Marketing is not just promotion and sales activity, it includes good analysis and planning that helps create a strong brand, product, positioning, packaging and pricing. Marketing strategies need to reflect the capability of the business. We try to change the culture of ‘build it and they will come’. We adapt our ideas into local situations, creating and explaining the advantages and disadvantages of each opportunity, and helping our clients choose.

Market entry strategies

We use the market and product analysis to create a simple marketing plan that defines key elements like target markets, product, pricing, promotion and place.

We can to get marketing plans onto one poster!

We have written for Lonely Planet, a powerful way to market even the smallest authentic tourism operator

Marketing imagery

After the plan and product development, one of the most basic places we start with marketing is getting destinations to have a set of images that reflect the experience that they are wanting to market. This means setting up images with people, doing activities on offer and demonstrating the benefits.

We help create a cost effective photo library of images that reflect the brand and highlight the competitive advantages

We also create quality images that customers could photograph, and present them as if they were taken by customers

We help SME’s set pricing to reflect value, costs and third party commissions, establishing simple tables that help them consider alternative pricing strategies.

We help structure marketing packages that appeal to the target markets because they combine transport, accommodation and tours, and because they add value.

We often run workshops on alternative marketing approaches to help stakeholders choose the right approach, together

Online distribution channels

We help our clients target the FIT customer by choosing the best mix of distribution channels possible. The most exciting and cost effective distribution channels come from on-line marketing. Some websites are ineffective. So often we start with helping small and medium enterprises improve their website, and then look at other existing online distribution channels.

We help clients decide what level of online marketing is best for them – getting the website right, joining distributors or moving on to social media.

We set up cooperative marketing systems to spread the cost among businesses and bring individual costs down.

One cost effective strategy we can help with is to choose a cooperative marketing distribution channel, or start one for a destination or region. In these channels, each operator is presented together, and our marketing skills make sure that there is sufficient differentiation between the products to help the customer choose with confidence.

A cost effective alternative approach to buying an internet booking system that we can help set up is an automatic email inquiry, structured to sort basic information needed to create a booking through reply email.

Travel review sites such as Igo Ugo provide independent information and opinion that many customers trust more than advertising

Automated enquiry forms are a cheap booking system that can also collect valuable market data

Social media

Social media is taking over business from online distributor sites. Programs like Facebook and Twitter are popular because information and reviews are provided by customers, so there is potentially less bias. However, the power to share a good story is balanced by the power to share bad reviews, so we use capacity building in social media to make sure that anyone considering using this media understands the risks and benefits.

We train our clients how to maximise the benefits and minimise the risks of using social media