Social Media For Tourist Spots

March 28th, 2012 Posted by joshuasinason in Featured, Findings, Marketing

Working in Digital Marketing every once in a while you see someone who just gives up on strategy and decides they’re just going to throw money at Facebook and Google to make sure they get what they want. You see this a lot in politics recently with Mit Romney spending loads of money on Facebook just to get in front of a pair of eyes. (Santorum has actually spent the least per click out of the current crop of candidates, over the last few months.) You see it in politics and you also see it in tourism because regional targeting starts to go out the window when your audience in all over the country. There are a few tricks you can use to get people to your social media page that don’t involve overspending. Here are some of the best places to learn from.

Targeting for peoples tourism dollars on social media is essentially the science of demographic targeting. You have to think about the audience you want and what their habits are, if you want spring breakers and college students your strategy will be completely different from the ones catering to the over 50 crowd. One thing that’s a little tricky is selling your place to kids, since they don’t have the purse strings and most of the time their social media access is limited, your best bet is to go after the women over 30 (known to them as “mom”) That’s why the movie companies put commercials for kids films on during Leno and female oriented shows, they learned long ago that the quickest and cheapest way to advertise to kids, heck to the entire family, is to advertise to mom.

One tourist destination that does an effective job of advertising to families is Medieval Times. From radio to social media presence, everything is giving out the same message, “hey mom bring the kids.” Their radio ads prompt you to go to their social media and are on message by getting in all the big keywords this demo looks for and they do it without being too long winded. Their social media is tailored to moms and everything from the welcome page to the custom tabs is there to tell you just how much they want you to bring your family. It isn’t subtle but it plays to audience’s that probably don’t have a lot of time to surf Facebook.

One of my first big social media jobs was working with a riverboat casino. One of the first things we did was establish the Facebook page as the place to go for free stuff, the goal with that page was to not just get unique visitors, but to get repeat viewers, loyal viewers, and people who would stick around and write reviews. A lot of advertisers want to put emphasis on their YouTube because it looks nicer to have a large stock of videos. But in reality, as much as people tout the number of YouTube hits they get, having a large group of people who give you the thumbs up and never show up again is nowhere near as valuable as a smaller but very vocal group of fans who give you reviews and build content for you. The smart social media advertisers that go after tourist see the value in building up reviews and cultivating a fan base as well as a unique identity that speaks to the fan base you want. Pushing out YouTube video after YouTube video is ultimately no better a strategy than over spending to get what you want.

A lot of tourist sites have taken advantage of sites like Pinterest, Epicmix, and Foursquare. Sites like that, along with Facebook are great for building a buzz and using your loyal fan base to bring in visiting tourists and people looking for weekend entertainment. Foursquare is especially good to use as a tool for giveaways along with your Facebook because it’s big with smart phone users and they’re an increasingly growing tool for people visiting different regions. (Twitter doesn’t seem to work well with tourist and entertainment attractions but it’s always good to keep up, especially considering all the new regional and demo targeting taking place) Above all remember that you don’t have to overspend or spam with videos to get your audience, just remember to be succinct, build your social media look around the audience you want, and keep that audience in mind as you choose when and how you advertise.

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