Search Results for: label/tourism

Never been there

July 28, 2009 by 5 Comments

1. The best promotion you can get is the personal recommendation of someone who has been to your town or attraction.

2. And yet… locals will live here for years, and never set foot in some of the most amazing attractions and events you have to offer. But once they do, they are some of the best evangelists.

Find of the CenturyThis, “I’ve lived here for years, and I’ve never been there,” attitude is surprisingly common. In New York, I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge with a Chaz, who lives there, but had never been. At home, I had never seen the archaeology find of the century in the Freedom, Oklahoma, Museum, until they called me for some consulting. We just don’t go see what we have close by.

What if you could get more of your locals to actually experience your treasures? Then they would be much more likely to talk them up to their friends and family.

How could you actually do this?

  • Promote your event directly to locals by word of mouth, personal contact, phone calls, emails, etc. Make sure you dedicate a specific portion of your promotion efforts and budget to bring in locals.
  • How about your nearby neighbors? Bring in the people from one town over, or all the surrounding towns. They’ll have less of that famous “we don’t have anything” local bias.
  • Create a special tour for locals. Make it like a blogger invasion, but for your locals and neighbors.
  • Host regional events. Partner with groups, like the Rotary or church groups, who are bringing folks from surrounding counties. Do more than give them a brochure; help them set up an event at a cool local attraction.

I know this is tough. Lots of towns have trouble getting locals involved in anything. So let’s open it up. The best stuff is always in the comments. What are your ideas and stories?

This article is part of Tourism Tuesday, a series of posts for tourism businesses and associations in small towns and rural areas. If you have questions you’d like us to address in this series, leave a comment or send us an email at becky@smallbizsurvival.com. This is a community project!

Filed Under: community, tourism

Rethinking local event calendars

July 21, 2009 by 14 Comments

Event scheduleWhen I checked into the Crystal Mountain Resort in Michigan, the desk staff person handed me a paper copy of the events and activities calendar for the week. That’s a tourism idea that has been around forever, and we can make something more of it.

First, let’s adapt it for a small town. 
Don’t think only of your big festivals and events, like the car show or craft fair. List activities of all kinds, especially your “insider” events. Your visitors from big towns would love to sit in your small town gym and cheer at the high school basketball game, or bid on cool junk at your country auctions, or watch movies without fighting a crowd at your local theatre.

Don’t think you have enough events? Cooperate with neighboring towns to add their events to yours.

Fill in empty spaces with “anytime” activities. Think about the experiences that make your small town special, like enjoying the walking trail, touring the historic neighborhood, playing at the playground, or laying out and watching the stars in the park at night.

And don’t get caught up in the pretty design in the example. Do a simple plain text listing instead. It fits your small town image better and takes much less work. Put your effort into the descriptions, so people can imagine the experience just from your words.

Second, let’s take it online.
How can you get this calendar into the hands of visitors and potential visitors? Of course you will hand out paper copies all around town: at the motels, the cafes, the gas stations. But you’ll also use some modern tools to share it online:

  • Post it on your local blog, and let the magic of RSS deliver it to interested readers every week. 
  • Set up email subscriptions to your blog through FeedBurner or FeedBlitz. 
  • Email your key influencers to invite them to subscribe: the regional and state tourism staff, regional reporters, your elected officials and legislators, local bloggers, and those same businesses you gave paper copies to.
  • Post it on your Facebook page (set it up to pick up the RSS feed automatically).
  • Set up a local Twitter account to share one-line event notices.
  • Call Utterli, and record the list in audio, shareable online. 
  • Show local bloggers how to use the RSS feed in a widget on their blog that will stay constantly up to date with local events.
  • List all these outposts (Facebook, Twitter, Utterli) on your main web page, so visitors can choose the method they prefer to get updates. 

Third, let’s add your ideas.

What ideas can you add? Do you have examples? Where did I get it wrong? Let me know in the comments.

