Price and SEO distract from marketing travel brand

Web content is a hot topic for the online travel marketing category. Why? Because so few web marketers are actually leveraging its capabilities to strengthen their brands. In the quest for top rankings in search engine results and travel broker sites, many destinations, resorts and attractions have forgotten the basics of branding and fallen prey to two distracting and potentially destructive patterns in web messaging: ‘the deal’ and ‘the lowest common denominator.’

Don’t sell your brand short with excessive discounting

Today, broker sites are dominating travel search. Aggregators such as Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz and Kayak are among the most visited sites for travel planning. While these sites are very effective at compiling information from wide ranging sources, they tend to focus on price as the distinction between travel options.

Price is a compelling decision factor, but remember that dollar signs are never sexy. Travel broker sites have no capacity to tell brand stories and can never compete with your own site for creating brand allure, drama and romance. Let the travel aggregators fill your vacancies, but make YOUR web site the place that tells your story. After all, a solid brand position can make your destination seem like a value at twice the price.

Don’t try to be everything to everybody

Another content trap that destination marketers fall into is the abuse of search engine optimization practices. Developing content that can fool search engines into high rankings for almost any travel-related search phrase can take your brand to a lowest-common-denominator status. It’s true that a laundry list of phrases on the home page can help your site rank for search phrases such as bed & breakfast, shuffleboard and monster trucks, but what portion of your site visitors would be attracted to such a combination?

Better to use your content to describe what you do best. Emphasize the aspects of your destination that differentiate it from the rest of your category. If you’re going to provide content on diverse offerings, organize it clearly and give it room. Don’t leave out the monster trucks; just keep them in their place (and probably not on the home page).

Use web content wisely and reap the rewards

Don’t let price and search engine tricks distract you from a sound, consistent web content strategy. A reliance on discounts can diminish the perceived value and equity of your brand, so use your markdown pen sparingly. And remember that each page of your site can be a search-term landing page; you’ll actually rank higher for providing deeper content on fewer topics than by name dropping hundreds of search terms with no support.

Maintaining a disciplined approach to your web content will pay off in the long run – creating a valuable site for visitors and a strong travel brand for you.

Updates on recent tourism and event campaign posts

Here’s a quick follow-up on two recent tourism marketing campaigns that were featured in the Points of Interest blog.

Groundhog Day 2010 in review

Tuesday was Groundhog Day, and the town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania enjoyed a big turn out for their 124th annual celebration. I watched live, streaming video of the festivities on the Official Website of The Punxsutawney Groundhog Club. Punxsy Phil, the Groundhog, was awakened to a sunny morning, and after seeing his shadow, proclaimed there will be six more weeks of winter.

My earlier excitement about the prospects of new “Groundhog vs. Shadow” videos for the 2010 tourism marketing campaign faded behind increasing clouds, however, as only one re-edited video was posted to the PAGroundhog YouTube channel this year. Oh well, only 52 more weeks til next Groundhog Day.

Countdown to Vancouver 2010

As the Winter Olympics draw near, I wanted to address a couple of points made in my last post about the Games.

First, it appears I may have jumped the starting gate when I reported a problem with the Vancouver 2010 Olympics website. At the time, the U.S. Athlete information for Alpine Skiing was missing from the site, but skiers were still competing for spots on the U.S. Olympic team, so it may have been premature to expect a final list of athletes then. My bad.

Second, at last check (2/3) the Vancouver 2010 Olympics Facebook page was up to 354,693 fans.... Two weeks ago, when the number of fans was 304,043, I predicted the page would reach one million fans, but sign-up seems to have slowed. We’ll see how this use plays out – as a social media success story or a Facebook flash in the pan.

And finally, my Olympic highlight this week was an amazing trailer that I saw on YouTube today, promoting the BBC's coverage of the Vancouver Olympics.

This animated masterpiece captures the excitement of the Games, the rugged beauty of the Pacific Northwest and elements of the local Inuit culture in an engaging story of victory against all odds. Check it out.

We asked 200 travel and leisure executives on LinkedIn what they felt was their biggest destination marketing challenge for 2010. Not surprisingly, “Learning how to do more with less” is the number one challenge with nearly half of all respondents. After all, what company in the travel and tourism space has enough money and resources these days? The economy and its effects on both consumer and business travel have put a major damper on the budgets of many. 

What was eye-opening in the results? The number of tourism pros still challenged with “Creating an emotional connection” with customers and prospects. Nearly a quarter of respondents feel this is their biggest challenge. Concerns with the commodification of the industry is evident here, as OTAs and discounting take their toll. The concepts of branding and connecting with customers have become a luxury for all but the strongest of players. This is supported by the 10% of respondents who chose “Figuring out what sets us apart.”

Could the number of respondents that chose “Dealing with so many new options” point to the confusion brought on by the rise of social media? In times of economic upheaval its a common reaction to abandon fundamentals and get distracted by anything that could offer promise. 

It will be interesting to see if this number grows or shrinks as we begin to look forward to more economic stability in 2010. What do you think?

Recently I was doing some research on how people make decisions and how they may be influenced. I stumbled across some fascinating data. Small cues can have a large impact on the way people think. Add a faint smell of cleaning fluid into the air, and people tidy up more thoroughly. Put a briefcase on the table during a meeting and people become more competitive. Put live green plants in a room you plan on having a creative session in and you’ll get 15% more creativity from the men and more flexible solutions to problems from the women.

Small but powerful

If you are in food and beverage, have a waiter or waitress offer a candy treat when presenting the bill to each customer in the group and then as he/she is leaving stop as though forgetting, reach in their pocket and quickly give everyone another piece of candy. This small strategy in the study increased their tip amount by a staggering 23%. Who would not want that?

One of the very basic tenants we have at our office is to tell many stories in many ways. They don’t have to be big or complicated, But they do need to be interesting and fun. It’s these small stories that can create the tipping point in the decision equation about your destination.