Email Marketing and Pop-up Marketing Campaign By: Isa 2 comments

Hello!

How’s everyone’s spring going? Here in Rovaniemi we have had both +18 degrees and a lot of Sun, and now during the past few days we have been getting snow… Summer is coming, slowly but surely 🌞

As our semester is coming to its end in a few weeks, today’s post will be our last, but not the least 👀

Within the past few weeks we have had a workshop about email marketing and we also made a marketing post example for the pop-up we have been designing.

Let’s see what these are about!

Email Marketing

Have you ever gotten a newsletter, feedback survey or a welcome email from a web page you signed up to? If, and when the answer is yes: all of these are types of email marketing.

Some might think that email marketing is dead, but that is actually not the case. For a decade already, email has been the channel generating the highest ROI for marketers.

You might also think: “Isn’t social media a better way to market these days?”. That is also not true, since the statistics say that the engagement rate of the biggest social medias is less than 0.6%, while the average email open rate is 22.86%. Amazing right?

Email vs. Social Media Engagement (OptinMonster 2019).

While not going too deep into the world of email marketing and how to do it, because there is a lot (and when we say a lot, we mean it) of information about the subject online, we thought that it would be better to share some links to useful articles and pages to help you to kick off your email marketing campaign 😊:

A Best Practice Guide to Email Marketing for Travel and Tourism

Email Marketing Trends for 2019

The Ultimate List of Email SPAM Trigger Words (2017)

Mailchimp

After our teacher’s short lecture about email marketing, we put our newly acquired information into practice by using Mailchimp.

Mailchimp Logo (Mailchimp 2019)

Mailchimp is a marketing platform founded in 2001, as a side project by Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius. At first, it was only an email marketing tool, but have since expanded to other channels as well, such as Facebook and Google ads.

To put it very shortly, users can: Create, Connect, Automate and Optimize on Mailchimp.

Some of us in this blogging group created a general newsletter about this marketing course, while the others in the group created emails from different points of view about a survey that was created during another workshop.

Unfortunately, we are unable to share our email examples, because screenshotting them does not give any good results 🙈 So let's move on to the next topic for this post 😉

Marketing Post Example

Part of our work for the pop-up experience we designed, and wrote about in our previous posts, was to create a draft of a marketing post. Surely, everyone has seen marketing posts scrolling around social media. 

So, what is important when creating such a thing? 

• Do it through the business profile, NOT through your personal one.
• Keep it short, informative and catchy.
• Decide for which kind of customers are you aiming.
• Add visual content, such as a picture or a video.
• Add relevant hashtags (e.g. #Lapland).
• Make it public and easily accessible.
• DO NOT make it insulting in any way.
• DO NOT include anything that is not allowed.

If you are getting afraid of social media marketing, please do not be. It is not as hard as you may think it is, as you can see from the image below.

Marketing Post Example for the Pop-Up Experience

This image represents our marketing post example. The post was made only as a draft and  so, has not been shared publicly. It includes short story-like text from the Elves' point of view both in English and Finnish, since it is targeted for both Finns and international travelers. 

The post also includes some relevant hashtags in the two languages and an image of a reindeer family in their natural habitat. 

We planned it for Facebook, since it is aimed mainly at families with children and nowadays many adults and their families are using this social media.

Unfortunately, our pop-up's execution is not possible yet due to copyright issues - which you can read more about in this post - but we will see what the future holds 😉 

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Thank you all so much for staying with us through this blogging journey in understanding marketing and we hope that you enjoyed our content!

Over and out ✌

Marketing Trends & Sharing Economy in Tourism By: Isa No comments

Hello again!

This week our topics in class were tourism marketing trends in 2019 and sharing economy.

Based on sharing economy, we conducted an interesting case study on peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodation and ancillary services in Oulu.

Let's dive in to see what these are about.

Tourism Marketing Trends in 2019

Starting off with trends, we got introduced to some of them through a presentation by our teacher Petra Paloniemi. These trends were Authentic Local Experiences, Personalization, Travel for Good, Tech and Digital Detox.

As travellers nowadays want to experience authentic local lifestyles, these kinds of experiences are becoming ever more popular. The experiences are more immersive, introducing such elements as food, e.g. cooking classes in Lapland or making your own wine in France (Paloniemi 2019).

