In today’s extremely competitive market, tourists are looking for unique, tailored and high-quality experiences.  Information technology is changing the business environment in which operators must work, as travelers can easily research and share information on the web.  The global economic downturn has put great pressure on the tourism industry, affecting business and leisure trips alike.

With such constantly evolving traveler habits and market conditions, it is more important than ever to have a distinctive and memorable brand with high awareness in the tourism market.  Your brand is your community’s identity – its value in the mind of the tourist.

The strength of your brand rests on two primary factors: process and creativity.

Process is critical because tourism branding has to be a team effort. It requires the readiness and commitment of local residents and businesses, council, staff and other stakeholders in order to be approved, accepted and implemented effectively.

By following a careful methodology that includes resident surveys, stakeholder interviews, committee involvement and extensive research into the history and economic strengths of a community, the challenge of achieving consensus can be met and the community’s tourism industry can move forward with vigor.

Getting the creativity right is a more subjective and elusive goal.  Every situation is unique, of course, but there are three rules that will generally determine the creative strength of your community’s tourism brand:

1.  Focus on how visitors feel

Many tourism brands deliver messages that are much the same.  To stand out, you need an emotional brand that resonates with your target tourism segments.  Market research must deliver the basics for this: Who are the visitors to your community? Where are they from?  What do they do when visiting your area?  Most importantly, how did visiting your community and its tourism offerings make them feel?

It is the tourist’s experience that creates a sense of satisfaction, not merely the activities or sights.  The impact of your brand will be strongest if it is centered on what visitors feel.

2.  Keep the Branding Unified

Many tourism attraction officers find themselves trying to sort through a chaos of juggling multiple brands.  A tourism area might encompass several municipalities, each of which has its own brand.  There may be another brand for an event, a region within an area or a region that includes other partners. Even within the municipality, there are often multiple brands, one for the municipality, another for the economic development department, another for a downtown revitalization organization and yet another for tourism.

This brand maze can be confusing to navigate for the tourism promoter, for tourism operators and mostly for tourists themselves. In addition, it results in a dilution and weakening of all brands.

How many brands are really required? We recommend a unification of brands to enable a municipality to focus and strengthen the most effective brand(s) based on a desired image. Where possible, one brand, one logo, one over-arching theme statement can be adapted or modified to serve the needs of specific departments, including tourism.  Having one unified brand, or one “family” of unified brands, is increasingly essential in the highly competitive world of vying for elusive tourism dollars.

3.  Make the branding effective for modern communications

The web is now the main channel used for tourism attraction. No longer is it sufficient to design images and messages that work well on paper.  Today’s tourists gain their first and sometimes only impressions of places online – often on a tiny handheld screen.

On your tourism website your brand must make a powerful statement - instantly.  It also has to expand easily throughout the growing variety of today’s social media landscape.  How will tourists perceive your tourism products on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter? Your brand will grow stronger as you use it more frequently and let it permeate throughout the online world.

Go online to where your target tourists are congregating, ask questions, generate conversation  - and take your brand with you!

Anya Codack

Yfactor Inc.
phone: 416-977-9724 x 509
fax: 416-642-1959
email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it   www.yfactor.com

133 Richmond Street West, Suite 202
Toronto, ON M5H 2L3

In tough times, where do tourists go?  Maybe they can’t afford a trip to Disneyland but they can afford to come to your community if they know from your tourism messages that they will have an enjoyable time.

Messages from the municipal tourism department should not focus merely on the tourism industry’s traditional offerings – sights, food, drink, accommodation and services.  Today’s tourists are looking for experiences. 

Your messages should promote your community as a destination of choice for experiences that the local tourism industry can deliver in ways that are competitively distinct.  Targeted to specific segments of tourism customers, your messages should tell them that your community offers personal, memorable experiences that will add value to their lives.

Many such experiences can arise from your community -- some noisy, some quiet, some for singles or couples, some for families.  The point is to address tourism customers, not just with a message like “Come see our Downtown,” but “Come see our Downtown and enjoy this kind of experience wrapped around it.”