This article is part of Tourism Tuesday, a series of posts for tourism businesses and associations in small towns and rural areas. If you have questions you’d like us to address in this series, leave a comment or send us an email at becky@smallbizsurvival.com. This is a community project!

Filed Under: marketing, rural, tourism

Please write a review

July 14, 2009 by 9 Comments

People trust other people, much more than they trust you. That means your potential customers trust the semi-anonymous reviews written on online review sites more than all that great text on your own website.

Do you regularly monitor what is said about you on TripAdvisor, VirtualTourist or Igougo? How about mainstream booking sites like Hotels.com, Expedia or Orbitz?

Requesting reviews

If you are a fairly small business, you may have no reviews or only a few reviews on these sites. One cranky person can leave a huge mark on your online reputation. So it is critical that you take action.

First and foremost, improve your service. We’ll all draw an undeserved negative comment on occasion, but we can all stand to improve. While you may want to brush off a bad review or get defensive, it’s more productive to treat every comment as a chance to deliver better service.

Next, encourage positive reviews. When a hotelier in Scotland stapled this card to my bill, I thought he was smart. He’d already made sure I was satisfied, and he was encouraging me to tell others.

If you want to encourage reviews,

  • Start with your satisfied current customers. 
  • Focus on the few review sites that actually send you the most customers. 
  • Consider contacting your biggest fans to offer reviews. 

I can see some possibility for controversy here. Are we skating too close to manipulating?  I’d love to hear your take on this in the comments.

Leverage reviews in bigger ways

Are you feeling brave? Let’s take comments back from the online review sites. Let’s open our own sites for reviews: 

  • Open a comment section on your own website. 
  • Allow comments on your tourism association website.

Do you think that could work? Do you know of any examples of a tourism business or association allowing open reviews?

    This article is part of Tourism Tuesday, a series of posts for tourism businesses and associations in small towns and rural areas. If you have questions you’d like us to address in this series, leave a comment or send us an email at becky@smallbizsurvival.com. This is a community project!

    Filed Under: marketing, tourism

    A tour of Small Biz Survival

    May 29, 2006 by 5 Comments
    Welcome to Small Biz Survival.com, bringing promising technologies to the regular everyday small business people of the rural world. I’m glad you stopped in! You can read more about us, if you’d like, and you can read our current disclosures. Let me give you a tour around the place.

    What can you expect to read here? Articles by and for small business people in rural areas and small towns. You face some special challenges in a small town small business, including:

    • Pressure from competitors in bigger cities,
    • Pressure from competitors online, world wide,
    • Scarce, or variable quality, resources to assist you locally,
    • Tight labor supply, and a graying workforce,
    • Lack of skills in your workforce,
    • Isolation from your industry peers.

    But for each challenge, there is also opportunity.

    • The online market opens the world to you.
    • Involvement in your community is your way to fight against decline.
    • Land is usually cheap, compared to growing areas.
    • Regulatory burdens tend to be lower than in well-developed regions.
    • A little payroll usually goes a long way.
    • Work ethic is usually high.

    Regular Features
    Based on those challenges and opportunities,

    We also write all sorts of how-to articles, post tips for USA income taxes, and anything else that strikes our fancy. For a list of what we like best of our work, read the Best of Small Biz Survival.

    Some additional articles on small business, economic development and rural communities, collected from all over, can be found in my Shared Items from Google Reader. You can read it as a complete web page, and you can subscribe to the feed. It’s also in the sidebar to the right.

    Do you like what you see?
    Come back and visit often! And feel free to comment. We enjoy a good conversation. We welcome your story ideas, feedback, tips, and ideas for us to share with everyone. Don’t miss out! Make sure you get our updates, in which ever form you like best:  Get our updates.

    Creative Commons License
    Our works here are published and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. If you’d like to reprint any of our materials, you may do so for noncommercial purposes, with no changes, and properly attributed with the author’s name and a link back to the original source. We’d also appreciate an email or a comment letting us know that you found our work useful!

    That’s all!
    So that’s the tour. Hope you found something useful for yourself and your business. Keep in touch.

    Filed Under: announcement