One might assume that destination marketing in South Africa is pretty straight forward – slap up a few good visuals on your site and you’re done, right?
“Well, not quite,” says Flow CEO Tara Turkington.
Having successfully managed and grown a number of South Africa’s premier tourism organisations (and Flow clients) – Cape Town Tourism, Maropeng, Origins Centre, Table Mountain Aerial Cableway, Two Oceans Aquarium, South African Tourism, Open Africa and Gauteng Tourism Authority – Tara believes a number of important elements collectively contribute to the effective promotion of a destination, whether it be mampoer tasting in Marico or shell collecting in Stilbaai.
Adopting the solar system analogy used by Tara in a recent column on the topic, assume that the centre of your destination marketing universe – the sun – is represented by your website. Surrounding the sun in this universe are satellite planets the e-newsletter, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.
Much like the sun does, the dynamic blog content on your website gives life to your satellite planets, so it’s critical that content is of a consistently high standard, has wide appeal and is refreshed daily. Ultimately, the way in which you leverage that content will determine how efficiently your marketing works.
Four of your planets should be instantly recognisable as social networking tools, while the fifth, the e-newsletter, plays a supportive role.
“A Facebook fan page can become a powerful planet with its own influential citizens, who can be mobilised and encouraged to consume – and contribute further to – content on your website or blog,” explains Tara.
“Facebook is great to organise events, to conduct quick polls, and to encourage people to participate in three key phases of their journey to their destination – the dream, plan and remember phases.”
A perfect example of Facebook fans in action is that of Flow client Table Mountain Aerial Cableway, for whom we created the votefortablemountain.com website, including a Facebook fan page and Flickr gallery.
The votefortablemountain.com website received 14 874 unique visits on the day of the announcement and 69 424 visits were recorded during the final week of the campaign. Facebook fans doubled from 9 000 to 18 236 in under a week.
Moving on to planet Twitter, a highly technical celestial body responsible for transmitting signals into the Twittersphere.
As soon as you’ve posted to your site, share it with the world by tweeting it. Ensure that you include functionality on your blog for others to tweet and “like” your posts too. Having others promote your post adds more credibility than doing it yourself.
As its name indicates, planet Flickr has everything to do with flickering, in this case the flicker of the camera flash. Its role is to act as a repository for sharing images – 4 billion to date!
By creating a Flickr group on your site, you’ll not only generate interest in your destination, but will receive a constant source of quality visual content. Stimulate interaction between Flickr group members by running competitions and throwing out issues for debate.
Second only to Google, planet YouTube is a massive search engine dedicated to hosting video clips. By including a live recording on your blog, you’re virtually guaranteed a much higher hit rate, and if the content is attention-grabbing, it might even go viral.
The final planet in your mini solar system is e-newsletters, an effective branding tool that offers a smorgasbord of interesting snippets designed to motivate readers to click through to the full version on your site. Timing is important in e-newsletter delivery, with midweek days at 06h00 generating the best response as workers open their in-boxes.
We’ve established that the efficiency of this little universe is hugely dependent on the consistently high standard of blog content. In the same Bizcommunity column, Tara comprehensively covers how this can be achieved. It’s well worth studying and applying if you’re serious about marketing your destination.