Lisa Farias

Tourism Marketing

admin — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 05:12:54 +0000

Tourism is an unique business and the tourism marketing strategy must be prepared with realistic, achievable goals and objectives that will maximize the opportunities provided to tourism operators within the Tourism Organization.
A market analysis identified key markets on a geographic basis internationally.
If the focus of your marketing research is on marketing a country’s tourism destinations has a whole rather than on marketing a particular tourism product such as an individual airline, hotel or resort.
A national or federal tourism authority promotes a country’s destinations, sometimes directly to tourists and sometimes through intermediaries; for example, airlines may play an important role in marketing tourist destinations in overseas markets.
Back in the days most tourism products were sold through travel agencies. Airline flights, hotel bookings, car rentals and package tours were handled by a select group of trained professionals who took a fee for their service.
Nowadays, in both of cases, to promote products/services or a country, Web Marketing on the Tourism Industry must be high considered as (or the most) powerful marketing mechanism.
The ability to access millions of pieces of information instantaneously, track things like miles, and even plan complicated itineraries was made possible with just a few clicks of the mouse, so it gives the way to reach the public quickly and more cost-effectiveness.
The companies/organizations on tourism must learn to take full advantage of internet marketing strategies. Marketing tourism products and services online is very competitive and the right execution plan is necessary to be successful. This execution strategy involves hundreds of elements including but not limited to:

-Multilingual Website (be careful with automatic translations) with well written and updated content;
-Multilingual SEO for text and images;
-Article Marketing/Reviews;
-Internet Distribution (Web Ads, Banner Ads, Promotions, Joint Venture Marketing, etc)
-Social Media Marketing
-Email Marketing/Newsletter
-Sponsored Search
-Affiliate Marketing
-Blog Marketing
-Feeds (RSS) and API Integration – such as Expedia.com and TripAdvisor.Com. The rapid sharing of data across the globe enables travel sites, agencies, airlines and hotels to share the same information and conduct business.

Questions? Contact me

Green Marketing Strategies

admin — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 02:18:23 +0000

Green marketing has not fulfilled its initial promise, but companies can take a more effective approach if they realize that a one-size-fits-all strategy does not exist.

Here is some points to help:

1)Avoid negative or preachy marketing messages
Purchasing is an emotional decision, rarely a logical one. Consumer decisions are made because a product is perceived to have a higher value to them. Consider the question, “What’s in it for me?”

“It’s better to sell deeper human benefits,” says Suzanne Shelton. “How do they market beer? By promising you are going to get laid.”

This concept doesn’t necessarily apply to business-to-business purchases however, where specifications and the cost of ownership data often trump emotions. Joel Makower pointed out that this is often due to the large volume purchases. For example, if 2,000 computers are inefficient, it will make a much bigger impact on the bottom line than a personal purchase of just one computer.

2)Make green purchasing easy
“Consumers don’t want to work hard,” says Amy Hebard. “They don’t want to be mini scientists.” Although some of us may use iPhone applications like GoodGuide, most don’t want to have to work so hard to make purchasing decisions.

Shelton gave the example of Walmart selling only highly concentrated laundry detergent. “Walmart is making it hard to not make a green choice.”

3)Most rely on the packaging for information
According to the consumer study, Eco Pulse 2009, by the Shelton Group, product labels are more important than advertising for finding out about green products. Of course untruthful labels can be illegal by breaking Fair Trade Commission Standards or considered to be greenwashing by consumers, so creating an affective label can be a tricky task.

“There is a lack of trust in the marketplace,” says Chris Nelson. For this reason, he considers the creation of standards to be particularly important. UL Environment is currently creating standards for green building products that will assist the LEED building certification process

4 )Start a Blog About Your Business;
Put a face behind your brand. Consumers will relate much more easily to your product if there is a personality or story to back it up. Think of your blog as a more elaborate extension of your “About” page on your company website. Share the inspiration behind your business developments, your thoughts on news that is relevant to your industry, and act as a resource and expert in your field — in a way that enables your audience to relate to you on a personal level. Provide original content showcasing your expertise, that readers can’t find anywhere else; and make your blog a platform for discussion in the comment sections to encourage reader participation and camaraderie. If you’re new to blogging, visit WordPress to get started.

