Northumberland County, by Eileen Lum, Tourism Manager
How do you continue to market a
tourism destination with the same resources year after year and still stay
competitive?
As a tourism destination management
organization for municipal government, we are tasked with promoting all our
tourism attractions and experiences in Northumberland County. With a
strategic plan on hand, we have used the traditional resources available to us:
online marketing, print collateral, advertising, etc… Although our efforts were
successful, we were envious of larger corporations whose budgets could afford a
sexier campaign that would engage their target markets. If only we had
those resources, if only we could really talk to our audience too…..Then we
discovered social media.
Three years ago, Facebook was
introduced to us by a colleague. Its potential to help businesses “talk”
to their clients appealed to us. We decided to create a Northumberland
Tourism Facebook Fan page. Once we broadcasted its existence, we started
to gain fans and then suddenly communities of individuals were posting and
sharing information about Northumberland to their Facebook friends. This
was incredible because now we could get a pulse of what our viewers thought and
they became our tourism voice or ambassadors. We were starting to build
relationships with readers, and this was converting them to actual
visitors. It just snowballed. Facebook is now the top referrers to
our tourism website.
This encouraged us to utilize another
social media platform. With many staff having access to smartphones or
blackberries, Sofie Andreou showed us how to integrate Twitter into our social
media plan. Staff are now tweeting/communicating new tourism events
or experiences to individuals who followed them on twitter. If a new bed
and breakfast has an open house, we are able to tweet this information to those
who are interested. We currently have travel media following our staff
because they too want an in on what’s new. As a result we are receiving
lots of earned media coverage and not to mention broaden our network of
potential visitors to Northumberland.
As we are reaping the benefits of
social media, we wanted to share these marketing tools with our tourism
operators so they can increase their business. We ask Sofie if she could
help us develop a training module that would engage our businesses to use
Foursquare. Foursquare
is a mobile-friendly, rewards-based network that allows tourists or locals to
explore neighborhoods by checking into locations, leaving tips for others then
rewarding them for doing so whether it be by special offer, discounts or
special services.
It’s an automated loyalty program and a simple way for our tourism
businesses to monitor their customers’ comments. We decided it was an
excellent project for return-on-investment results: we have the consumer
already situated in Northumberland and by virtue of them checking into
Foursquare and being influenced by other customer comments, we can more readily
push their commitment to purchase. Our hope is to get at our social media
savvy businesses to participate in this project over the next few months in
summer and we’ll monitor their success.
What’s next? We don’t know. We do know that social media
has allowed an organization such as ours market as effectively as larger
corporations if you develop a social media strategy. We can’t wait to see
what the next social media marketing tool is. Stay tuned.
Eileen Lum, Tourism Manager
Northumberland
County
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