E-tourism Marketing Intelligence

I am very glad that I am using my fingers to communicate on this chilly morning as I have (almost) no voice left! See, I almost lost my voice last nite at the end of the 3-hour training session that was held by the Scenic Rim Regional Council at Beaudesert. It is UntangleMyWeb.com’s third workshop in Beaudesert and we can now say that 80 local small and medium business operators have now received training on how to improve their online visibility!

Here is a little video I took before the event started so those who missed out can have an idea of what peoples’ expectations were:

This couldn’t have been achieved without the amazing team at the Council. Tanya Lipus who organised last night’s workshop as part of the RimBiz series, Kerrie Algeo who looked after the operational side, from registration to finding a longer Internet cable at the last minute and Kevin Liepins who first contacted UntangleMyWeb.com to set up online marketing training for the region.

Over 20 small and medium operators, from very diverse industries and backgrounds attended the workshop. People came from as far as Warwick and Tamborine to attend.

Accommodation houses, wineries, tours, alpaca farming, HR consulting, event organisers, foundations and many more learnt about writing compelling content for humans, how to make their content SEO friendly, how to take the plunge with Web 2.0 and social media, how to grow links to their site and how to measure all their efforts using Google Analytics! Our youngest attendee was still at high school but has no issue with understanding the importance of Facebook as a marketing tool!

It was an excellent and very interactive night, hence the state of my voice this morning! The workshop started at 5.30pm and finished at 9pm, which is great as the attendees are very busy during the day running their own businesses! One of the highlights was the Target Market exercise, which revealed that we often take too many things for granted and don’t spell it out on the content of our websites! I think there will be a lot of content editing going on in the Scenic Rim this morning!

Finally, you can download the online marketing workshop presentation Online Marketing Workshop presentation and I look forward to reading your comments about last night. Click the comment link (blue) below and let me know what you learnt, liked and disliked so I can too, improve how I communicate with my target market

ROI used to be and still is one of the hype and buzzy word in the Corporate world. However, over the past few years, his little brother “web-analytics” has grown very tall and seems to now be sharing the podium. I have recently come across two great sites, thanks to Vicky Brock from blog.highlandbusinessresearch.com. The Web Analytics Association www.webanalyticsassociation.org and Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik www.kaushik.net/avinash/.

There is an incredible amount of resources on the net dedicated to Search professionals. However, if I now bring it all back to Small and Medium Enterprises, especially in the tourism industry, there is not much help for them there. Amongst professionals we know what we are talking about, but our industry needs to make an effort and break the barrier and start infiltrating the Small Business Onwer’s minds. After all, over 90% of tourism businesses are Small and Medium Enterprises and tourism is one of the biggest industry in the world… Can anyone see the light bulb flashing there?

Vicky from Highland Business Research has recently written an excellent Tourism focused review of what variables should really be tracked on a website. Her post here: why counting hits and page views leaves you completely in the dark about your website’s success.

Only recently I was meeting with my accounting consultant (I call him consultant and not just accountant cause he helped me see the big picture and not only focused on T-shaped accounts. After a long 2-hour chat on a public holiday (I will be forever grateful) his eyes lit up when I started going on about Google, analytics and search engine optimisation. “Fabienne”, he said, “HOW on earth can I get on top of Google”? Bring on the whiteboard was my reply (which was full of accounting hieroglyphics) and Googy the Googlebot came to life…. My turn to contribute to his education. He actually explained to me that he had asked may people and professionals why he was not appearing on Google but no one seemed to be able to help him. Let me rephrase that: Joe and Jane Bloe probably did not know, or might have read something about it on the Gold Coast Business News (great mag by the way, and yes it did indeed have a great article on SEO a couple of months back) or other, but more importantly Joe and Jane probably were not aware that Search Marketing is a discipline on its own and that it is not just a hobby that web designers to do on the side. My accounting consultant has probably also asked his web designers or hosting company but they might have had bigger web developing projects with greater ROI on their plates… It is a shame he was not pointed in the right direction earlier. But, better late than never, and glad I have been able to help you Paul! Let’s see how long until Google adopts your site!.