Why public relations are the key to successful destination marketing
It doesn’t matter whether you are a farmer with one or two holiday lets, or a park owner with multiple accommodation to sell. When it comes to destination marketing, you need to have both public relations and marketing activity to help you stand out from the rest.
Glamping in particular has become a crowded market place with many farmers and land owners diversifying and offering glamping and camping on their land.
To make your offering stand out, you need to invest in promoting the experience on multiple channels and that doesn’t mean just paying for some adverts.
The main difference between PR and marketing is that PR focuses on building and maintain a positive reputation for your brand or business while marketing focuses on directly promoting and selling, think social media posts compared to social media adverts.
Obviously for a business you need to make money, so marketing activity is essential, but you won’t get bookings if your online reputation and presence is poor, no matter how much marketing you do.
Before a potential customer makes a booking for a break or holiday, they will look at a number of things to help them decide who to spend their hard earned cash with.
Your prices will play an important part, but so will how they feel about your brand after doing their research. They will look at your online reviews and how you responded to them, check out your social media channels to get a real feel for your destination and the experience you offer and they may also google you see what if any articles come up, good or bad.
All of these things will influence where they spend their money.
So what can you do to improve your PR?
Organic Social Media Management
This is all about posting regular, engaging content on your social media channels to bring your glamping and camping experience to life.
It’s a great way to build a loyal, dedicated audience who can help market your offering with likes, shares and comments and the best thing is they help you promote your business for free!
Review stays/familiarisation visits
You may have seen other glamping and camping accommodation being reviewed in the newspapers, magazines and online.
Working with media and influencers to review your accommodation can result in a huge increase in traffic to your website and social channels, improve your search engine optimisation and increase bookings.
Media Relations
As well as review stays, you will undoubtedly have a story to tell from time to time.
Whether it’s the launch of a new glamping or camping venture, new units being added, new enhancements such as hot tubs or ensuite facilities, a special event taking place, they will all make a great news story for local newspapers and trade media securing you free coverage and promotion.
Getting articles published which link back to your website, will also improve your google rankings!
Awards
You probably know that there are awards out there you could enter, but just don’t have the time to research the right ones and do the applications. But winning an award can give you amazing positive coverage and undoubtedly increase your bookings.
Any business wanting to encourage people to book with them rather than a competitor would benefit from PR.
It’s all about creating your story, building trust and advocacy in your target market, developing your brand personality and showcasing the experience you offer.