The tourism industry worldwide is continually coming up with new ideas for such tourism experiences.  Some have become well established in recent years such as, sports, cultural, culinary and agricultural tourism.

Does your community offer any such experiences?  Chances are that local entrepreneurs are already attracting and serving tourists in this way.  In many communities the tourism-development departments struggle to keep up with the operators and do not sufficiently promote the available niche offerings as they become marketable.  This leaves tourism customers at a loss when they are searching the web for creative ideas for their getaway.

Searching the web -- that is how the majority of trips are now researched, planned and booked. The single most effective way to support your local tourism operators and increase tourism in your municipality is to make it easy to find them. Your tourism department and the local industry must collaborate to deliver web-based marketing and online booking capabilities for tourism product.

Turn your tourism website into a one-stop place for ideas about the many features of your community -- camp sites, museums, historical sites, beaches, parks, trails – that can appeal to tourists as inexpensive yet fulfilling experiences.  Include detailed listings and maps, an events calendar, and a selection of pre-planned trips that make travel to your region easy and convenient.

Publish information and ideas on blogs and social-networking sites and invite participation from your community – the more commentary and discussion you generate, and the more keywords you imbed in your website pages and messages, the more often search engines will place your site among the top picks on their results pages.

Here are some emerging tourism niches you could consider developing in collaboration with your business community:

• Eco Tourism – Eco-friendly golf courses, wineries, gardens, farms and other points of interest can be organized into tours for families and groups. 
• Girlfriends’ getaways – Reunions, celebrations and good old-fashioned escapes are increasingly popular among women in the form of trips that can encompass everything from spas and tranquil cottages to sports and adventure pursuits.
• Site Jogging – This is a new tourism trend for lifestyle-oriented people who like to jog around to various sites instead of riding in vehicles.

Just for fun, try searching for any of these keywords, or any of the more established ones such as agri-tourism or culinary tourism, and see which websites appear most prominently.  Next time, one of them could be yours!

Anya Codack

Yfactor Inc.
www.yfactor.com

phone: 416-977-9724 x 509
fax: 416-642-1959
email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

133 Richmond Street West, Suite 202
Toronto, ON M5H 2L3

An important best practice in the field of investment attraction is to determine and quantify what works for your community and what doesn’t.  Tough economic times call for implementing economic-development programs with the highest likelihood of demonstrable success.

Most successful economic development organizations have sound performance objectives as their starting point. This means not only tracking final results, but also the effectiveness of your various approaches to generating and converting leads, prospects and locates.

Fortunately the Web is an ideal medium for publishing information, inviting responses and measuring how much interest is generated.  Clear goals or key performance indicators should be established for all investment-attraction websites.

To help you know whether your goals are being achieved, you need 3 things:

•      Historical stats and documented, defined goals,
•      Access to detailed website visitor statistics,
•      A statistics review and analysis schedule with a feedback mechanism.

The economic-development department should conduct regular reviews of online visitors and their behaviour patterns. These need to be tracked, documented and analyzed. Search terms and keywords, most visited pages, and most requested information are just some of the data that needs to be recognized and then worked into the implementation of the online marketing plan.

An investment-attraction website is an evolving marketing channel and every site must plan for continuous improvement. Visitor behaviour will provide information on what’s working, what needs to be improved and what needs to be changed, deleted or added.

Very precise data can be collected for specific marketing campaigns. A banner ad campaign or an e-mail campaign will often be designed with more than one type of creative concept -- for example, you might try three or four different headlines. Each headline can be monitored and tracked separately, producing near real-time results. You can then adjust the campaign and increase the use of the most effective headline.

To enhance measurement of an online advertising campaign, it is often helpful to create a website page that is linked only to a specific online marketing promotion. For example, clicking on a banner ad would take a prospect to a page inside your site, rather than your home page. When analyzing your visitor traffic, you can see clearly which visitors came directly as a result of the campaign.

