Social Media and SEO are no substitute for Advertising and PR

How do people find out about your destination or tourism business? How did your guests come to your particular hotel or B&B? How did your customers learn about your attraction? Was it through your website? Through a brochure? Or through a relationship with a tour operator/travel agent? Did your guest searched on the Internet for your destination? And if so, how did they know what to search for in the first place?

The more specific you can be about answering these questions the more you will be able to compete in the crowded global tourism market. When it comes to basics the fact is potential customers will never come to you if they don’t know you exist in the first place. While website optimization and Social Media initiatives are becoming increasingly important for tourism destinations and businesses, advertising and PR are still the best way to get known. It may be online advertising, but it is still (paid) advertising.

Search engine optimization and incursions into social media are no substitutes for advertising. Online advertising investment in the US in recent years has been growing substantially but it is still only about 6.5% of ad expenditures (TV and Print account for over 80% - source: TNS). Online advertising grew 17% from 2005 to 2006, by far the largest increase in the ad world (followed by Spanish TV and Spanish Press advertising with 13.9% and 8.5% respectively). As convergence continues to happen (the combination of video, print and interactive content delivered via many devices) it will be harder to separate the media, but what is clear is that the market still believes in advertising.

In order to first inform the consumer that something or somewhere exists, organizations need to advertise. Furthermore, good advertising may still be the best way to brand a product or service. You can optimize your website for search engines all you want, but if people are not searching for your product or destination, they will never come across it. For example, say you want to promote your destination in Spain because you’ve heard that it’s an up and coming market and Spaniards have a high standard of living and are affluent enough to travel to Canada. But other than Canada as a peaceful country, most Spaniards don’t know much about it as a tourism destination and it’s not in most peoples’ radars. You just launched a blog about your destination in Spanish and you found someone who can keep it going in that language. The problem is Spaniards are not searching for blogs in Spanish about Canada. How can you get them to visit the blog? Advertising. Blogs, Social Media and Search engines are great when people participate, but for them to do this they have to be interested in the topic (i.e. the destination) and if they don’t know anything about you or even that you exist, how will they?

Jaime