Last week I attended a tourism marketing seminar for the Vancouver, Coast and Mountains region organized by Destination British Columbia (DBC). Not surprisingly, digital marketing was the big focus. Here are a few highlights;
The first speaker, DBC’s CEO, Marsha Walden, shared some high-level views of the global tourism industry:
While most of these numbers were not unexpected, I found DBC’s answer was. The key to winning in this crazy competitive sector is through collaboration, across all levels of tourism business, DMO’s, community organizations and government. Bringing such a disparate group together will be a challenge, but the solution is content. “Siri and Alexa are the best players on our team,” said Walden.
The next part of the presentation was Global Content. Here is what DBC is doing in the content department:
Google’s Meg Bush filled us in on what that powerful little search box has been revealing about our travel habits lately:
DBC’s Richard Bergan gave a great presentation on the power of tagging for digital marketing. These are snippets of code embedded into websites that help track indirect referrals and build audience insights through analytics. If every tourism business in the province embraces tags, we’ll have more of that priceless big data, and be better able to attract even more tourists to Super Natural BC.