5 )Utilize Social Media
Forget about the old school practice of blasting out press releases every quarter. Make marketing your brand a daily, even hourly, conversational event by using social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Linkedin, etc. According to Small Business Trends, “Alexa.com, the traffic ranking web information company, [which] highlights the top ten most used websites. 50 percent of them are social media sites with Facebook landing in the number two spot (Google is number one). Others on the list include YouTube at number three and Twitter at number 10.” Twitter enables you to bring traffic to your blog, and your company’s main website by linking to blog posts. And when you tweet relevant information to your Twitter followers and Facebook fans, break news, and give feedback on breaking news, voicing your opinion, you set yourself apart and market yourself at the same time.

6 )Create an Electronic Press Kit
There’s no need to spend money and precious resources on paper, printing, cds and even thumbnail drives, when you can develop an electronic press kit at your company’s website to help journalists produce stories about you. Press will want you to walk the walk when it comes to treading lightly on the earth, especially if you’re a green business — and that means doing away with the aforementioned fancy brochures, cd-roms and paper materials you may currently be using to spread the news currently Creating an electronic press kit is easy, and it’s a convenient way to distribute information to endless amounts of people and a far-reaching, global audience. Doing so also eliminates the cost of postage required to send snail mail, and the carbon emissions postal workers emit by delivering your mail. Finally — take it from a journalist who hates sifting through stacks of press folders and cds, it is so much easier for a writer to put together a story about you when all the necessary photos and press materials can be found at your website instead of buried in a string of folders on a cd that is stashed in a box in their closet.

7 )Get Creative With & Green Your Schwag
Handing out schwag is arguably the most wasteful method of marketing known to man, but it can be effective when done well. With some creativity and ingenuity, you can make your schwag enticing, compelling, and memorable by making it useful and green. A company called Eco Imprints specializes in eco-friendly promotional goods. They offer amazing schwag including a custom bean plant that displays your laser-printed message or logo across the bean as it sprouts, and postcards embedded with wildflower seeds so your logo can literally blossom. John Borg, the company’s founder offers, “We are trying a fresh approach, to get people to think about the products they use, and what happens when their useful life is over.” Being innovative with your schwag will make an impact on consumers, not landfills. Also, think hard about what your customers really want and need… Do they want a plastic stress ball or a lucite plaque with your logo on it? Probably not… Would they use and appreciate a pen or a mug or a reusable tote bag? Quite possibly….

8 ) Send Out Weekly or Monthly Email Newsletters
Sending out a newsletter regularly is an effective way of staying in contact with people who are interested in your business — and cleverly marketing your newsletters also helps attract new customers. Offer subscribers exclusive news, promo codes and special discounts that they wouldn’t be able to access without receiving your newsletter. Organize giveaways that readers may only enter via your newsletter, and announce winners in the newsletter so recipients will eagerly anticipate the next installment as they have a vested personal interest in it. Embedding links throughout your newsletter, to your website, online shops, etc. will also help drive up traffic and sales. Mailchimp is a great resource for creating, delivering and tracking your newsletters creation delivery, and tracking. Just remember to be very careful and transparent (and get those double-opt-ins) when building your mailing lists.

