Category Archives: Tourism Marketing
Optimising your website is key!
As I surf around the Internet these days I see a load of sites out there that are built for the masses who all love social networks and signing up for special offers! Follow me here to twitter with me, Click me on Facebook and join me as a friend, Like me a lot and join my social scene etc…
While I don’t discount the value of these social streams for some larger businesses, I have yet to see any real business gains for clients that have a smaller catchment of visitors or small or low membership clients. Some of which are ruining their websites with these.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Improve Your Website And Sell More
Did you know that you can increase your website’s ability to sell significantly by looking at implementing small changes to pages within it.
See how we helped Museum Hotel increase their bookings 20% month on month and improve their level of conversions by 100% on their website by improving the functionality, usability and engagement levels. We tell you how in our PDF attached.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
PPC vs SEO
There is a debate in the industry around the benefits of using pay-per-click (PPC) adverting instead of search engine optimisation (SEO) as your main source of website traffic. While I feel that there are many benefits of search engine optimisation to me as a business owner PPC can be rewarding in so many ways over SEO.
Here are some interesting points to be aware of;
- PPC traffic converts at 2.03% versus 1.26% for natural traffic
- PPC visitors spend about 10% more money on your site than naturally found visitors
- PPC visitors stay on your site 29% longer than naturally found website visitors
Here are my thoughts on why these stats are as they are
With PPC you control what phrases you want to appear in Google for, with natural search (SEO) you dont have the same control over these search queries. In some strange instances your site might be found for search phrases that are not related to your business at all but the search engines have tagged your website as having content relevant to this.
For example, you can state in PPC that you want to show for a phrase that directly relates to your product, for example “dog collars” and then when someone types in “looking for dog collars” your site comes up at the top of Google ready for that person to click, visit and then buy.
The reason I believe PPC visitors stay longer on your site is that they know what you have is what they have searched for and now want to know more about your website before making a commitment to buy from you. They are just checking you out more before they spend their cash with you…
The reason people spend more from you is an interesting one, is it because the PPC visitor is a more serious purchaser and hence has more to spend than the naturally found website visitor.
My final words, PPC gives you more control on who see’s your business online and where your business shows and doesn’t show. It typically gives your business an instant boost of traffic due to the fact that you can show in google today, tomorrow and the next day as long as you are willing to pay for the traffic you get. PCC also gives you the ability to test product prices, collect feedback and gather really quick information due to the ability to send alot of traffic to your site via PPC advertising. It’s all good food for thought…
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Car Rental Marketing Online
Here is a really simple marketing plan for any car rental business to follow.
We have a number of clients who have been growing using this Internet plan.
Step 1
Design your website so that your home page is designed to meet your main objectives. Break your objectives down into main areas and ensure these are placed on your websites home page in a clear, well thought-out layout.
Step 2
Have a page for each objective, for example if you have trucks to rent then have a page entirely dedicated to trucks. Discuss the benefits and features, include the sizes available, have a video showing how easy it is to drive, park, load furniture, include testimonials on the page to add creditability. Don’t be afraid to include a lot of information about the trucks. People can elect to read it or not. Let people know if you include free kms, trolleys and/or blankets. In this case more information is better.
Step 3
Make sure you have your websites set up for search engine optimisation. This is still key to driving visitors to your front door and into your wallet! Make sure you look at other companies that have worked with rental car companies as this will give you an advantage as these search optimisers will know how to attract more customers to your site having worked in this area in the past. Make sure you ask for evidence that they know what to do for your business to help make it grow.
Look at how we have generated leads for a client over the course of the last three years.
Step 4
Include an advertising campaign – look to use Google, Yahoo and MSN to drive more business your way.
So, there are four steps to get your website working for you. It’s marketing for car rentals 101. Start today and build more customers, sales and leads tomorrow.
If you want a tailor made marketing plan for your car rental business or for any business please give me a bell, I am happy to assist you.
Take care…Cheers.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
How to set up Google Website Optimiser
How to set up Google Website Optimiser (Part 1.)
We have been using Google Website Optimiser to help our customers gain more. If you have always wanted to know more about how to set up a simple test using Google Optimiser then here are a few tips on how to do so.
Step 1: Click on the Website Optimiser from within your AdWords account.
Website Optimiser
Once you have selected this you will be asked to select an A/B experiment or a Multivariate one. If you want to split test one page over another you can select the A/B experiment, if you want to test changes to elements of the same page design and get 1000 visits a week you can select the latter option.
Choose the page you would like to test with (examples of potential test pages could be your home page or a product detail page).
Create alternate versions of your test page. Create and publish different versions of your test page at unique URLs so that Website Optimiser can randomly display different versions to your users.
