It’s January 31st. The year is in full swing. Last chance to post something on what 2012 will bring! So, here goes.
It is certainly an interesting time for destination marketing and the national, regional and city Destination Marketing Organisation – the ‘DMO’. We have been talking about fundamental and revolutionary change for a while now. The hyper connected economy in which we live means our customers are now truly empowered and we are facing up to the fact that they are getting increasingly turned off by one-way communication. The current economic climate has brought with it austere times in many countries around the world and with that comes cost cutting and spending controls.
There are however plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the opportunities that 2012 brings for digital and destination marketing. Here are five.
There is a real opportunity, through better collaboration, to get what could be a whole country behind creating, sharing and distributing great content about your destination. Imagine that! The potential to leverage a hugely valuable content network to help you achieve your marketing objectives from awareness raising to conversion is indeed a huge one.
We have been saying that this year will be the year of mobile for at least 5 years. This year probably will be! And mobile is intrinsically linked to local search. If you have not done so already your destination marketing strategy needs to consider the opportunities mobile brings and how you develop marketing programmes and platforms to support that.
Integration really is important. Destinations really are thinking about multichannel now and we are even starting to define multichannel roles within the organisations we work in. Those organisations are starting to figure out how to deliver integrated marketing campaigns across multiple channels. Furthermore, words like engagement, participation and sharing are becoming part of every destination marketers vocabulary.
It is finally time to put that campaigns mentality you have been developing for the last 25 years to one side. Yes, your campaigns still have a place but you need to start putting relationships at the heart of those campaigns. An unending dialogue between your destination and the customers that are interested in talking to you.
Focus and prioritise. Probably the biggest challenge you face is time. A list that is far too long for you to have any chance of reaching the bottom of. At its simplest level developing strategy is about making sure the right things are at the top of the list. This presents an opportunity in itself – making the right decisions around where to invest, where to test and what deserves a rest.
Perhaps ironically some of the biggest challenges you are going to face are likely to exist closer to home.
Paradoxically, success in delivering digital is more to do with people than technology. The skills shortage and lack of experience that exists in other areas of digital applies equally to the DMO. Success very much depends on getting the right people in the right jobs – and creating an environment for them to thrive.
The destination’s relationship with the tourism industry is critical. Even smaller tourism businesses are empowered to act like never before and reach out directly to the customers they are targeting. How the destination enables and supports those tourism businesses as well as defines the DMO’s role across awareness, consideration, planning, booking and advocacy will dictate whether the destination creates an effective and collaborative relationship with the industry it is supporting.
And finally, just a little bit of tech. Developing a destination content ecosystem, taking advantage of the opportunity that mobile brings and undertaking useful evaluation and measurement in a truly multichannel environment demands more of your platforms and toolset than ever before. Just like the marketing programmes you are running, success is going to depend on effective integration of different systems and technologies in the pursuit of delivering a seamless customer experience.
We’re developing the web strategy for a new DMO (Destination Marketing Organisation) website. We’re currently looking at segmentation – building out our current approach to segmentation so we have something more granular that supports the development of specific customer personas. Once we’ve defined these groups and fleshed out a clear rationale for going after them we’ll present our approach to key stakeholders.
Getting collective and organisational buy-in around our approach to segmentation and targeting is critical before we move into defining a user experience for each group – mapping out appropriate user journeys and considering the resonant content to meet the needs of each one. Once we have clear picture of the desired user journeys associated with each customer group then, and only then, can we move onto defining detail around the information architecture, content strategy and functionality requirement …
As we’re working through this process I’m mindful of some of the bigger issues facing a DMO. Here’s a recently published presentation from the Manolis Psarros at AbouTourism that looks positively at some of the challenges. It’s well worth taking the time to watch the videos too.
Recently published in it’s third edition and available here we wrote the chapter ‘The digital challenge’. The book asks whether tourism places get the reputations they deserve and discusses brand concepts, challenges and topical cases. It tackles how place perceptions are formed, how cities, regions and countries can enhance their reputations as creative, competitive destinations and the link between competitive identity and strategic tourism development. It goes on to discuss how successful destination management organisations increasingly engage in conversations rather than campaigns and handle controversial questions of authenticity, brand narratives, leadership and authorship, story-telling, aesthetics, ethics and evaluation.
Authored by place brand consultants, destination marketers and academics including Simon Anholt, Philip Kotler, Wally Olins and other leading authorities our chapter ‘The digital challenge’ discusses how digital channels have grown up and how it represents a fundamental and revolutionary change. Customers are getting increasingly turned off by one way dialogue. Customers are now truly empowered and they are taking control of their relationship with brands – they are shaping those brands. We discuss tools, technologies and channels – what’s available and how are they currently being used in the area of travel and tourism. We outline the four key challenges facing destination branding within the context of digital – content, socialisation, integration and measurement. Finally we discuss what this means for destination, travel and tourism brands.
Why not go buy the book … it’s already picking up some good reviews …
Here are the presentation slides for today’s keynote at ENTER 2011 – the international conference on IT in travel and tourism. Big thanks to the keynote team – Jason Ryan from iCrossing and Tom Hall from Lonely Planet.