In 2019, travellers also want to feel less like unwanted outsiders and more like locals through interactions with residents in their everyday moments and also outside the tourist areas (Paloniemi 2019).

Personalization is created by collecting valuable data starting from the initial research and all the way to consuming (Paloniemi 2019).

And what is done with this data?

The data is then used to deliver spot-on messages and offers throughout the customer journey on, for example, booking engine-apps (Paloniemi 2019)!

Travel for greater good focuses on responsible tourism, with Millenials and Generation Z in the travel market. Sustainability and greenness are important to them and the desire to make a positive impact on communities has created the voluntourism industry (Paloniemi 2019).

Through the growing development of tech, tech-savvy solutions are being developed and becoming more advanced. Such advancements allow the instant booking of tours, restaurant reservations, attraction tickets and more, directly from smartphones. Augmented reality (AR) apps are also becoming more common - from language translators to city guides (Paloniemi 2019).

And last but not the least trend: Digital Detox.

Nowadays, with the excessive use of smartphones and other devices, it's no wonder that one might want a detox from their phone for a few days, right?

Some tourism companies have started to offer tours to off-beaten-tracks without wifi or even electricity, while some hotels and resorts encourage guests to use their devices less - or go as far as setting phone bans. Despite the peace of mind and relaxation these detoxes bring, there is a definite downside to marketers. That is, the loss of invaluable user-generated content. (Paloniemi 2019.)

Alright, onto the next topic ↓

Sharing Economy in Tourism and Marketing

Sharing economy is an economic model based on sharing underutilized assets for monetary and non-monetary benefits, that is largely focused on peer-to-peer (P2P) marketplaces (DeCrop 2016). Airbnb, HomeAway and Couchsurfing are examples of P2P accommodation (DeCrop 2016), and ancillary services around P2P accommodation can be related to food, transportation, activities, tours and so on (Jutila 2019). 

According to DeCrop, the fast development of sharing economy is due to tourists' increasing openness to self-guided holidays and desire to experience authentic experiences. The economic crisis and unemployment have also pushed many to pay more attention to prices and value for money. (DeCrop 2016.)

Case Study: P2P Accommodation and Ancillary Services in Oulu*

Looking at the P2P accommodation situation in the Oulu Region, there are 262 active rentals. Of those rentals, 82% are on Airbnb, 15% on HomeAway and 3% on both, with sizes ranging from shared rooms to entire homes.

 Airbnb and HomeAway rentals on the map

Other than rental accommodation services, searching with “Oulu” there are 2 783 Hosts on Couchsurfing as of 13 April 2019.

Then, searching for P2P ancillary services, starting with Airbnb there is only 1 experience provider, 0 results with eatwith, and searching for “food experience Oulu” or “Dining experience Oulu” both in Finnish and English only leads to restaurant reviews.

For transportation services, Bloxcar provides 6 search results for cars in Oulu. Other transportation services when searching “carpooling Oulu” give results to sites such as kyydit.net – which is mostly for city to city carpooling.

Other than the already existing accommodation and ancillary services, we thought of some smaller everyday services that guests might look for. When booking P2P accommodation, guests might want the option to use the kitchen or to do laundry. While for example Airbnbs are often well-equipped, we found out that if there's no option to do laundry at the accommodation, there also aren't laundromats - which are common in many countries. There is one laundromat company in Finland, but they do not operate in Oulu.

As for P2P accommodation hosts, usually their rentals are fully equipped with everyday commodities. But, in case they have a constant flow of guests, outsourcing cleaning or laundry services could be easier for them 😄

To wrap up this post, we think that P2P services are a great way to provide local authentic experiences! We could not really think of many downsides, other than the fact that the legality of the services and respecting the surroundings should be taken into account.

Here are some examples of what kind of disputes P2P services have caused:

What airbnb really does to a neighbourhood

Uber relaunches a licensed service in Finland after taxi law deregulation

We'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas regarding the marketing trends or sharing economy!

Stay tuned for our next post 😉

*case study originally conducted on 11 April, data numbers checked on 13 April 2019.