Identify your conversion page. This is an existing page on your website that users reach after they’ve completed a successful conversion. For example, this might be the page that is displayed after a user completes a purchase, signs up for a newsletter or fills in a contact form. Once you identify the conversion page, you are then asked to enter in a name for your original site and then to enter in the website page names that you are going to test against it with.
Where to enter your pages for the Optimiser to test with
Once you have done this you then enter in the website page that advises the Optimiser that a completed goal has taken place (known as a conversion).
Part 2 will follow shortly…
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Use Google Optimiser to get more sales and customers
Knowing how to use Google Optimiser will guide you to more sales and customers.
I was looking into my Google stats for a client’s website last week and discovered a huge spike in people leaving their website on the products and services page. After further review I discovered that my client had decided to completely revamp their product and service content based on what others were telling them should be on that page. While making changes to your website can help you gain more sales it can also make you lose sales too.
With Google Optimiser you can set up various versions of a web page to see what impact a change has on the performance of your website. It’s a powerful free product that can allow you to test every tweak to your website to ensure you don’t get in the way of sales!
When using Google Optimiser consider these points:
- Don’t make any changes to your website content until you have tested one version over the next (old content versus new content).
- Look at split testing the changes to see what impact this has on your customers and sales generated before making the changed content the final version to go live with.
- Make sure you only make changes after you have reviewed your analytical data. Make changes based on what it is telling you works best.
- Don’t let bullies or the ones with the largest voice in your company make all the decisions on website content without first of all advising the reasons why.
Use Optimiser to help you refine and improve your sales and leads. Your business will grow from doing so!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Marketing for luxury hotels
What luxury hotels may want to consider in 2011…
Mobile Marketing!
Consider this… mobile phones these days come in many shapes and forms, computer systems and designs, with a huge explosion in smart phones (basically mini computers that fit in your pocket). One of the smartest ways to help your business right now is to use this avenue as your path to these users of smart phones.
While smart phones are coming down in price, these tiny, powerful computer-like phones are still mostly for the geeks and or the wealthy. With this in mind you can use this medium to reach out to the rich and advertise your services in this medium.
Look to build a mini website page application for smart phone platforms like Android and the iPhone. Ask your booking engine supplier if they are able to give you a link to their mobile application.
This way these targeted visitors can source information on your hotel and make a safe and secure booking direct from their smart phone.
Make sure you keep using technology to keep ahead of the rest!
Best of luck… until next time!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Hotel website best practices
Good ideas for creating a pleasant website experience for your customers.
As time goes on and people get accustomed to interaction through social networking sites our expectations of what websites should offer visitors are changing. I like to think of this as a free spirited approach to offering information about your hotel and its unique offerings.
When I design a website I start off by thinking about what my main objectives are and focus on accomplishing these. For some hotels, there are multiple objectives but try to narrow them down to a select few. Keep your objective at the forefront of your mind when you design or modify your home page.
Here is an approach that I like to use – list your objectives, your primary ones down to your secondary goals. For example, your primary goal could be to generate more bookings. A secondary could be to get more people signed up to special offers, or your Facebook account or just to your newsletter. Whatever they are list them on a piece of paper, and then print out your home page and circle what objectives you have met. Do the comparison and then have a shot at placing a new image on a piece of paper of what should be on your home page.
Some owners treat their home page as a sales tool, while others look to get people moving along through the journey to making a online booking. Think of ways to engage them, think about your objectives again and look to position your unique sales proposition and then make sure you have these on your home page. Make visiting your hotel a unique and easy experience from the very beginning (ie from your website).
The newest trends are videos or seamless photos of your hotel to create a virtual tour. This creates an interaction with customers as they can look through your entire hotel without needing to be there in person. Whatever you do, think about the visitors experience and make sure you attempt to connect and engage with them!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Five website tips for car rental companies
Follow these five guidelines for increasing your leads.
The car rental business is a very competitive space. In order to attract and obtain more customers I recommend a number of items for you to consider if you want to generate more sales and leads.
Make sure your homepage is not cluttered. Think about your main objectives (which are to gain leads and sales from visitors) and ensure your booking form or search form is located on your home page so that visitors can start on that journey of finding a rental vehicle.
Make sure your contact number is placed on your home page and even consider having your entire location on this page so that people can see exactly the location of your business… this can be helpful if your rental business includes truck hire, or is not dependent on places like the airport for your main revenue stream.
To add credibility include some testimonials on this page from people in the past that are your fans!
Look to add a real support option (a live person) into your website in the form of live chat function. Research has shown a connection to the business from within your website will increase its sales by up to 30%.
Make sure you make the most of the social networking opportunities that exist today. Place a connection to your Facebook and Twitter accounts directly from your home page.
For more tips and advice on ways you can generate more business from your website, join my newsletter or give me a call so that we can start working on your site together to generate more sales.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Target niche marketing for hotels
How hotels can target new clients for more business using the Internet.
