One of our issues in our CVB was to reach the end users (customers) with our up-to-date information. So what I suggested is to establish a blog and come across fresh information with attractive pictures and useful information. It is a pain for customers to gather information that they really want. Those who order tour guide brochure or call the office for inquiry are only a part of the whole market. To reach potential customers and to enable them to reach our information, I kept a tourism blog.
Upgraded one: http://gangwondo.cocolog-nifty.com/
Former one: http://gangwondo.spaces.live.com/
*Both are written in Japanese due to the target market.
Good things about blog are 1)you can offer written pictures, videos and other documents as well as written information, 2)you can have two-way communications with customers, and 3)you can check the demographics of visitors to the site.
The matter is what to show in the blog. I know lots of CVBs are now utilizing blog like a trend; however, mostly what they show is what they want to tell them, not WHAT THEY WANT TO KNOW. Your blog must be something that customers want to visit again and again to check to make them feel traveling to your destination. So what I did was to post the information that was inquired by a couple of customers. If several consumers want to know about the information, probably a large number of people are anxious to know about it.
I also shared the package tour information or the link to the tour to give customers chance to actually join the tour and visit our destination. For customers, gathering tour information is a lot of work. As a CVB, we obtain a variety of information and we should share those with the public as much as possible, for the sake of customer service. Customer's convenience to access to the information may reflect the convenience to access the destination.
This medium is also useful to communicate with the professionals in the industry. With new postings information, I would send mail magazine with the links. It played a role as a news letter.
And now, I am using this tool to advertise myself!
Don't forget to do a bit more of extra work to earn more visitors to your blog: when people google the name of your destination, your site should be on top of the result. Try to use bullet words and your destination name with the word "tourism".
Also, it would be useful if you set a search engine to seek the information in your blog. You can also visit some blogs and web pages on your destination owned by customers. They will be happy if you leave some comments and they would visit your blog. Some of them will link your blog. This way you will be able to earn more viewers.Labels: Tips, Tourism/ Marketing