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Bibliography

Paloniemi, P. 2019. Lapland UAS. Lecture. Some Trends Related to Tourism Marketing. 8 April 2019.

Jutila, S. 2019. Lapland UAS. Lecture. Possiblities and Challenges in Peer-to-Peer Accommodation. 8 April 2019.

Marketing Elves By: Isa 2 comments

Jussa and Nessi - The Ranua Elves

Hello dear readers!

Here we are once again with an exciting blog post for you 😄

In the last two weeks we have been up to quite a lot in our studies, and all the knowledge we gained can in fact be applied to our project work we introduced in one of our previous blog posts.

So this is the time to reveal more about our project, which includes two elves called Jussa and Nessi, and how to apply what we learnt in helping these elves to deliver memorable experiences and implement a marketing campaign 😉

Social Media Tools: Twitter By: mkkk 2 comments

Twitter in their own words is "what's happening in the world and what people are talking about right now."

It is a news and social networking service, where users post and interact with short messages, more commonly known as "tweets". The length of a tweet was originally 140 characters, but the limit was doubled to 280 characters in 2017. Get to know why!

How to start using Twitter

Here is a little video demonstration, showing the phases of creating a twitter account.

After setting up your account, you can start exploring the many functions of Twitter, and how to use it for you company. To get help and tips for using Twitter, check out their extensive Help Center!

How can tourism businesses take advantage of Twitter?

According to the latest statistics, most of the Twitter users are millenials, which means roughly between 18 and 29 years of age.

If we look at this fact, we could deduce that whatever business, including the tourism businesses, can get the most out of Twitter if targeting people under their 30s.

However, Twitter itself provides some tools and tips for targeting your audience in order to reach the people you actually want to reach.

This means that, if used correctly and upon the implementation of a well-planned strategy, Twitter can turn into a nice addition to a business' marketing strategy.

Focusing on tourism businesses, nowadays travelers are all about sharing on social media whatever they are experiencing at every stage of their travel: pre-, on site and after.

As regards Twitter in detail, about a third of its users access the platform before or after a trip, while 39% use it mid-journey. Moreover, nearly 20% of users tweet to share feedback throughout their travel experience.

From such insights it's understandable that travel companies and brands can use Twitter to boost their image and support word-of-mouth marketing.

This can be done especially by sharing content that is highly valued by the tourism business' target group. This usually includes discounts, last-minute deals, contests and travel ideas backed up by beautiful images - even though Twitter's focus was not originally on sharing pictures.

Another tip to boost tourism businesses' visibility on Twitter is to use the company logo as their avatar for the brand to be quickly and easily recognisable. Also hashtags are a great way to promote a tourism brand and connect all the feedback related to it.

Many more steps can be taken in order to sell tourism products with the aid of Twitter - you can never stop learning!

Examples of good use

Indeed, if you want to learn more, Twitter provides some inspiration about why should you tweet as a tourism brand.

You can also learn from other brands - not necessarily tourism related ones - how to boost your image by using Twitter.

What do we think about Twitter?

Two of us bloggers were already familiar with Twitter before writing this post, while the other two of us had only a basic knowledge about the social media platform.

Doing research on the social media, especially focusing on its use in the tourism business, helped all of us to understand Twitter either just a bit more in deep or quite a lot more.

We think that Twitter is quite underrated, when looking at all the great opportunities it can offer as a platform to reach and engage your audience.

Now we all feel confident about the usefulness of Twitter for marketing and promoting tourism, and we believe that it is a good way to widen a brand's visibility and impact on the target group.

Want to know more?

If you want to get to know more about Twitter and how to use it in an efficient way, here are some tips for you!

While for business tweeting, you can check some best practices provided directly by Twitter.

Also, if you want to focus on Marketing on Twitter, here is a useful and detailed guide for you to check. And you can have a look at the following video too, which introduces some great tips and tricks to use 😉

Last but not least, for the ones interested in using Twitter especially for tourism purposes - like us - here are 3 powerful ways to do so 💪

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What about you? Are you already familiar with Twitter? Did you know how useful it can be for a tourism business to tweet? 😄

Introduction to Marketing By: Isa 10 comments

Hi again!

Our journey to understand Marketing has begun, and we are ready to share with you our freshly gained knowledge 😎