www.triplepundit.com
inhabitat.com

Corporate & e-Commerce Marketing

admin — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 21:38:58 +0000

Issue press releases for your website. No matter the field, a well written press release can not only improve your marketing strategy and gain a few inbound links and link bait from other websites, but can lead to journalists that will cite your company in their offline/online magazine as well as in online news websites like Google News and Yahoo! News.
If you have a company or product presentation website, try to provide multilingual pages. Helps for ranking in different localized search engines and user experience.
If you have local conferences or shows that relate to your industry attend to them. Go yourself, or send an employee. Make business connections, friends, discuss daily issues, socialize. You wouldn’t imagine how much that will help you on the long run.
If you sell products or services on your website, regularly offer discounts or promotional coupons. That will not only increase sales and visibility but will attract links and stories, especially if you are a well known company. Issue a press release each and every time you offer that discount. Journalists and news search engines like Google News usually pick up the press release.
Your customers are always right!
Personalize your company’s cars license plates
Optimize your website’s shopping cart and watch how your average order size increase and your cart abandonment rate decrease.

Link Building and Research Tips

admin — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 21:25:53 +0000

Write controversial content that will self-generate links and discussions/comments. Pick on well-known people, criticize loved websites or brands.
When starting your website, try to gather a few links from already established and trustworthy websites. Stop trying to get your link on websites that are 2 months old like yours. Pay a directory submission in Yahoo!, google or other popular directory. Paying for a directory submission almost guarantees you a faster response time.
Avoid the Sandbox – Build links slowly. Slowly can mean 5-10 gained backlinks per month.
When you research websites for IBL’s possibilities, don’t be fooled about high PR pages. What you need is Trust, not a high Pagerank. How can you tell if a website is an authority website or not? Just find 5 titles of 5 articles on that website and search those phrases in Google. If the website appears on the first page, then it’s a quality website. After that inspect some of it’s backlinks, and try to see if the website is involved in dubious link schemes or has IBLs from irrelevant and spam websites. If it doesn’t, you’re OK to go. Remember, what you need is Trust, and traffic. Not Pagerank.
A good link building strategy is to comment or participate in discussions or content on other websites in your industry. It’s not enough to have good articles/content. The world has to know about them. Make connections/relations with other jounalists/bloggers/entreprenours in your niche, comment their articles, and links will come by themselves, with time.
Create posts/articles that help your visitors and attract natural links. “5 tips to …”, “25 easy ways to make …. better” type of articles are the best you can write.
Write stories/articles in the most highly-ranked websites of your industry and link to your website from the article. I am not talking about article directories, but industry websites that accept content contributions from members.
Do you write in forums ? Always put your link in your signature, and try to write a few attractive words too, to increase the likelihood of clicks on your links.
If you are interested about Pagerank rather than relevancy, whenever you submit to directories or other websites that accept links, try to search the most relevant page with the highest PR, and submit to that. Keep the relevancy pretty high on your list though, otherwise they will reject your website for sure. I would and will.
Viral marketing, word of mouth, tell a friend schemes can get your server on fire in hours. Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence
Ask friends or colleagues in your industry, to review your business website. If you have high profile friends, then you are sure to bring a high traffic and increased authority impact to your website.
Build a funny 404 page that will make your visitors laugh a bit and maybe will attract some links.

Social Media Marketing

admin — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 21:24:59 +0000

If you ever want to write something that will end up on any of Digg’s, Reddit’s, Netscape’s, Newsvine’s (etc) frontpage, write about how to get on their frontpage, about Firefox, WordPress or Apple/Mac. No matter what you write about those, people love them and you WILL get on the frontpage, unless it’s un utterly stupid article.
Reward helpful and valuable users by promoting their work on your homepage, or develop a rating system. Invest 5 minutes of your time to send a quick email or note telling them you appreciate their help.
At least once per year, ask your visitors what they think about your website’s content. What would they want to read more? What new facilities should you offer them?
Don’t forget where you started from, even if you are a professional in your field. No one can be an authority in a certain category if others don’t link to/recommend/interview/blog about.

