Viper Marketing & Communications Group

The 11 Steps of Destination Marketing

Author: Jim Hardcastle

Jim helps people plan and deliver effective communications. His background in the countryside sector provide him with a wealth of experience in rural marketing. Facilitation, fueled by coffee, with Post-Its at the ready, he’s here to help .

The 11 Steps of Destination Marketing

These are the 11 salient points from our recent Destination Marketing course.

1. Destination Marketing is Not Product Marketing.
Destinations are intangible, visitors can’t experience it beforehand. You have 4 key hurdles to help people overcome:
Abstract - what is a great walk or an amazing wood?
Generality - what’s the difference between your bit of the countryside and that bit over there?
Trust - to commit time and money your customer must trust you as an organisation. It’s easy to return a faulty product but not so easy to return an experience
Impalpability - how do you use your communication tools to imagine the experience or interpret the service experience?

2. The Customer’s Journey
This is about the customers ‘journey’ so look and listen before speaking. We also refer to it as a journey to remind ourselves to plot the end-to-end engagement e.g. don’t forget about them after they’ve left your site.

3. Don’t Jump into the Toolbox
Plan your communications, don’t just jump into the toolbox and build a website or print a load of brochures if you have no plan. We have a framework that helps. Start with your business needs, write them down on Post-It’s and stick them on a piece of paper. Make sure everything you do after that meets those needs. Why on Post-It’s? So you can move them around and cluster them into groups that help you prioritise.

4. Colin or Wayne?
Define your audiences, but don’t just create a list of socio-economic data that’s hard to remember, give them a human name. You’re communicating with real people so give them real names. Define all their characteristics then give them a suitable name that will sum up in others people’s minds. Are they a Colin or a Wayne, a Jane or a Margaret?

5. What’s at your hub?
Make sure you have a digital hub that all your communication tools point at. The hub might be your website, or these days it might be Facebook. Just make sure all your social media spin from that hub and point people towards it where this a clear action e.g. book here, call this number.

6. Information v Interpretation
Understand the difference between Information and Interpretation, and when to use them. Interpretation is explaining the significance of a place. Information is telling people where the toilets are. Use more information the further people are from your destination. The further the visitor has gone into the site the more interpretation you use. Strangely visitors don’t want a huge panel to read when they’ve just arrived. They want to orient themselves to toilets and cafe’s!

7. Order! Order!
People like structure. Structure your message and hang the facts from it. Go and have a look at your clothes rail in your cupboard with all your clothes hanging from it. That’s your message with the facts hanging from it. Tell people what the clothes rail is before you introduce them to all the facts hanging from it.

8. The Almighty Rule of Thirds
This rule applies in lots of situations. Create your Brand Guidelines with three fonts, three colours, three logos, three layouts to use (remember Order! Order!). On interpretation panels have a third text, third images and third white space. In social media, a third of the time give free things away and make recommendations, spend another third of the time talking about you then the final third promote or sell your destination. In your garden always put in three plants, never one, it always looks better.

9. Location Based Services
Remember, more and more of your visitors will be checking you out online before they commit to visiting and they’ll be arriving with smartphones. Are you making their visit easier with these tools? Are you using augmented reality or Quick Response codes? You don’t have to of course, but you should have a good reason why you’re not looking at new technology being carried in the pockets of your visitors.

10. Measure What Makes a Difference
Create a timeline of metrics so you can see that ad had this impact. Create a dashboard that measures Likes and Followers, unique visitors to your website, impressions, conversations etc. Tie this in with traditional campaigns through brochures and leaflets. With social media it’s easy to help people become advocates, what are they posting on Facebook and tweeting about you?

11. The Customer Journey
If you’ve plotted the customer’s journey through every step, along the lines of a flowchart, you can see where small, incremental improvements can be made that don’t seem daunting. Use the flowchart as a monitoring and reviewing tool.

Get it right and you’ll see them again. 

If you’d like some help with your destination marketing please get in touch, mail@vipermarketing.co.uk
 

- Posted on Monday 13 Jun 2011 at 13:17 by Jim Hardcastle

Tags: audience (33), communication planning (21), destination marketing (5), interpretation (12), iphone (10), marketing (66), quick response codes (3)