We can often learn more from our failures than from our successes. Don’t neglect to carefully track any portions of your site that don’t attract many visitors – before you replace them. This information helps to repair any deficiencies and to become more competitive in the future.

Statistics tracking and analysis principles can also be applied effectively to Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking sites. MySpace, Facebook and similar sites create networks through profiles and common interests.  It is easy to measure how many people join a network of discussion about a topic initiated by your economic development department.

Blogs lend themselves readily to measurement. A blog is a regularly updated commentary on a particular subject intended for a specific target audience. If you set up a blog on your investment-attraction site to discuss business opportunities in your community, you can measure not only how much interest it attracts but how much interactivity and lead generation it produces.

Finally, YouTube is ideal for reaching out to the market in a measurable way. Set up your own profile, publish as many videos as you like and watch the number of views climb in real time.

Ultimately all of these measurements will need to be scored against the bottom line – the number of genuine investment opportunities they bring to your community. Make sure that you ask all prospects how they heard about the opportunity. Better still, ask them to rate your various forms of communication!

Economic times are tough, to be sure, but the electronic forms of communication and measurement available to economic developers today represent opportunities never before available.

Anya Codack, CEO
Phone: 416-977-9724 x 509
Fax: 416-642-1959
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The economic recession is likely to cause many companies to cancel or delay decisions on business expansion and investment.  Nevertheless they will remain on the lookout. When conditions improve they will remember those communities that have retained an attractive, optimistic and cooperative image through their communications.

So the need for economic development does not disappear during tough times, far from it. But cost-effective strategies and methods are required for getting the word out. 

A traditional approach to investment attraction includes a heavy emphasis on publication advertising, direct mail, tele-prospecting and collateral mailing. This approach is costly, difficult to measure and time consuming to implement effectively. Today’s marketing strategies can take advantage of both tried and new Internet channels, using the Internet as a primary vehicle for image creation through the dissemination of facts, stories and anecdotes about a community – all with the intent of creating interest, thereby attracting people and businesses.

The Internet has become the number one tool for businesses and site selectors in their location search.  It provides the ability to publish easily and frequently and at low cost.  Announcements, events, blogs, online newsletters, business success stories, news and profiles will all help your community stand out as being a vibrant, dynamic place with a lot going on.

Here are some web-based communications channels that you should consider as part of your marketing strategy:

Podcasting

A podcast is a series of audio or video digital media files distributed over the Internet. It works by setting up a connection between a producer’s website and a subscriber’s computer or portable device so that shows can be downloaded automatically as they are produced. 

Podcasting is an increasingly popular method for building a loyal audience. A typical podcast series can consist of four- to 10-minute segments on topics of interest to specifically identified business sectors. Brief interviews with local entrepreneurs can be included to provide facts, stats, comments and anecdotes. In addition to sending them to subscribers, your department can disseminate them online through podcast websites.

Video Stories

Here’s a little research exercise: Try going to www.youtube.com and typing some keywords into the search box, such as “Canadian industrial properties” or “business location opportunity.”  You will see page after page of video summaries appear.  Social-networking sites like this are fast becoming ubiquitous business marketing tools in the same way that the web itself became a mainstay of business in the 1990s.

Video is an excellent method for distributing entrepreneurial success stories and capturing the ambience and spirit of a business community.

E-mail Marketing

Sending promotional e-mails to site selectors is inexpensive and effective if done professionally and with care. With e-mails you can "push" your message to a chosen audience, as opposed to waiting until a viewer sees an advertisement. E-mail messages are very easy to track, so you can measure the return on your investment.

What you need to avoid, of course, is the impression that you are distributing spam. One effective technique is to require what is known as the "double opt-in" method of requiring a potential recipient to manually confirm their request for information from you. Numerous e-mail marketing companies are available to help with such issues and to assist in creating formats and templates.

Mini-CDs

Site selectors and consultants don’t have much time. If they have obtained sufficient information about your community from your website to put you on their list of prospects, consider sending a detailed package on an inexpensive mini-CD instead of in a bulky folder.