Brand and Visibility Marketing Tips

admin — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 21:23:01 +0000

When commenting a post or story in another website try to make your comments in a professional way, show what you liked/disliked/agreed/etc, cite other sources, give examples, bring pertinent arguments etc. Remember, comments are an important part of a post/article. Over 60% of the readers will also read the comments.
Try to associate your name or your website’s name/brand with the big boys on your niche. Regularly comment their articles (don’t spam) and from time to time make reviews of their post on your blog/website.
Starting your website from scratch always sucks. Seek out other websites/companies in your industry and try to establish a relationship with them. Try a mutual partnership and/or services recommendations. Don’t try to e-mail/fax your direct competitors.
Brand and paint your employee’s uniforms and your company’s cars with your logo and website address. This is especially useful if you have a lot of cars. It’s mass-branding and it will get people, thus future clients in your local area accustomed and comfortable with your logo, website and business.
Put your website address, on every possible internal piece of paper or communication device, including, but being limited to business cards, letterheads, invoices, newspaper and/or other print ads, yellow pages advertisements, receipts etc.
Always identify yourself with your visitors, especially if you own a publishing website/weblog. Always have your editor name written for articles and it’s best to have a profile too. A picture, a contact method.

Marketing Techniques

admin — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 21:22:12 +0000

Pay attention to your website’s statistics. Install a good analytics tool (I suggest Google Analytics). Not only the absolute numbers and statistics (like total users/total visits) count. Try to go deeper and analyze the navigation patterns, entry/exit rates and pages, the new /returning visitor’s ratio etc.
Continuously monitor your server stats, referrers and logs, and try to respond to links and articles that reference your website. That shows dedication and it’s another way to market your website indirectly.
Survey your visitors (you need a free user account to read this article). Learn what your audience and demographics are. Strive to improve your readership towards your website’s business goal. Constantly re-survey.
Research your market and always be up to date with your competitors. What their prices are, where do visitors go, is the site designed for success? Look for things like quality code and content, internal/external linking, keyword density in content and links, pages indexed, Google Pagerank, quality titles, headers, site layout and design, conversion process, site load time, dedicated host, what new services they develop, etc.
Raise awareness of your products and services, convert a visitor into a registered user and/or paying customer, persuade exiting customers to make further business, developing loyalty.

Email marketing

Email marketing is one area that has become conventional in the stylish world. if you are in this type of business model, you have to derive ways in which you can magnify sales and amplify audience to your site that will actually be transformed into buyers. There are a number of tactics that you can employ to achieve this.

1. Irresistible offer

On your website’s home page, you need to add an irresistible offer, which will automatically catch the attention of your visitor. This could be something that is on high demand in the market and it could be on a CD, white paper or eBook. Visitors will have to sign up so as to get the deal and that is one of the tips for you to magnify email list building on your website.

2. Make it easy

You have to make it simple for the visitor to opt in and join your email list. You can urge the visitor to provide only useful content like name, company name or email address and you have to ensure that the subscription link is displayed on the home page, at an eye-catching place that will attract attention of any all audience. In short, you have to facilitate the process easy and simple to access. This is an email list building approach that can be utilized to increase the opt in rate of the readers to your site.

3. Information resource

Once you get the visitors sign in, you need to give beneficial resources to your readers frequently in order to retain and interact with them. This can be accomplished by sending email to them, which contain beneficial information and that need to also be related to the information they subscribed to. You also require to derive ways in which your subscribers can without a doubt pass on the information to their friends. This could be achieved when you make a link that encourages them to send your email to their friends. This will work out properly for subscribers to share beneficial information with their friends and you will get more subscribers at the same time. This is one of the viral marketing strategies that you can adopt to help you thrive in your email list building.

By now, you should have learnt the various methods to attract audience to opt in to your email list and to retain the subscribers. You could do some more testing and tweaking of your website to increase the opt in rate of your visitors so that you can scale your business to the next level with email list building.