If branding online is at least in part reputation management destination brands face a number of key challenges – including content, socialisation, integration and measurement. We used to pay particular attention to things like tone of voice, style and design. In our new world we need to pay attention to things like our point of view and the way we behave as brands.
The emotional journey a customer undertakes with a destination brand involves a journey across awareness, engagement, emotional attachment and advocacy. From a marketing point of view the starting point used to be very much awareness. Now we can kick off that journey at the advocacy stage – harnessing the power of those that love us most and help drive awareness.
We drive awareness through seasonal planned activity. Our marketing campaigns. There is now a very real opportunity to amplify existing attention. Be it events big and small or that which you are gaining through social channels. That conversational content can be used to drive both awareness and engagement.
Test and learn is important. Figuring out how to do things – and more importantly how to do them well. Execution is as important as ever. Digital has empowered marketing departments the world over. The relationship with their agency teams is becoming more collaborative and one much less based around them and us. A relationship where everyone is learning by doing.
We still need a unifying idea. That big idea used to be the starting point. Integration used to be about delivering that idea across the full range of channels – traditional and digital. We need to develop models that support proper integration across owned, earned and bought media. One such model might be putting the big idea in the middle of everything and supporting it through targeted engagement initiatives which crowd source content, develop that content and the communities that exist around it. Through the creative use of paid media channels we achieve further amplification around those initiatives and we wrap it in our brand – or our point of view.
If a lot of what we do in the digital space is always on – including PR, social media, search and content development – one of the challenges is how we wrap that around our campaign activity and support it. So not only are we amplifying what we do where engagement is concerned we are using that engagement to support what we are doing across paid media channels. I talked about simple unifying approaches in the previous post Looking at trends. Is digital growing up? Developing a content strategy based on a content calendar might be one of those approaches.
We need to support such activity with a user centric approach to measurement. One that looks beyond traditional campaign metrics and web analytics by evaluating visitor engagement through measuring user behaviors both on-site and across the networks and communities our customers participate. One that focuses on Awareness (Do people know about us?), Actions (What are they doing when they find us?) and Advocacy (how do they feel about us?). A scorecard approach can be used to track an appropriate set of metrics and help deliver always on measurement to support always on marketing.
If you are thinking ‘holiday accommodation where?’ you are probably not alone. We’ve just launched a small site for one of our clients in Portugal to support the accommodation side of their business. Built on WordPress it utilises the same custom template and resources their larger site is built on. Not only was this a very cost effective way of doing it but it also means the site retains the look and feel of the main Alentejo Adventures site. We worked with the online reservations site www.booking.com to set up online availability and reservations and integrated this functionality on the new site. Portuguese version coming soon.
Fair enough. But where is the Alentejo again? The opening paragraph in the Lonely Planet guide goes something like this and in my opinion like most of the stuff you read in their guides is pretty bang on.
Alentejo is like Portuguese fado music – ultra traditional, intriguingly diverse and lingeringly sentimental. Covering one-third of the country, Portugal’s largest region is bewitching, with its dry, golden plains, rolling hillsides and lime-green vines, rugged coastline, tiny whitewashed villages and majestic medieval cities. Its people are fiercely proud, yet somewhat melancholic.
So what’s the problem? Bottom line is, certainly in the UK, a whole lot more people are searching for holidays in the Algarve rather than holidays in the Alentejo. The difference in the volume of searches is startling – for some keyphrases the Algarve equivalent drives over a thousand times more volume than the Alentejo equivalent. There lies the next challenge and one that you can help crack if you can get the national tourism organisation working with the regional tourism organisation and both working with the businesses on the ground. You can probably guess where we are going with this so watch this space!
On some level, when a company offers me a form or an e-mail address as a way to get in touch, I feel slightly snubbed. Why so bloody aloof? Why keep me at arm’s length? I’m an alright person. My needs are not wholly unreasonable. I just want a few answers to a few questions that I can’t find the answer to on the website.
I feel pretty strongly about ‘Contact Us’ pages. They should be welcoming and encouraging. After a first date with someone you really quite like you wouldn’t ask them to leave a message so that you can pick it up at your earliest convenience. Surely you’d make yourself as available as possible. In fact if you really liked them you’d be waiting by the phone, e-mail, text and Skype! After all, this is the critical phase of what could turn out to be lovely long term relationship. Every move matters.
Here comes the trumpet blowing.
On one of the sites we’ve recently been working on we’ve been improving that all important ‘Contact Us’ page. Built on Word Press, it’s not as big and elaborate as a lot of the sites we work on but it doesn’t mean you can’t do things well. We think the end result is human, welcoming and super encouraging to ‘get in touch’. Like most of our website development work it all starts with a sketch and a conversation with the client and then (and only then) do we move into wire framing, information architecture and the techie build. I do the doodles and Pete and his team work their magic on design and build.
The final solution.
Here’s what we decided;
Introduce the lovely staff. Include images and links to find out more about them.
Offer four different ways to get in touch – telephone, e-mail, Skype and a call back form.
Reassure that there is no question too silly and that the staff speak good English.
Be upfront about response turnaround times, call rates and office hours.
