One of the great founding narratives of business is that of the millionaire or billionaire who didn’t do any research because they had a great vision. The story is often supported by the Henry Ford quote that if he had asked the customer what they wanted they would have said faster horses. In this article, we will discuss why and how should businesses conduct tourism research. If anything in our ‘post-truth’ world that story has got even stronger: for some people evidence no longer matters. And it is true, that there are occasionally … [Read more...]
5 Step Travel & Tourism Marketing System
Many of us are suffering from information and technology overwhelm when it comes to tourism marketing. Some of us just cannot afford to commission a search engine optimization company to help out in the immediate term. Believe it or not, achieving a robust online presence yourself and within your own team is possible without spending a cent with these 5-step travel & tourism marketing systems. As travel researchers and marketers, we have been experimenting with various methodologies over the last few years since Google switched its … [Read more...]
Mastering Tourism Marketing
We are as an industry in truly exciting times where we have online marketing opportunities, that will NEVER arise again. Pretty serious stuff. This is all due to the infancy of semantic search - the search engine algorithms that determine what is presented to a traveller why they are searching for holiday ideas. It is a time where you have the opportunity to really strengthen your business or destination brand in a way that you will never be able to do again. How strong and tight your brand is will determine your success. And because we are … [Read more...]
Is luxury travel really that unique?
I’ve just finished researching a whitepaper on luxury travel ahead of launching our exciting Luxperience MyTravelResearch.com luxury travel research. So I was really delighted when Australian public broadcaster SBS showed a two-part story from the BBC/Tern Television on ‘The Story of Luxury’. It’s one of the nice things about being a researcher is that business and pleasure so often intermingle. The series starts with concepts of luxury from Ancient Greece and then looked at how these evolved both there and in the European Middle Ages. It was … [Read more...]
Is Tourism Innovative?
Does tourism suffer from the innovator's dilemma? A couple of years ago, we were commissioned to build an evidence-based marketing plan for a tour operator. At the time, they were highly successful but an external review had identified that they lacked process and a way to drive the next wave of growth. This was where we came in. When we sat down for our inception meeting, I commented how excited I was to be working with a business at this stage of the business cycle. This is exactly the time a business should scan the horizon looking for … [Read more...]
The science of why you need consistency in tourism branding
One of the coaching calls for our Tourism Marketing Plan Blueprint™ addresses the topic of how to talk about your brand. On the call, our geek-in-chief Bronwyn talked about how consistency enables search engines like Google recognise your brand. That builds Trust, Reputation, and Authority (TRA) which come together in search to put you in front of customers at the right point to make their decision. In this article, we will discuss the vital role that consistency plays in tourism branding. Google famously does this through its algorithms. … [Read more...]
Riding the Google Travel Roller Coaster
Last week I came across an article that reported how Google had had virtually made organic search results irrelevant on mobile. This of course threw me into a bit of a spin. Did it mean that we all had to pay to be shown on Google these days? It is what we all fear, deep down. However, there was a mention at the end of this article that it was an experiment and that we were not sure if this was going to be the status quo forever. So I contacted David Amerland over the weekend to get some clarification. He also said that Google is always … [Read more...]
FREE Luxury Travel Trends White Paper
It's exciting times for MyTravelResearch.com in the Luxury Travel trends space. We recently announced our partnership with Luxperience to create a new and exciting Insights to Action report into the minds of luxury buyers and consumers. You can find more information here In the meantime, we have just published a free report on Luxury travel for you to download. Free Luxury Travel Trends and Insights White Paper In this report, we define what luxury travel is and we explore who is the luxe consumer. We show you how to connect with them in … [Read more...]
Learn the Benefits of Marketing Persona
As a tourism professional, you’re stretched for time, budgets are tight and you have competing stakeholder needs so marketing persona will be out of your ideas yet. You may not have the time to trawl through hours and hours of research to create and trends to create a best practice and innovative marketing plan. Here is the secret: All successful marketing strategies begin and end with the CUSTOMER. As busy tourism marketing professionals, it is easy to forget. Your customer is absolutely central to your marketing NOT your product or … [Read more...]
Top 5 Mobile Marketing Trends in Travel Research
The search landscape is moving fast. In particular, mobile search and mobile usage by travellers - both business and leisure. We have seen great emerging trends this year and it presents a great opportunity for those willing to truly connect with their potential customers on the path to purchase via mobile. Travellers have become very demanding of their content and information as Google tells us there are millions of searches for hotels and travel-related experiences. Not only that, we have seen travellers and consumers in general take to … [Read more...]