RSS & Newsletter Marketing Tips

admin — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 21:21:05 +0000

A lot of users are “old-school” and prefer e-mail newsletters than RSS. Always offer this option.
Another good newsletter tactic is to offer a periodical e-mail digest with the top stories in a certain period. A month will be ideal. Maybe some of your visitors missed a few interesting posts/articles.

Email marketing
Email marketing is one area that has become conventional in the stylish world. if you are in this type of business model, you have to derive ways in which you can magnify sales and amplify audience to your site that will actually be transformed into buyers. There are a number of tactics that you can employ to achieve this.

1. Irresistible offerOn your website’s home page, you need to add an irresistible offer, which will automatically catch the attention of your visitor. This could be something that is on high demand in the market and it could be on a CD, white paper or eBook. Visitors will have to sign up so as to get the deal and that is one of the tips for you to magnify email list building on your website.
2. Make it easy

You have to make it simple for the visitor to opt in and join your email list. You can urge the visitor to provide only useful content like name, company name or email address and you have to ensure that the subscription link is displayed on the home page, at an eye-catching place that will attract attention of any all audience. In short, you have to facilitate the process easy and simple to access. This is an email list building approach that can be utilized to increase the opt in rate of the readers to your site.

3. Information resource

Once you get the visitors sign in, you need to give beneficial resources to your readers frequently in order to retain and interact with them. This can be accomplished by sending email to them, which contain beneficial information and that need to also be related to the information they subscribed to. You also require to derive ways in which your subscribers can without a doubt pass on the information to their friends. This could be achieved when you make a link that encourages them to send your email to their friends. This will work out properly for subscribers to share beneficial information with their friends and you will get more subscribers at the same time. This is one of the viral marketing strategies that you can adopt to help you thrive in your email list building.

By now, you should have learnt the various methods to attract audience to opt in to your email list and to retain the subscribers. You could do some more testing and tweaking of your website to increase the opt in rate of your visitors so that you can scale your business to the next level with email list building.

Advertising and Affiliate Marketing Tips

admin — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 21:18:37 +0000

If you use the Adsense, YPN! or adCenter contextual ads on your website, try to optimize them. Don’t just insert them in your website and leave them. Work with them; change the position, the ad layout, the colors, and the content around them. And remember, that at least for Adsense, the ad that’s placed in the highest position possible in the source’s order will yield the highest income per click.
Use affiliate programs once your website has started to receive some quality traffic. Depending on your niche, affiliate programs are a much better way to convert your traffic, then all the other advertising methods like contextual networks, banners, links etc. Commision Junction is a good way to start.
Build an affiliate system for the services products you are offering. Let others do the PR and sales job for you.

Global Marketing Tips

admin — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 21:15:24 +0000

Use the title and meta description tags as wise as possible. Try to make each page with its own unique title and description, and never repeat more than 20-25% of the title and description tags content on different pages. Use a limited number of characters (8-10) in the title tag, and put the most important of them, relevant to each page, at the beginning.
Try to use H tags (1, 2, 3 etc) at the top-most possible location in the pages of your website, in the source order, and NOT visual order.
Don’t write news or posts just to have something for the big Google. If you gain something on the short term you will lose it later. Try to be innovative.
Suggest ‘related websites’ in your website’s information page on ALEXA. It will bring some traffic.
If you want that early SE results, don’t just buy a new domain and invest $10 K on the website design and development. You are better off buying a 5 year domain and investing $5 K on the website. Age matters a lot and it will matter good years from now on.
Try to build other websites that revolve around your primary niche. Use them to better market and infuse brand and traffic into your primary website.
Use Google’s, Yahoo’s and MSN’s sitemap services. Not only that it will provide you with invaluable server and website data, but it will get your pages in their index faster.
Don’t ignore Google’s, Yahoo’s, Live’s and Ask’s image search functions. Most of the times, you can get a higher traffic from the image search engines then from the usual search, especially if you have a content rich website.
Always remember to rename your images with relevant descriptive words (a maximum of 4 words).