Here are some tips I use to help hotels gain more customers, leads and sales using niche based sales & marketing:
- Analyse data from your website and look to see what keywords customers are using that find you in searches.
- Take these keywords and arrange them into small groups that are similar in nature.
- Take these keyword groups and think up a domain name that has these keywords in them.
- Purchase this domain name (or a variation of it if this domain name is unavailable). Buy the co.nz or the .co where possible.
- Set up website hosting for this domain name and then place on it content that is rich in keywords on this subject matter.
- Include testimonials from clients where possible to aid credibility, your key features and their benefits, and some photos and videos where possible to enhance the visual appearance and to help connect with the end user.
- Make sure your website page has great search engine practices included in it. Seek out an expert that can help or guide you.
- Look to advertise this subject in Google AdWords as another means to bring in targeted traffic, again bring in the experts to help you with this. Make sure you have set your goals up correctly.
- Set up Analytics so that you can track your return on investment. Best to set up conversions as well (so that you can track how many leads you are generating).
I hope this helps you!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Hotel target marketing
How hotels can target the perfect client.
One way to attract more clients and increase sales opportunities is to target visitors with specific needs. For example if you offer conferences, meeting rooms, wedding packages, and/or gift vouchers think about designing some pages that are solely focused on detailing these features and benefits.
Consider designing brand new sites that focus on a particular offering and then look to target a segment of visitors that meet a criteria. Here are a couple of ways to broaden your appeal to a particular market:
- Create landing pages geared around one single product. Keep it simple, clear and make it easy for people to take action by contacting you for further information or for a booking.
- Create a page on your site that talks about nothing else but your offers. Provide some evidence of your brand, reputation, experiences and knowledge to add credibility.
Using a single product landing page can do your brand and sales a wealth of good. If these landing pages are designed to their fullest potential you can really boost up your rankings in all search engines as well.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
A plan for hotel social networking
Blogs, Twitter, Facebook – how to make the most of these if you are a hotel.
There is so much to be learned from the past year in regards to the whole social networking area. While some hotels have really engaged these areas, others have not taken this area of business to the levels possible either though lack of understanding what these tools can offer a hotel, or due to lack of management interest in this area.
I guess some hotels are relying on the old methods to bring in business, ie supply chains, email marketing, website marketing and other third party sources.
To me reliance on these services is costly and highly competitive. I now see these new mediums as a way to really grow your brand and increase your communication channels. What was once communicated on a monthly basis or through the mail can now be sent to thousands of people instantly, which is an amazing advantage if others in the market haven’t taken these social areas seriously as yet.
Even better, consider giving the advantage to these groups of followers by offering them the newest specials, the best rooms, the upgrades, the real deals… make this area your focus. Forget your website and email marketing for a month or two and concentrate on telling your staff that all communication of promotions and special offers must now only be on Facebook, Twitter or your blog and then watch this space erupt.
Not only will you begin to gain a huge social connection following but your marketing costs of using PPC and email marketing can be reduced as well. It might take a while to make this area respond for you, but take steps today and start building your following for tomorrow.
Good luck.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Booking engine for hotels
Five tips for making your booking engine work better for you.
Over the years I have come across many hotel sites that make it harder then necessary to allow visitors to make a booking on their website.
Here are a few tips to help you make sure visitors can make a booking with ease:
- Place the booking engine directly on your home page.
- Ask your booking engine supplier to provide you with a booking engine that looks and feels like your own website, and that can integrate straight into your current design.
- Make sure the booking engine or a link to it is on every page on your website.
- On your ‘contact us’ page – also include another link to your booking engine.
- On your ‘rooms’ page – have a link under each room type so that visitors can go directly to your booking engine.
These simple recommendations can go a long way to ensuring your visitor can make a booking with you without them having to look… look… look…
Good Luck.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Online marketing for car rental companies
Discover a marketing plan that grew a rental car business by 1800%.
The Internet is full of companies advertising themselves in search engines as the company to use when looking to rent a vehicle. Yes, it’s a crowded space, and many have gone down the slippery slope of competing for business by cutting their rental costs per day (especially within the car area) where the larger companies have thousands tied up in stock and must look to discounting just to empty the yard! It’s a competitive area and one that must be managed carefully if you want to make a splash. But there is hope, we have managed to find thousands of leads for our clients using our creative marketing models.
Here’s how…
I have been working with rental companies for around five years now and over this time we have tried many ways to find opportunities to grow businesses. We started off like most do, with a search engine strategy to ensure we had all of the ingredients in place for search engines so that they could be found by Google, Yahoo and MSN (now known as Bing).
The method in the early days was to optimise their website and display all products and offers, ensuring they had all their offers and specials at the time nicely placed on the home page. This method worked for a while but we ran out of home page space with these traditions and the sites just become a clutter both to manage and to surf around.
