewed the “product tours” spent over two-and-a-half minutes more viewing product information on each product.

Good reason to get your video content ready!

While you can upload video directly to your OM4Tourism site, I recommend you upload to YouTube, and then embed the YouTube video in your post or page (we have a YouTube plugin that lets you do this).

This way not only can people comment on your site and blog about your post, but they can also find your video directly through a YouTube search. So that is more exposure for your content.