Author: SolimarInt

Project Kicks Off in Morocco

On May 23, 2012, Solimar International kicked off its 13 month project: Promotion des Circuits Touristiques Integrant L’artisanat (Promotion of Tourism Circuits that Integrate Handcrafts, funded by the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). This project aims to increase the convergence between the craft and tourism industries and increase revenue through the creation of tourism circuits in the Medinas of Fes and Marrakech. Since the project started, the team has been busy meeting with local stakeholders and working to organize workshops to introduce the project to the different regions. The team held its first workshop in Fes on June 22, 2012, and the second workshop in Marrakech on July 9, 2012.

For the June 22 workshop, the project required a minimum of 50 people in attendance, but there was an amazing turnout of 140 people. The State Secretary for Crafts, the Director of APP, about 15 journalists and other distinguished guests were present. The Chief of Party, Olivier Messmer, gave a very impressive presentation on the goals and objectives of the project, what the tourism circuits for Fes were and how the project would roll out its activities over the next 13 months. We have received a lot of positive feedback from APP as well as the Ministry of Crafts for this opening workshop. Special thanks to Shawndra, Olivier and the entire Morocco team for putting together such a successful workshop. We look forward to continued success for the next workshop in Marrakech!

This year marks Solimar’s fifth year working on the Global  Sustainable Tourism Criteria – a groundbreaking set of voluntary guidelines created to provide an international understanding of sustainable tourism. The long term goal: strengthen consumer confidence in  the tourism industry’s sustainability claims and provide a clear path for tourism business seeking more sustainability in their offers.

This movement has come a long way since 2007 when Solimar was first contracted to analyze nearly 3000 tourism criteria from around the world. After the original GSTC Criteria for hotels and tour operators  were launched in 2008, the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) came to life out of the ad hoc coalition of partners such as the United Nations Foundation, UNEP, Sabre/Travelocity and Rainforest Alliance that helped finance and provide guidance to the initiative. Solimar has built websites, managed social media outreach, developed GSTC indicators and supported the ongoing technical review and revision of the GSTC Criteria as the Council has grown from a network of less than 50 to its current 200-strong membership.

Throughout 2011, the GSTC has focused on building a series of recognition processes  that will add additional strength to sustainable tourism standards and certification programs by ensuring that they meet global best practices. Standards –may apply to receive GSTC recognition, and several – including those from the Rainforest Alliance, EarthCheck, and Costa Rican Tourism Board have done so. Certification programs with GSTC-recognized standards can then apply to become GSTC Approved. The first GSTC Approved  standard is set to be announced soon.

This year, the GSTC is moving into its next phase as they develop a set of global criteria focused on sustainable destination management. Solimar Chaiman, Don Hawkins, has been involved in the development of the criteria set to launch in December. Like the criteria for hotels and tour operators, the Global Sustainable Tourism Criteria for Destinations will serve as an aspirational set of guidelines for places interested in conserving and strengthening their human, cultural, and environmental resources. Five pilot destinations, including the Okavango Delta  and Lanzarote have volunteered to pilot test the criteria and ensure that they are attainable and useful in a real context.

The GSTC Criteria have proven to be a useful tool for Solimar’s projects in Bolivia and the Western Balkans where they provide a previously unavailable starting point to assess current sustainable tourism efforts and a clear path for operator training, product management, and targeted marketing.

The GSTC hosted its 3rd Annual Meeting this week in Washington, DC, featuring an impressive line up of speakers from the travel industry.

I love marketing almost as much as I love traveling. The idea of using communication to create value for a company is something that I connected with at an early age. When I founded Solimar, I wanted to apply my love for travel and my passion for marketing to help small and medium-sized tourism businesses located in undiscovered destinations reach the North American market. I quickly learned that the problem with that idea is finding a model that works for the client and works financially for us.

In 2001, the only marketing options that worked for tourism companies were earned media through public relations or distribution through tour operators and travel agents. Websites were thought of as digital brochures.

Doing these types of activities effectively is a full-time job, something that many small travel businesses are unable to finance. This forced me to abandon the original business model and shift to selling travel as a travel agency and later to turn Solimar into a sustainable tourism consulting firm that works in international development. I love the work we do at Solimar, especially the impact of our work, but I still long for a way to help businesses and destinations with travel marketing.

