Posts by: Sheila

How is your email open rate? Statistics vary, but HubSpot's email study found that emails related to travel had a 28% open rate. If that seems low, remember that people are flooded with information these days; it is hard to get their attention. It is worth your time and effort to improve your...

Want to be as effective as possible in the least amount of time? Really, who doesn't?! Many destination marketing pros and their tourism partners have told us that they want to be more efficient with their digital marketing and social media time management. The problem is that too many folks are looking...

We feel your pain.... People who took our most recent digital destination marketing survey gave us a lot of honest feedback in the open-ended portions. This question from one participant is similar to what we hear in almost all of our social media workshops: "We don’t really do anything but Facebook. We should do more,...

Are you hosting a conference, workshop, or maybe a small partner event? Use social media to help promote it and get people signed up, even when you have a tiny (or a zero) budget. Since we do a lot of conference speaking, webinars, and social media workshops, we've seen plenty of ways to...

Sometimes, you've got to go back to the basics. It may seem obvious by now that digital marketing and social media are not fads. Online communication is often the norm and not the exception for visitors, guests, and customers, but it is still an uphill battle to get some folks to accept...

You know all that advice about the best times to post on Facebook? The truth is that it depends on when YOUR Page followers are most active on Facebook, and therefore more likely to see your posts. That data changes every day. The most active times on Tuesday may be different than...

Since we often hear the phrase "tourism is the front door to economic development," we began thinking about how social media and digital marketing can grow prosperity by both attracting new businesses, and helping the ones you already have. Our interest in this topic is also a natural outgrowth of our continuing educational...

There are over 2 billion monthly active users on Facebook. Most are not in the U.S. The largest number of users is in India, then the U.S., then Brazil, then Indonesia, then Mexico. If you want to connect with international travelers, try using Facebook to target visitors worldwide. We gave this...

Let's face it - the competition is fierce to rank on Page One of search engine results for many of the keywords that travelers use to find things. One way to overcome that is to not only search engine optimize your text content, but also your photos, video, and audio....

  Which social media and digital marketing platforms are working well for tourism professionals and partners like you, and which are not? What are some online marketing priorities for smaller DMOs? How can I keep my skills sharp and up-to-date? This is our second tourism industry survey on how people are using social media,...