Title

Title Project MED-ROUTE “Mediterranean Route

for Tourism and Culture”(Ref. I-B/1.2/368)

MED-ROUTEPromoting

Thematic Tourism through Viral

Marketing Techniques and

Tools CENTRAL CONFERENCE: “Orchestrating

Strategies for the Development and Promotion of Thematic Tourism through

ICT in the Mediterranean Sea Basin” Al-Balqa, Jordan, 04/02/2014

Contents• Definitions• Social Media• Article Marketing• Blog Marketing• Social Media Bookmarking• Video Marketing• ICT and Tourism: International

Trends and Developments• Key Messages for Tourism

Businesses2MED-ROUTE CENTRAL CONFERENCE – Al-Balqa,

04/02/2014

Definitions• Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to

marketing techniques of focused use of social media networks, online communities, blogs, wikis or any similar online activities

• Web-marketing, online marketing, or eMarketing – all these terms refers to the internet marketing and are crucially important for promoting destination and market travel and tourism services

3MED-ROUTE CENTRAL CONFERENCE – Al-Balqa, 04/02/2014

Social Media (1/3)• Social media, unlike traditional media channels,

represent a unique way of transmitting information in all directions, not just “one-way” and “top-down”

• People generate and share their own content, which is very vital for marketing in tourism industry

• Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are the best known and effective social media networks for marketing in tourism and hospitality industry


Social Media (2/3)


Social Media (3/3)


Article Marketing• Article marketing is vital tool for traffic sourcing

and quite importantly for increasing page rank not only in tourism industry

• Promoting travel destinations, tourism businesses or travel trade events is an essential component of any long-term online marketing strategy

• Thousands of unique articles submitted and distributed to hundreds of article directories and e-zine directories increase the value of travel & tourism websites significantly


Blog Marketing• Blogging or blog marketing considerably help

promote destinations, tourism businesses and travel trade events in unparalleled and efficient way

• Posting of different unique articles to hundreds of tourism niche blogs market is an incredibly efficient marketing tool in terms of both developing free targeted traffic to websites as well as increasing search engine rankings through highly relevant one-way back links.


Social Media Bookmarking• Social bookmarking is one of the fastest

methods for internet users to organize, share, and manage web resources currently available as a SEO tool

• Most of social bookmarking services support internet users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags such as tourism, travel, marketing etc. Such tags in fact promote travel business and make it much more visible and searchable by search engines.

• Leading bookmarking: Delicious, StumbleUpon, digg, Yahoo!Buzz etc.


Video Marketing (1/2)• Videos are an attractive and fun medium used

by millions potential travelers around the globe who looking for interesting information put in the eye-catching way

• Video increases traffic to websites, appears in Google search results and on the end of the day helps in developing more sales opportunities

• According to Google study “The Travelers Road to Decision” YouTube is the most used site for travel-related videos, with 81% users looking for business travel options and 79% searching for personal travel opportunity.


Video Marketing (2/2)• A correctly submitted video is more than 50-

times more likely to push tourism websites on the first positions among search engine results than traditional SEO techniques

• Sadly, many companies either ignore videos at all or only submit the page where their video is hosted but not the video spot itself

• Visibility is key for the travel industry; because today’s online travelers are much more demanding when it comes to online bookings before fully committing


ICT and Tourism: International Trends and Developments (1/3)

• Integrated electronic destination management • Electronic Customer Relationship Management

(e-CRM)• Use of modern e-marketing methods • Use of mobile platform technologies in tourism

(m-tourism)• Use of advanced multimedia technologies,

digital maps and virtual reality techniques for the promotion of tourist destinations



• “Intelligent” data measurement / analysis systems for tourism, especially those which are based on data mining techniques and are used for targeted tourist marketing purposes

• Use of ICT methods to make tourist websites accessible by people with special needs and the elderly.




Key Messages for Tourism Businesses (1/9)


Source: Impactiv8 - “8 Key Social Media Strategies For Businesses Within The Tourism Industry”


























THINK GLOBAL

Thank you for your attention

Thomas PapapolyzosTREK Consulting SA

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