This past year, Solimar won a contract to help the Namibia Tourism Board develop and implement a global online marketing strategy funded by the Millennium Challenge Corporation. When we started developing the campaign, we knew the tactics – blogging, social media, SEO, online advertising, and content creation – but as we started doing this, I began asking my team the same questions I knew our client was going to ask us: What is the value of this? What is the return on investment ROI for online marketing? How are these activities putting “heads in beds”? We started falling into the same trap as many of today’s digital marketing companies -talking about the importance of likes, sentiment, engagement, brand loyalty – the terms that make us sound smart and important – without answering the question about how online marketing delivers visitors to a destination.

So I did what anyone does when you have a question, I turned to Google. I spent hours researching online marketing tactics and models for showing online marketing ROI. As I did this, I kept stumbling on great content from guys like David Meerman ScottGary VaynerchukPaul Roetzer, and a company called Hubspot that provided answers to my questions. As I continued to search and ask different questions, I kept finding more content from Hubspot that answered them. Even better, I started getting emails from Hubspot that answered questions I hadn’t even thought about yet and directed me to more content. One of these guides was about blogging tactics and offered an opportunity to demo their all-in-one inbound marketing software, including a blogging platform. After an initial consultation, I signed up and went through eight hours of inbound marketing consultation from a fantastic inbound marketing consultant, Nick Sal.

I am not sure when exactly the light bulb went off, but I knew that we had stumbled upon a marketing movement called inbound marketing and a fantastic company that provided a tool to enable us to not only do online marketing more efficiently, but also to quantify its impact. We could now show the value of an individual blog or social media post, especially when we layered the traditional travel purchasing model of dreaming, planning, booking, experiencing, and sharing over Hubspot’s sales funnel approach. This gave us an understanding of what type of content we needed to create and how we could cultivate leads and pass those on to our trade partners to bring travelers down the travel sales funnel.

So how does inbound marketing work? It’s pretty straightforward and follows a process that is proven and works for thousands of businesses.

Step 1 – Define your business or destination’s goals. This seems obvious, but it is amazing how overlooked this step is. Destinations and travel businesses need to identify quantifiable goals that are realistic and time bound. This is how you are going to measure the success of your inbound marketing campaign.

Step 2 – Develop a travel inbound marketing plan. With goals understood, the next step is to develop a plan that identifies your target, the content offers you will create, the keywords you will focus on, and the way you will nurture leads and convert to customers. In addition to laying out a calendar that focuses your efforts, you also need to analyze who will do what to implement the plan, what can be done with your in-house staff and what you will outsource and to whom.

Step 3 – Drive more visitors to your website.  By creating compelling content that answers travelers’ questions and promoting that content through SEO and social media, you can increase the number of your website visitors. Think of your website visitors as the top of your sales funnel. What content will compel them to visit your site? What questions are travelers currently using Google to answer about your destination?

Step 4 – Convert website visitors to leads.  This is the most important part of inbound marketing.  It’s not enough to get more visitors to your website; you need to convert those website visitors into leads. Anyone who has exhibited at a travel trade show knows that it doesn’t matter how many brochures you distribute; it is how many quality leads you develop that matters. The same is true for your website. It’s great that visitors find your site and look at your site, but what are you offering that will motivate them to give you their email address or phone number? Don’t expect a simple “contact us” form to do the trick.

Step 5 – Nurture leads and convert to travelers. Once you convert a website visitor to a lead, the sales process kicks in. If you are a tourism business, this is pretty straightforward. Provide content around context. Know everything you can about your leads and give them information they need while explaining why they should trust their vacation experience to you. If you are a destination, then this is when you can pass leads to your trade partners to help close the sales.

Step 6 – Measure everything. The beauty of travel inbound marketing is that you can measureeverything. You can track what blog entry or social media post created a lead and converted it to travelers. Keep doing what works and change what doesn’t.

