So you have successfully selected a marketing representative for your unique destination. You have been working with them for a few months now, but how do you determine if the work they are doing for you is paying off? You want to ensure that they are marketing your location accurately and effectively. In order to evaluate your marketing rep’s performance, you must monitor them on a regular basis. Here’s how:

1. Determine the set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you are looking for.
It is important for your organization to determine what KPIs, or metrics, you would like to measure, and eventually see improve. You want to ensure that these metrics span across all marketing activities, and reflect the success of your organization accurately. Keep in mind that this varies from organization to organization. Most companies typically utilize Return on Investment as a KPI. However, you must ensure that you are calculating the return accurately. Are you carefully estimating how much you’ve gained from your marketing investment? Does this include retaining your customer base, as well as gaining new customer revenue? ROI is an essential KPI to track. Here are some more KPIs your firm can utilize, to ensure that you are recording your marketing performance accurately:

• Number of hits to website
• Performance indicators on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. These sites typically have their own performance metric tools that are easily accessible.
• Number of clicks, click-through rates – found through tracking tools like Google Adwords. This is effective for tracking how well your marketing rep is working on your search engine optimization (SEO)
• Revenue gained by traditional media marketing and advertisements
• Number of inquiries you receive for tours/activities you offer
• Actual travel volume – how many visitors are coming and going from your locale on a weekly/monthly basis? How many visitors are you receiving from your selected target market?

2. Find your baseline.
In order to see if your marketing representative has made any improvement to the KPIs you found above, you need to measure where you stand before they begin (or once they start). Make sure to record what level each KPI is at before any marketing campaigns have started. This is so you have a baseline to compare future numbers to and you will be able to track visible improvement.

3. Conduct performance evaluations on a regular basis.
Now that you’ve determined the metrics you want to measure and have established a baseline, it is important to regularly measure these metrics periodically. A good idea is to see how you are doing on a monthly or quarterly basis. Evaluating performance on a regular basis allows you to determine what aspects of your marketing rep’s campaign are succeeding and which are underperforming – allowing you to re-strategize sooner.

4. Analyze the change in performance
While you may be tempted to fire your marketing rep as soon as you see a dip in your ROI, don’t be so quick to make that decision. It’s important to analyze why certain KPIs are underperforming. For example, even though travel volume may not have increased over a few months, you may be seeing greater visitors to your website, which could mean greater awareness of your destination and more visitors in person in the future. However, if you see a consistent lag in the performance of KPIs across the board, it’s probably time to have a discussion with your marketing representative about their strategy and whether they are the best fit for your organization. It may be time to look elsewhere.

It’s important to measure the success of any marketing campaign, whether you’ve been working with your marketing representative for years or you just hired a new one last week. Finding a marketing rep that fits well with your organization is key, but consistent performance monitoring ensures that the door to your destination is open to the travelers you need and ensures that your marketing efforts continue to lead you down the road to success.

For information on the work Solimar has done with marketing representation, check out our representation projects in Rwanda, Namibia, and Myanmar.

Natural heritage sites are changing in this ever-evolving world, and not for the better. Organizations like the PUP Global Heritage Consortium are working to revolutionize the way these sites are managed, with a holistic, adaptable approach. They are the ones working to ensure that our grandkids will get the chance to see these sites. But what are Natural Heritage Sites and what is happening to them? UNESCO defines them as “superlative natural phenomenon or areas of exceptional beauty and aesthetic importance.” They contain “the most important and significant natural habitats for in-situ conservation of biological diversity”. 

Unfortunately, many of these sites are facing extinction. 

For many of our grandkids, all that may be left of these wildly unique heritage sites will be a faded picture or a passed down story. Our grandkids may not get the chance to see the rare gorillas swinging in the trees, but only frozen in a museum. 

Read this list and memorize every detail to one day teach your grandkids on your rocking chair. Or, better yet, you can play your part in supporting conservation efforts and maybe then, you can take them there yourself.

1. Simien National Park, Ethiopia

Amongst awe-inspiring mountain peaks, cliffs and valleys live an array of rare animals as diverse and wonderful as the opening scene of The Lion King. Endangered animals such as the Walia Ibex (a wild goat found nowhere else in the world), a cat called the caracal, the Ethiopian wolf and the Gelada Baboon (both pictured above), are rare animals which call this place their home. But as the park is compromised by unsustainable agricultural grazing, human settlement and soil erosion, these animals are further endangered. 

A lack of effective tourism and conservation planning has meant that this park and its colorful inhabitants are in danger. Without such planning, human inhabitants will continue to graze the land for natural resources in an unsustainable way, putting pressure on wildlife and ultimately making the park more like the Lion King’s elephant graveyard than the circle of life. No more Hakuna Matatas. 

2. Virunga National Park, Democratic Republic of the Congo

Also home to endangered wildlife, the Virunga National Park is Africa’s oldest national park, with eight incredible volcanoes (two of which are the most active in Africa). The park once had the largest hippo population in the world, as well as a significant number of forest elephants.

However, it is the fight for the critically endangered mountain gorilla which has garnered significant media attention. Nearly half of the world’s 700 remaining mountain gorillas live in Virunga, but they are being hunted by poachers for meat or for sale. Many have even been senselessly murdered in the last decade. Since 1994, about 140 park rangers have been killed in their fight to protect the park from illegal poaching and land acquisition. This is no easy fight, but increasing media coverage and sustainable tourism development may just give this special animal a fair chance.

3. Los Katios National Park, Colombia

Come to this site and you’ll find the fastest flowing river in the world, the Atrato River. You’ll also find yourself surrounded by varied landscapes, from forests, to floodplains, to low hills. This diversity extends also to the native fauna. Native species of mouse, grey-headed chachalaca, as well as 440 bird species and 550 species of vertebrae have been found in the park.

This diversity, however, is being threatened by illegal fishing, human settlement and deforestation. Trees are coming down all over the park as timber is illegally extracted. Anyone knows that without trees, a forest cannot be a forest and birds will have nowhere to rest their heads at night. Without adequate tourism and conservation planning, bedtime stories about forests will be like stories about distant planets.

We live in a unique moment in history where we have the ability to not only visit these sites, but to also try and preserve these sites for future generations with sustainable tourism development. Organizations like the PUP Consortium and UNESCO are leading the way in conservation and protection. The PUP consortium, in particular, offers adaptive training and reports for heritage sites, helping them thrive in an ever-changing environment.

The challenges are many, but if we make the right moves, these areas and their wildlife may survive. At the end of the day our grandkids will thank us. That is, in between texting on their iPhone v82 of course.

To learn more about tourism and conservation planning, visit our website or check out the work of the PUP Consortium.