Tourism and travel are products that need selling for success. Selling requires marketing and advertising. How does this happen when tax payers pay the bill?
Tourism is big business. In some countries, Fiji, Costa Rica and The Bahamas for instance, it’s their number one earner, employing thousands of citizens while adding lustre to otherwise lacklustre GDPs. Tourism as a prime economic driver pops up in surprising places. Austria’s primary national income earner is tourism while in Canada tourism has grown into the country’s third largest industry, recently overtaking forestry amongst the top three of the country’s greatest sources of gross revenue.
To give you a good idea about the importance of a national tourism marketing campaign, the USA is finally getting its act together, drawing the fifty independent states under a single marketing umbrella, Brand USA. For the first time in its history the USA federal government is devoting funds to marketing the country as a single entity rather than a confusing mixed market of fifty competitors all crying out for attention.
Over one billion people are travelling this year, the largest market ever seen in human history. Every country wants a piece of the action. Every independent state and region in those countries wants their piece too.
So, how do national and state tourism authorities sell themselves to get their fair share of all this hot money-making action?
Not long ago, full page advertisements were placed in newspapers to woo customers. Television commercials played significant roles extolling the attractions of wherever is being promoted. Add radio spots and point-of-sale material (i.e. brochures and pamphlets) to the mix and you get a traditional marketing scheme.
That scheme isn’t working so well these days.
Why? The answer is two words: Social Media.
At the recent NTEEC (National Tourism & Events Excellence Conference) held at Melbourne’s MCG (itself a tourist drawcard—one night after the conference finished Liverpool played an exhibition match before a crowd of over 95,000 fans, many of them flown into Melbourne from the UK or interstate just to watch the game), heady discussions revolved around how marketing money may be better spent to attract customers.
National Tourism Organisations (NTOs), State Tourism Organisations (STOs) and Regional Tourism Organisations (RTOs) sent representatives from far and wide. Destination Marketing Organisations (DMOs), funded primarily by national, state, local governments, also acquiring funds from chambers of commerce were there in spades, keen to gain information and advice about how the industry is changing. Universities with travel and tourism departments sent senior lecturers and professors to lend data from various research projects into customer behaviour and spending habits. Public relations firms sent representatives to gauge how much more money is forthcoming from the government funded marketing organisations.
Put simply, it was a pointy end of the plane gathering of industry leaders. These are the people who determine where the tourism marketing money will be spent, how it will be spent and how much will be spent. Big tourism businesses rely heavily on subsidised marketing projects which are largely funded by tax payers. Billions of dollars of revenue is at stake, whole industries mark their bottom line profits based on numbers of interested visitors willing to spend their money on ‘tourism product’.
In a crowded global landscape packed with touristic attractions, how does any one destination sell itself effectively in order to secure its slice of the big revenue pie?
That was the question. Again the answer lay in those tricky two words: Social Media.
In Wollongong the week before, a different conference was held, Australia’s first SoMeT (Social Media Tourism). One of that conference’s organisers, Rodney Payne, co-founder and Executive Director of Think! Social Media gave a keynote speech at the NTEEC. Of all the talks I heard over two days of non-stop talking, his was the most illuminating simply because he presented his opinions about DMOs in very striking terms: when they get too involved with governments, they lose their drive for imaginative marketing.
Considering this was a confab of public/private/government funded organisations trying to be clever about marketing what are essentially privately owned businesses, Payne’s comment was at first startling as a critique of audience stakeholders. His points became clearer as he cited significant case studies and progress reports from various international DMO marketing campaigns in which his business had been involved last year.
The news according to Payne is mixed good and bad. Payne says many DMOs will not survive because they’re not getting proven measurable results from government invested money. A lucky few will survive and perhaps see increased funding if their campaigns are deemed a success. Survival of the fittest, most clever and innovative summed up Payne’s assessment succinctly.
Another earth-shattering change was discussed, the changing role of traditional media. Statistics show that travellers are less inclined to seek guidance from a travel story published in a newspaper’s travel section or from a glossy spread in a magazine. The days of the travel writer’s ‘famil’ may be numbered while PR budgets are being cut and advertorial becomes increasingly superfluous.
Unfortunately, at the NTEEC there were no media spokespeople present to explain how many writers specialising in travel genre are adapting to changing circumstances, going online, blogging and growing their businesses into professional travel authorities whose independence is sound and reliably outspoken. To be honest, Naked Hungry Traveller is but one of many online publications busily differentiating themselves from traditional advertising influenced media outlets, namely newspapers and print magazines where an advertisement is often seen on a page near the story written by the hosted writer whose independent opinion is immediately at question because the visit was hosted at the DMOs expense, usually declared but often not.
User generated sites such as TripAdvisor, UrbanSpoon and Yelp were also discussed at length. How does any DMO control user generated content?
It can’t. It’s a free world.
DMOs can however try harder at generating their own content via social media and that was the crux of the conference. Clever engagement with visitors via social media is the key to a DMO’s successful marketing campaign.
Some DMOs are very good at finessing social media. Others don’t get it at all and now face a challenging catch-up game just to maintain the status quo, or they face dissolution.
Opportunities exist for travel media to become more involved with DMO marketing campaigns, supplying authentic copy that engages with non-traditional audiences. Some DMOs are doing that already, inviting bloggers to review their products (i.e. free trip) as a way of attracting new audiences and hopefully increased business.
This is where we are now. Those stories are out there, impacts being measured and assessed. Was it worth spending valuable marketing money to host one blogger whose opinion can be bought over another whose opinion can’t? That’s just one question of many under discussion by NTOs, STOs and RTOs.
While user generated content sites are increasingly being called into account for a lack of proper moderation and openness to manipulation (competitor writes fraudulent reviews and posts them from numerous email accounts or one business engages dozens of friends and family members to post negative reviews about a competitor), professional independent media that engages with social media is apparently a safer bet for productive DMO spending.
Gobbledy-gook? After two days of discussion about how vast sums of money should be invested (the Australian Tourism Commission’s budget is over AUD$200 million for example, not all of it spent wisely: Where the Bloody Hell Are You? TVC comes to mind) to gain the most traction in a fickle marketplace increasingly reliant on social media (the really independent and therefore totally uncontrollable quotient in this potent mix). Social media is now the favoured platform on which the majority of consumers make a decision about where to go, how much to spend and why.
Naked Sources:
www.facebook.com/teeconference
www.linkedin.com/groups/Tourism-Events-Excellence-Conference-3889059
Tom,
Well-written, incisive piece. You are doubtlessly “spot-on” with your sentiments.
Thank you Joy Dodds. When governments work with private businesses, if you want to know how your tax money is being spent, follow the money. It’s an interesting trip.