Wrap it all up in a bunch of useful content and information. Flickr, YouTube, downloadable brochures, weather and the location.
Offer the option to sign up to hear from them again and win a holiday.
We also worked with the client to set up appropriate telephony and route calls via Skype so the customer only pays for a national rate call. Here’s the end product. You can let us know what you think and what we’ve missed by leaving a comment below. Thoughts welcome!
Now more than ever before, in our new world of conversation culture, brands must have a distinct tone of voice to help project a unique point of view. So when it comes to freelance copywriting where do the poor blighters start?
Robert Hoberry author of the book I’m still reading – Brilliant Copywriting dismisses the usefulness of big brand development projects as they often produce long winded vision and values statements and lengthy descriptions of the target audience and segmentation.
“Radical simplicity and a healthy dose of honesty are the answer. In fact to write for a brand, a copy writer usually needs to understand just two components the big idea and the brand personality. Everything else is a distraction. A brand’s big idea can steer your general direction: a brand’s personality can help steer the tone”.
So now I’m reaching for another book on my shelf The big Idea by Robert Jones. It’s an oldie but goodie. I remember the pennies dropping when I read his summary of the 50 biggest ideas around at the time. He scored them each up to a maximum of five stars based on how big the idea, how radical, how social and how tangible they were. Below are some of the top scorers. It’s interesting that 10 years on these ideas are still firmly positioning these companies as ‘different’.
Ikea – Democratizing design
John Lewis – A better form of capitalism
Apple - Usability
Virgin – Iconoclasm (I looked that one up – breaks established conventions)
Tesco – We like our customers
Orange – Optimism
Gap – Democratic fashion
The Guardian – Outsider
Channel 4 – Curious
National Trust – places for people for ever
If a copywriter understands the big idea and can formulate a clear picture of the personality traits associated to the big idea then they’re ready to write, but not before answering another bunch of question related to expression, content and audience.
How would that person speak? What words and phrases would they use? (expression). What would they chose to say? (content). Who would they choose to say it to? (audience).
Whilst I agree that brand development projects often end up on the shelf - too wordy and descriptive to be useful. My experience is that the really useful output of any brand development work is the production of a simple set of guidelines. Hats off to the brand team at Visit Wales. Check out www.walesthebrand.com for a brilliant example of articulating an organisations’ ‘tone of voice’ and ‘point of view’ simply and more importantly usefully. I love inclusion of what not to say.
I suppose my point is that freelance copywriters as well as designers, directors, editors etc need help getting started. Marketing departments must answer two killer questions before looking to the creative industries to describe the solution. What is your big idea and what is your brand personality?
I’m a firm believer in ‘The tighter the brief the more creative the solution’.
Visit Wales launched their Proper Holidays campaign this week. In a previous blog post we suggested that it was important that destination brands have a clear point of view online. Wales certainly has a clear point of view about what holidays should and should not be about. Work on your sense of adventure instead of your tan lines.
Check out the two TV ads supporting the campaign and see if you agree.
The story continues online where you can find out more about the Darkes’ family holiday in Wales. It’s worth checking out the Visit Wales blog too. Watch this space – I am sure there is plenty more to come.
We work across a wide range of sectors – from Dingo Hire Melbourne to Water Resistant Jeans in terms of what people might be searching for on Google. Our smallest client is an activity holiday business is Portugal. Well, actually not so small – the sister business supplies vegetables to the likes of Marks and Spencer and turf to Real Madrid. I am not saying that the other business is any less interesting but travel and tourism is a great platform for user generated content. Have a look at this and if you like it forward it to those you follow and look up to. Produced and directed by a bunch of Canadians while on holiday with Alentejo Adventures. Brilliant.
Good timing too. At the same time we were discussing the Alentejo Brand and what the essence of that might be. We reckon the video encapsulates it perfectly – let the good times roll! Alentejo Adventures might not be our most profitable account and it might not be as big as some of the other things we work on but sometimes it’s more than enough to work with nice people doing nice stuff. What’s more the holidays are great too and I would recommend them to anybody.
ENTER is the International eTourism Conference, promoted by the International Federation of IT in Travel and Tourism. This year it is being held in Lugano, Switzerland in February with keynote speakers from, amongst others, Google, Expedia and Switzerland Tourism.
We have been invited to speak as part of a session looking at Online Branding for Destinations chaired by Robert Govers, author of Place Branding. The session also includes speakers from tripadvisor, Tourism Montreal and Tourism Queensland.
Our section will cover building stakeholder communities online and will discuss some of the things covered in our recently written book chapter ‘The Digital Challenge’ to be published later this year in the 3rd edition of Destination Branding – creating the unique destination proposition. Including;
Digital channels have grown up – it represents a fundamental and revolutionary change.
Customers are getting increasingly turned off by one way dialogue. Customers are truly empowered and taking control of their relationship with brands – they are shaping brands.
Tools, technologies and channels – what’s available and how they are currently being used in the area of travel and tourism.
The four key challenges facing destination branding within the context of digital – Content, Socialisation, Integration and Measurement.
What does this mean for destination, travel and tourism brands?
What does this mean for the Destination Marketing Organisation (DMO) website?