The great advantage of this method is its convenience to the recipient. A little disc is easy to store and retrieve. Most importantly for professionals in a hurry, it is searchable by topic or keyword in seconds. Site-selection consultants will tell you that potential communities are sometimes left off their short lists for clients because it is too time-consuming to find information about them.

Web 2.0

Economic-development programs should take advantage of new online social media and dissemination channels to reach target sectors and businesses.  A web 2.0 program is increasingly necessary. The impact of blogs, wikis, tagging and social-networking sites is increasing every day in business life. 

An ideal channel for reaching audiences in a cost-effective way, Web 2.0 makes it possible to disseminate messages, video, audio, testimonials and stories and to reach either broad or narrow audiences.
In conclusion, tough economic times require not retrenchment, but a renewed approach to economic development that stresses creativity and energetic ways to proclaim your community’s advantages.

The Internet offers new ways to get the word out – faster, cheaper and more targeted. It is clear why this channel must become the principal tool in your marketing toolbox if you need to build a modern, sophisticated image for your community – one that will be remembered when it’s time for action.

Anya Codack, CEO
Phone: 416-977-9724 x 509
Fax: 416-642-1959
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Economic development used to be about going out and attracting a company, and pulling together incentive packages to land that company.  But that is not where economic development is going in the future.

The focus is shifting toward raising awareness of the uniqueness of each community and its ability to retain and attract talented people who will contribute to creating more economic opportunities.

A growing number of communities have realized that their development time and effort needs to be spent developing people-based business retention strategies at the same time as they continue with efforts to attract site developers.

More attention is being given to creating a community environment that provides a heightened quality of life and quality of place.  A high quality-of-life experience will be a significant factor in the attraction and retention of creative workers.

Urban theorist Richard Florida has noted that “access to talented and creative people determines where companies will choose to locate and grow, and this in turn changes the way cities can compete.” The theories of Florida, director of the Martin Prosperity Institute, affiliated with the University of Toronto, have had a tremendous impact on the way cities and organizations look at shaping their economic futures. In an interview with Canadian Business magazine in 2008, Florida discussed how attracting and retaining members of the “creative class” creates economic advantage through the development of clusters of talent.

“The real clustering that matters is not the clustering of industries and firms and technologies,” he said.  “It’s the clustering of highly innovative people.

“The places that attract them are the really, really big winners. They grow more, they have more patents, they have more innovation, they have higher housing values, incomes and wages. It’s no longer that we can grow just by popping stuff out of the ground and using people in these mass production assembly lines. The growth of human capabilities is coincident with the growth of our economies.”

A best practice in economic development today is to help keep communities vibrant by working collaboratively to develop strategies to retain a productive work force in an attractive and sustainable environment.

This means that investment attraction marketing needs to include emphasis on natural amenities, recreation facilities, culture, festivals, sports, heritage, shopping, health care and education.

Information and communications technologies are important tools in developing and deploying such strategies.  Web-based applications can assist with delivering public information and helping to build consensus around a program, gathering and analyzing industry intelligence, conducting surveys, presenting podcasts and reaching out to communities of interest through social networks.

All in the name of invigorating a community’s economy - through motivating and rewarding the people who live there!

Anya Codack

Yfactor Inc.
www.yfactor.com

phone: 416-977-9724 x 509
fax: 416-642-1959
email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Communities of all sizes in North America have discovered that their efforts to promote tourism as a pillar of economic development can gain a big advantage if they include culinary tourism among their offerings.

Since the turn of this century culinary tourism has become an industry within an industry, as statistics have revealed tremendous growth in the number of communities developing culinary tourism programs, and specialized organizations have sprung up to provide resources for such programs and develop best practices.

While tourism development organizations are fortunate to have these resources to build on, they should be guided by one overriding success factor – collaboration. A culinary tourism initiative cannot succeed without enthusiastic collaboration among the various organizations within the supply chain, with strong leadership usually provided by the tourism development or economic development organization. Collaboration is particularly essential to maintaining a high-quality website that promotes the program and is one of the most important factors in its success.