I can only imagine what site visitors thought at the time – we were just overloading them with offers for specials and deals for vans, cargo trucks, cars, people movers, minibuses etc, and it was not working to the levels we were happy with. We then thought we just needed more visitors to the site, so we started an advertising program using Google’s platform. We soon found out that having more people visit wasn’t the solution, the problem in fact was due to the confusion and clutter we had on the home page – people just could not see the woods for the trees!
The question now was, how can we increase our leads and sales without having a home page include all the information needed for each customer type? What we did then was create a new creative marketing model to direct these customers to sites that closely matched their requirements. We did this by using the models below all bundled up into a web strategy:
- Landing pages
- Sales pages
- Advertising with Google, Yahoo and Bing
- Search engine optimisation
- Website Optimiser
- Live support/chat
- Facebook profile & brand advertising
- Automated customer signup process.
Line chart showing growth for one of our clients.
The results not only spoke for themselves, they were almost too good to be true. This marketing method worked and we were able to track the progress of this business and over the course of four years build up the sales from the Internet.
If you would like to know how you can grow your rental company to the levels seen above please contact me using the details below.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
SEO for hotels
How to grow your hotel sales!
While the industry as a whole is a very competitive market there are some that stand out as innovative, creative, adaptable and brand focused. It may seem easy for some hotels that are smaller in size, but there are options for larger hotels to have these traits as well so that they can discover a long-tail of opportunities in the market place.
Over the past ten years I have worked with a number of hotels that were generating more room sales, selling more luxury based packages and exceeding the growth models that others were experiencing.
What I found was that all of these outstanding hotels were embracing the Internet and looking for opportunities and niches for themselves in this market space. One thing that particularly stood out for me was that these hotels were managed by people who wanted more sales from their own website, instead of leaving sales to a third party (all of which charged a very high commission model for each booking generated).
The ones that were growing were really utilising the Internet to drive customers to their own site, while others were just happy to take what they could get from their third party suppliers. Most of these hotels were not interested in rocking the boat with their supply chain – to them it was just easier to use this method of third party booking engines. My thought is that leaving it to a third party to bring in bookings is just crazy, but what can you say or do to change their minds? Obtaining more bookings from their own website to most owners or managers is in the ‘too hard basket’.
So, as I said above, the hotels growing in leaps and bounds had common traits and goals – they wanted more bookings from their own website, and at low or no commission rate.
Here is what I discovered most the successful hotels had in common between 2000 – 2009:
- They invested money into ensuring their website could be found in all major search engines.
- They used the Internet as a advertising platform to bring in more business.
- They had websites that made the process of booking online easy.
- They used an award winning booking system that was designed to blend directly into their website.
- They had invested in email marketing to send updates and special offers to all customers that had been to the hotel before.
Last year we saw a introduction of social media options like Twitter & Facebook and now many of the same hotels that succeeded back in the early 2000’s have rolled up their sleeves again with the intent to get value from these new models of interaction.
For me, social media interaction has an intangible return on investment. After all, it’s all about branding and keeping in touch with others through a medium that people use on a day-to-day basis. The value is blurred at best but the model is available and should be utilised to its fullest if you want to expand your brand awareness.
So lets look at the model from the early 2000′s again, now ask your self as a Hotelier, ‘what do I need to do to keep my business in growth mode though the economic times that we are in?’.
Here is my hit list for growing your hotel for 2011 (taking elements of the 2000 list as well):
- Invest money into ensuring your website can be found in all major search engines (use a specialised resource to ensure you keep in step with the latest tips).
- Use the Internet as a advertising platform to bring in more business – advertise not only in Google, but think Yahoo and Bing as well.
- Get your website into a new 2011 look and feel, look to engage users at the highest level. Make the site easy to navigate and keep the main focus and objectives in the website at all times (keep the booking engine in the design) so that people can book with ease.
- Use an award winning booking system that is designed to blend directly into your website.
- Make sure you utilise a company that specialises in web based booking systems as their major offering.
- Invested in email marketing to send updates and special offers to all customers
- Use the social media to brand and create more awareness of your product offers, use facebook as a medium to advertise offers to all followers.
- Use mini-websites to get in front of direct traffic and advertise these in all of your marketing materials, email signatures and printed business documents.
- Track all activity and report on your investments so that you can visually see if the return on investment is at a high level.
- Make sure your focus is on getting more visitors to your website(s) – the more bookings you get from your own site the more you will save – up to thousands on commissions that are charged by suppliers each and every year.
- Get in touch with a search marketing company that can help you reinvent yourself and your branded hotel with a sound strategy for more growth.
The way forward is simple: embrace the technologies available on the Internet; source experts that can offer you skills that your hotel does not have in-house; and focus on gaining more sales from your own front window.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
