www.e-tourismfrontiers.com
www.e-tourismfrontiers.com

Tourism eMarketing

Strategy for Online Marketing

E-marketing is a part of the overall marketing mix, not a separate activity. The key benefits and functions of e-marketing include:


1) Delivery of massive amounts of information in a user-friendly way: cost-effectiveness in conveying information and products on sale directly, cheaply and at short notice to prime prospects
Brand-building, now made possible by the rapid spread of broadband  connections, allowing users to experience dramatic imagery and animation, as well as enhanced communication and interaction

2) Two-way interaction:


3) Joining promotional activity seamlessly with online purchasing.

4) Joining offline marketing activities with online so that traffic can be driven in both directions, web to brochures or telephone, telephone to web and so on.

5) The ability to engage with customers on a one-to-one basis, but also to use ‘one-to-many’  and one-to-a-selected-few activities.

6) The facility to build integrated partnerships with other businesses and bodies. Partnerships may work at many levels, as neighbours, or as non-competing sharers of the same kind of visitor. The joint work could be:


E-marketers need to be clear about the business’s overall marketing objectives. These may be:


Once the tasks and the priorities are clear, standard marketing disciplines can be applied:


Write a three-year marketing plan with work programmes for each year. Accept that even when you outsource your ICT requirements, the procurement and learning curve for e-marketing makes it difficult to work in one-year cycles. More continuity is needed for e-campaigning than for most offline campaigns. Revise the three-year plan annually. Set targets:

Targets may be very general, such as brand awareness in a key segment in a key market; or very specific, such as number of customers in the CRM database, rate of growth, key fields captured, number of interactions with them, cost per action, cost per acquisition (CPA), value of sale. Targets may focus on one channel you use- for example, number of e-newsletters sent/received/opened/clicked through.

It is usually most effective to operate campaigns jointly with partners- accommodation providers, attractions and event organisers should work together, (and with their tourist board) in commercial groups based on locality, theme and target segment. In any partnership arrangement, be sure to comply with the local data protection laws or codes of conduct in your own country and in the source market.

Whether the target audiences are end-customers, the media, or tour operators and retail agents in source markets, businesses require a wide set of e-marketing tools and techniques:

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