Key Concepts and Trends in Culinary Tourism

In its broadest sense, Culinary Tourism is defined as the pursuit of unique and memorable culinary experiences of all kinds, often while travelling, but one can also be a culinary tourist at home. In fact experience has shown that development of local awareness should be the first target for a culinary tourism program.

Culinary tourism is growing exponentially. Its leading authority, the International Culinary Tourism Association (ICTA, www.culinarytourism.org), reports that it has seen an enormous surge in recent years in the number of destinations exploring culinary tourism.

Yet this industry segment is not simple to organize – it does not consist merely of restaurants that can be grouped and listed. It encompasses cooking schools, cookbook and kitchen gadget stores, culinary tours and tour leaders, culinary media and guidebooks, caterers, wineries, breweries, distilleries, food growers and manufacturers, culinary attractions and more.

Furthermore, culinary travellers are not homogenous. Studies by the ICTA and other researchers have found that travellers who choose destinations based on culinary criteria span both genders, all age groups and all ethnic groups. Marketing activities in many cases must be carefully targeted to reach different market segments.

Culinary travelers generally have two things in common, however – higher incomes than generic tourists, and a tendency to spend more during their trips. It’s small wonder that more communities are trying to appeal to such travellers!

Culinary Tourism Programs

Communities embarking on a culinary tourism program need first to understand and identify all the complex elements of the regional food supply chain. One of the most important critical success factors is the creation of an inventory within the region. Understanding what is available is fundamental to building a successful program and packaging the products within it.

Programs typically combine:

• Facilities such as farms
• Activities such as visiting wineries;
• Events such as food festivals;
• Organizations such as hospitality and tourism associations.

A program can combine some or all of these elements but will often have a geographic component as well, such as a culinary trail, that serves both as a unifying element for the program and as the cornerstone for its branding.

The most important component of any culinary tourism program is the membership. It is critical for the economic development department – or any other designated leadership body for the program -- to locate, contact, and invite eligible establishments to participate in the culinary tourism program. All the links in the supply chain need to understand that they depend on each other, not just for supply but to support the brand and marketing strategy.

Culinary Tourism Websites

Culinary tourists are very likely—more so than generic tourists—to research and plan their trips online. The web’s multimedia and interactive capabilities make it the perfect medium to convey powerful and compelling stories to draw tourists to culinary businesses.

A culinary tourism website should be designed as a niche site that has its own distinctive appeal consistent with the brand of the community as a whole. It should incorporate the most important characteristics of tourism websites in general, as described earlier in this series (see “How Competitive Is Your Tourism Website?” published May 5, 2009):

• The site must offer one-stop access to all culinary tourism products and absolutely must be kept up to date;
• It must help visitors to make decisions about where they would like to go, based on their own situations and preferences;
• It must be interactive, enabling visitors both to obtain answers to individual questions and to communicate with others about aspects of the culinary tourism program.

Social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter can be used. Integrating Google Maps into the website will make it easy for visitors to locate attractions and determine the best routes to reach them.

The design of the website should incorporate a search engine optimization plan, a linking strategy, and an online advertising program to drive traffic and ensure that the site appears high in search engine results for relevant keywords.

Other desirable features include an itinerary planner where tourists can organize their culinary experiences, a directory, advanced destination search capability, photo galleries and a press room.

