A damn good water park.
That’s the first thing you’d need if you were courageous (and crazy) enough to open a new one in Wisconsin Dells – The Waterpark Capital of the World® – and hoped to survive even one week up against the likes of Mount Olympus, Noah’s Ark, and the Kalahari.
But in a crowded niche, you’d also need some damn good tourism marketing strategies to make a real splash.
A favorite company of ours can teach you a few of those. Beau Wine Tours’ travel service centers on transportation for visiting oenophiles in Napa Valley, one of the planet’s great wine capitals. There are no slides or wave pools, but, as in the Dells, there’s a lot of liquid. So, how did Beau stay float, separate themselves, and flourish in the sea of competition? First, they offered a premium product, of course.
Then, they started attracting customers by developing an audience for their blog. Let’s take a look at some of their groundwork.
5 Blog-Based Tourism Marketing Strategies From Beau Wine
At BuzzFarmers, we love learning about recent examples of original content campaigns from great companies doing it right. And we seriously love when these case studies coincide with Wine Wednesdays. Blogs and booze make for a pretty unbeatable duo, don’t you agree? If so, drink up and read on! You’ll appreciate these five posts from Beau Wine Tours.
1. Turn! Turn! Turn!
Each flip of a calendar page presents new opportunities for your blog, and Beau Wine Tours is on top of it. In addition to establishing Napa Valley as a winter wonderland, they cover the spring, summer, and fall.
They also gear content toward upcoming shows and events. This practice accomplishes several things for the company: It provides an evergreen resource of rotating posts, attracts visitors researching their trip during a specific time of year (which means they’re ready to make specific plans … which means they’re ready to pay specific money for services they might not even have considered yet), and groups Beau Wine among the area experts who can be relied on for solid information.
2. Get Resourceful
As a keyword, “Napa Valley Hotels” is for serious inquiries only. It averages 12,000 searches a month and faces a stout 250,000 pages of competition. You wouldn’t think a small business like Beau Wine Tours could hang with the Frommers, Trip Advisors, and Wine Spectators of the world – let alone the countless players in the hospitality industry – but there they are on page 3 of a Google search because of the great range of authoritative content on their site! No post is too ambitious if you can back it up with know-how and quality.
3. Profile Industry Personalities
This one of legendary chef and entrepreneur Charlie Palmer is an example of one of our favorite types of posts: getting other people involved. Think of it as karma content – it spreads goodwill and makes good business sense. And as far as tourism marketing strategies go, it spotlights the diversity of Napa’s travel services while positioning Beau firmly among the best of the best.
As many of their posts do, the Palmer profile includes a cool video, too.
4. Share Some Inside Info
Travelers love nothing more than discovering something few before them have. As a tour and transportation service in well-trod territory, Beau Wine has literally seen it all, and they’re wisely sharing bits of intel here and there via their blog. You have a tremendous reserve of tips and tricks regarding your industry, as well – don’t let it go to waste! But don’t give away everything, either!
5. Be the A to Their Q
It’s said that hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports, but the pros keep it simple: “See the ball; hit the ball.” The same goes for blog-based tourism marketing strategies: Beau Wine Tours does it at a high level, and they don’t overcomplicate things. They create content that visitors to Napa Valley are searching for. They give answers to questions. In this case, they help newbies with wine tasting etiquette. In another, they provide counsel on what to wear in Napa, which you know first-timers freak out about.
Now, you’re probably wondering how some of these posts actually sell Beau Wine Tour’s wine tours. Well, they don’t! Or, if they do, it’s a soft sell. Rather, the rest of their site is there to close the deal. Their blog brings in an audience and builds a narrative. Their original content earns that audience’s trust and interest. Their product or service converts that audience into clients.
Have you tried any tourism marketing strategies you’re proud of? Let us know in the comments!