So if you are a travel company or destination marketer reading this blog entry, congratulations! You just discovered the secret recipe of travel inbound marketing. Time to convert your knowledge of your destination into a tool to get found and grow your business or destination.

If you need help or would like to learn more, please contact us at [email protected] to request a proposal for your business or destination.

 

Solimar Joins Global Partnership for Oceans

In an effort to address tourism’s impact on our oceans, Solimar partners with an organization dedicated to protecting marine resources. 

The Global Partnership for Oceans, officially launched at the Rio+20  United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in June 2012, is a partnership of over 100 governments, international agencies, civil society groups, and private sector companies focused on mobilizing knowledge and financial resources to address the threats to the health of the world’s oceans. Not surprisingly, tourism is one of the biggest threats to the health, productivity and resilience of the world’s oceans. Solimar is committed to addressing the problems of overfishing, pollution and habitat loss as we also address tourism issues across the globe.

Solimar uses sustainable tourism to foster the conservation and sustainable use of coastal and marine resources and ecosystems through various methods. By creating market access for small and mediums enterprises and providing incentives for those enterprises to adopt tourism “best practices,” their impact on fragile coastal and marine environments is greatly mitigated. Solimar also works to raise visitor engagement in marine conservation areas through awareness building campaigns and “codes of conduct” that target issues such as responsible seafood choices and visitor impacts to coral reefs.

In addition, resources for local tourism enterprises have also been developed by Solimar to help improve tourism products and services along with sustainability. The “Tourism Toolkit” covers everything from business planning to operations and management to sales and marketing. In addition, Solimar documented 16 unique “Conservation Tourism Strategies” that guide local enterprises on ways in which they can directly support marine conservation efforts.

Through these efforts and continued education, Solimar firmly believes tourism can not only avoid hurting delicate marine eco-systems, but actually help to promote their survival, which is why we are proud to officially join with the Global Partnership for Oceans.

The quirky Bolivian town of Rurrenabaque is the ideal starting point for visitors wishing to experience some of the rich biodiversity, gorgeous landscapes, native cultures and friendly locals that make the Amazon so special. Whether tourists want to discover the ancient survival skills of the Amazon, visit the wildlife of the pampas, explore daily life on a Bolivian ranch, take a multi-day jungle adventure, go craft shopping, or just relax by a swimming pool in the tropical sunshine, Rurrenabaque has it all!

Nationally, Rurrenabaque has been admired for its Green Action Program, which showcases Rurrenabaque’s commitment to responsible business practices and the conservation of cultural and environmental resources. Solimar and its partners started the Green Action Program to help local tour operators develop and participate in more responsible business practices that emphasize community improvement and cultural and environmental preservation. Currently, the Green Action Program represents eight local tour operators.

Through the Undiscovered Travel Collection, Solimar is committed to help strengthen the marketing of Green Action members. In the travel industry, Internet marketing is one of he most powerfultools for an enterprise. In order to establish a sophisticated Internet presence, businesses must take into account several different marketing tools including websites, blogging, Facebook, twitter, youtube, to name just a few! The Undiscovered Travel Collection created a training program that would help these eight Rurrenabaque enterprises become more savvy in their Internet marketing. Solimar consultant Gianmarco Fiori conducted the six-part training course, which included the following topics:

1. E-marketing Introduction: The Basic Strategy behind Internet Marketing

2. Website Design, Maintenance and SEO

3. CRM and Sales

4. Facebook Basics: How to use your Facebook page for marketing and CRM

5. Trip Advisor and Travel Forums: How to use your forums & trip advisor page for marketing and CRM

6. Flickr and YouTube: Using Content sharing sites to complement other social media outlets and improve your marketing initiatives 

Each of the six lessons lasted two hours and consisted of a PowerPoint presentation and at least one in-class activity. At the end of the course, each participant received a handout of screen shots detailing what they had learned. Lectures were composed of presenting students with important definitions, concepts, tips and tricks, and most importantly detailed step-by-step slides illustrating how to implement these marketing actives.

“We rely confidently on Solimar's deep technical experience and professionalism as tourism consultants. You always are exceeding our expectations.”
Leila Calnan, Senior Manager, Tourism Services Cardno Emerging Markets

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