Best Practices for Culinary Tourism

• Partnerships – It cannot be overstressed that culinary tourism involves many players. There is a need for these players to share the most effective possible communication and networking. Partnerships need to be built with local organizations, including cultural and general business organizations, as well as with government organizations at higher levels that can provide significant resources.
• Leadership -- Studies have revealed the importance of strong and effective yet collaborative leadership to the success of culinary tourism programs. Key roles for the leadership organization are to direct the execution of the culinary tourism strategy, act as the conduit for communication among stakeholders and partners, and provide links to other culinary tourism initiatives and resources at levels ranging from local to international.
• Integration -- The development of culinary tourism should become part of the tourism strategy of a community. Successful culinary tourism programs ensure that services such as accommodation, shopping, recreational attractions and information services are readily available and promoted in a way that helps support the culinary tourism activities.
• Financial support and performance measures -- Most culinary tourism products require a few years to become established and successful. They need long-term investment resources and financial plans. They also need to demonstrate success to their funding organizations by means of measurements such as revenues, additional spending by tourists, increased person-trips and the like.
• Differentiation -- Culinary tourism programs should be distinctive to the region. The essence of culinary tourism is an emphasis on local products or local styles of cuisine that make the community’s experience unique for visitors.

Anya Codack, CEO

Yfactor.com

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1-877-793-5016

The web provides many advantages as a communications platform, but when you visit the websites of non-profit organizations around North America it is surprising to see how often those advantages are negated because the sites are not up to date.

An outdated website wastes the time of your visitors and undermines your organization’s credibility. It also directly affects your revenue. If events and campaigns are not publicized early enough and with appropriate frequency, participation will drop.

That these threats are frequently not addressed points to a universal management problem among NPOs – the lack of time on the part of staff and volunteers to update the website content. This arises often from bottlenecks created when web content is the responsibility of only a very few people, even in cases when the organization has multiple websites to manage across branches or regions.

A solution could be decentralized content publishing -- assigning responsibility for various content updating tasks to different people. But this solution might not always be the answer.

There are disadvantages to decentralized content publishing from a management point of view. The national organization does not want to find that many voices are representing the organization in many different ways.

Should a chapter publish incorrect information or inappropriate opinions, the national organization may find itself managing a public relations nightmare. Organization-wide branding is a key concern. So is managing the timing and consistency of messages across the organization.

Then there are costs to consider. Decentralized content publishing typically means that each chapter or regional office has its own website to manage. Often the costs of those sites – hosting, design, maintenance and support -- are managed at a local level and the national organization is not aware of the total impact. Duplication of effort becomes a serious financial issue.

Further, many of the business advantages of the web can be cancelled by a structure that engages multiple content authors to supply multiple websites. Chapters will invariably select different databases or formats, making it difficult or impossible to gather data for the entire organization and to run association-wide reports critical for decision making.

Common Platform, Common Workflow

The dilemma facing many NPOs, then, is whether to centrally manage the website content with the constant risk of it being outdated, or to assign responsibility for content to many authors with the risk of organizational disarray.

Fortunately there is a solution available that combines decentralized content publishing with a common management platform – a multi-site content-management system.

With this type of technology all sites, the national site and all chapters, can be operated from a single administration platform that incorporates easy publishing tools combined with restricted access management and workflow approval processes.

Simple tools let the organization’s communications manager quickly set up user rights by selecting the desired access level for any given user on any affiliated website. An integrated workflow approval process makes it possible for various people to be assigned different roles in the process, such as page creator, page reviewer or page publishers.

Chapters can be given total autonomy or some pages can be reserved for use by the national organization. This keeps consistency of messaging and branding in place while permitting local flexibility.

Staff or volunteers can update web content easily, using familiar editing tools. Content creation can be delegated to any number of individuals, with specific website areas assigned to people with appropriate expertise.

An effective multi-site content management system can reduce publishing times from weeks to minutes and remove many of the common bottlenecks encountered in typical publishing processes.

Do users of the system need to be technically savvy? No, but they do need basic communications skills and an understanding of best practices on the web – content writing principles, the importance of links and easy navigation, the principles of search-engine optimization and techniques for content creation that increase usability and user satisfaction.

The multi-site content management system should come with tools that support such best practices and the technology provider should be prepared to offer excellent training to the system users.

In summary, a multi-site content management system can be the technological solution that makes decentralized content publishing successful. It can enable non-technical users at each chapter to publish information themselves, using a common platform that promotes collaboration and permits the national organization to have the branding and messaging influence it needs.

A major reason why the web has become the predominant medium for destination marketing is that it permits a community to do far more than just cast a wide net of information and hope that it picks up some interested tourists. Today’s website technologies and social networking services combine to enables a destination to communicate interactively with highly targeted groups of potential visitors and even with individuals.

This explains the recent growth in the number and variety of themed tourism mini-sites. You might want to consider allocating some funds in your tourism promotion budget for building such mini-sites because they effectively fulfill the potential of the web, and make it increasingly easy for potential tourists to find what they want. That adds value to your message.

As noted in an earlier article in this series (“Directories and Itineraries for Tourism Websites,” Jan. 19, 2010), people visit tourism websites with personal goals in mind for their trip. Their choice of destination often depends on whether a site reveals desirable characteristics in a tourism offering.

Mini-sites take advantage of this personal-shopping aspect of the web by suggesting new ways for people to enjoy their vacations in keeping with their personal goals.

For a guide to how these ideas can be put into action you can examine the tourism strategy of the City of Enumclaw, Washington (pop. 11,470). The city is developing an ingenious strategy based on the brand, “Washington’s Equestrian Capital.”

The objective of the tourism strategy is “to use the unique brand for Enumclaw based on the equestrian-themed Expo Center as the lure to bring visitors to both the center and the town in general to engage in a concentrated rural atmosphere of activities and events, spend money and have a good experience.”

The strategy identifies and appeals to three groups: local visitors up to 30 miles away, day visitors to a distance of 60 miles and overnight visitors coming from a radius of 120 miles.

And the web? The Enumclaw strategy identifies it as a key marketing tool, with a website specific to the equestrian brand. It recommends the following characteristics and content for the site:

a. Organize it by interests and activities.
b. Make photographs compelling.
c. Draw in the viewer with:

• Videos and podcasts
• Opt-in e-newsletter
• Press room
• Printable activities guide and “best of” brochures and maps
• Links to class registrations, hotels, dining.

It’s clear that Enumclaw understands how a themed mini-site can be used as a foundation for a successful tourism strategy. You can download the Enumclaw, WA Marketing Plan & Style Guide here.

Niche Marketing

Micro-, niche- or mini-sites can be the key to implementing niche marketing in a way that still reflects a cohesive, consistent brand. An outstanding example is www.traveliowa.com, the official tourism website of the State of Iowa.

This site, though unified by a modular design and the logo “Iowa Life/Changing,” is really a collection of mini-sites. It deliberately presents no generic information, but invites the viewer immediately to express personal preferences by clicking on topics according to a variety of criteria: location, timing, type of experience or specific destinations.

Pages devoted to vacation themes, such as Iowa’s history, are structured around maps and linked descriptions of attractions that fit that theme. Individual attractions are promoted by large rotating photos that link to in-depth sites with interactive capabilities such as ticket purchases. On all pages the viewer can consult an events calendar and express personal viewpoints using Facebook or Twitter or RSS feeds. This is a site that invites visitors to dig deeply into their own preferences to make their vacation plans.

Mini-sites can serve any number of purposes within a tourism strategy. They can guide tourists through activities related to hobbies, historical figures and places, music, local products and special events. They can effectively promote initiatives that would be difficult to present comprehensibly in any other medium.

The Town of Markham, Ontario, for example, has an innovative festival every August called Doors Open Markham. It is an annual showcase of the community's historical and architectural heritage sites involving many institutions, historic buildings, heritage homes and private gardens. How can such a multi-faceted event be marketed in a bite-sized package? The answer is a mini-site, www.doorsopenmarkham.ca, that captures the spirit of the event while serving the key function of tourism websites – to answer viewers’ questions.

These examples demonstrate that a single tourism website does not need to be all things to all people. It can serve as a gateway to mini-sites designed for specific purposes and to appeal to audiences that your community wants to target in its destination marketing strategy.

Anya Codack, CEO

Yfactor.com

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1-877-793-5016