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Building a Successful Website for a Destination Marketing Organizations: A Strategy-Centric Approach
At VTP Digital Marketing, we support destination marketing organizations worldwide to increase the welfare of their citizens with innovative, sustainable digital marketing strategies. The core of our philosophy is that the power of deeply rooted passions fuels the dreams of local communities, ignites the ambitions of businesses, and inspires visitor to explore a destination. In this blog we share some of our insights that we used helping national, regional and local tourism brands with creating websites that work.
Understanding the Importance of Strategy
When working with destinations, i often see that the website is used by the digital marketing department as a communication tool to push the tourism brand as good as they can to their target audiences. Which sounds logic, but is a very narrow view of what the website of a DMO really is, and what it can do to realize the vision of a DMO and the welfare of citizens in a destination.
Sometimes there is also no understanding or feedback mechanism if a website is working well.
To be able to understand if your destination website is working well, the basics is to have insights in the statistics of the website, but if you haven't set clear goals or a clear strategy you probably only measure the total number of visitors, visited pages and when a bit more advanced, which outgoing links are clicked and from which target markets and or even persona profiles.
But does your website really contribute to your strategy ? Are you inspiring those travelers that you want to send to the communities you represent ? Are you trying to influence visitor behavior with attractive deals ? Or maybe spreading visitors on busy days ? Or encouraging them to behave in a environmental friendly way ? And that is just one side of your DMO platform, the other side is to help the businesses in your destination to communicate in line with the defined brand of the destination and reach out to the right people at the right time like for example Northern Island
Especially when the volume of the visitors of your website is going up so is your influential power, how are you using that and is that still in line with your strategy and in the benefit of the companies and the communities in your destination. Are you contributing to growth of new events and experiences ? Without closing your eyes for your hot spots. Are you helping visitors to experience your destination with a positive impact on the environment, including nature and animals ?
Of course these strategic questions are not only defined or solved by your website, but a website can play a big role in the outcomes. A website is where everything comes together and therefor is the co-responsibility of every team in a Destination Marketing Organization. While i was involved as a Digital Marketing Expert in creating the marketing strategy of Nepal. Marketing Strategy Consultant Robin Boustead, created a metro map with lines through every department and what the role of every department was to make a success of the website, based on Hallam's Digital Marketing Map.
Thus when embarking on the journey of building a new website for your tourism organization, it all starts with a solid strategy. A well-defined strategy is essential, it provides a roadmap, guiding decisions related to content and design, ensuring that your website aligns with your overarching goals, values and what your target audience loves to see.
What Needs to be defined in a DMO Strategy
- Vision & Objectives : What do we want to get out of tourism ? How should it benefit the communities the destination is part of, not only now, but also in the future.
- Top Offerings and Experiences: Specify what the best is your destination has to offer.
- Niche experiences: With what kind of niches in the destination could be we play a leading role.
- Values : that guide the destination
- Target Market & Audiences: Understand why your target audience should choose you and what makes your destination or service unique. As a destination you have very different audiences ; the travelers coming to your destination who need to be inspired and influences, press who you want to share your story, the companies making the destination who you want to help you with the branding. To cater them all you need to make choices, will i have one website that links all these audiences or will i use different websites for each audience.
You don't want to make a strategy alone but do it in consultation with trade associations, tourism businesses and the public.
When you decide to talk to different audiences like businesses, investors, people you like to come and live in your destination it would be really good to think that properly through. Your goals, vision and values will be the same but other things change. Because of the complexity, i don't think it's wise to bring such different audiences under the roof of one website. You can interlink them, but they have a different approach, with different social media handles and different communication plans. This blog is about a website meant to attract travelers to a destination.
This strategy will not only dictate your content needs but also shape the design elements of your website, making sure they resonate with your intended audience.
Besides the strategy you need a communication and a digital marketing plan that defines more on what you will communicate and how. Maybe you even set up a whole story world to interconnect the experiences of your destination.
Delving Deeper into Strategic Contributions
Once your strategy is set, consider the role of your website in achieving your strategic goals. Ask yourself:
- Role in Customer Journey: What role does your website play in the customer's decision-making process?
- Conversion Focus: Which conversions are critical, and how can your website facilitate them to boost sales?
- Customer Interactions: What steps do your customers need to navigate on your site before they make a booking?
Understanding Your Customer's Journey
A travel doesn't just pop-up at your website and decide to visit your destination. They might have seen a social media post, an advertisement or a friend told them about the amazing holiday they had. A visitor is probably also not enough convinced to book its next holiday after one visit. It needs more information and answer to all the questions the traveler might have to make a confident choice. Underneath graph from Google shows a person that had over 400 online moments before booking.
Start by mapping out what your target audience probably finds most amazing about the destination, think what kind of questions they have and what kind of certainties they need, like enough to do, quality accommodations, hygiene, etc. Also think about the travelers already in your destination, how can you help them get the most out of your destination ? Think on how you can provide answers easily and effectively, but also who needs what answer when. Think about the journey you want to guide them through, from initial interest to booking a trip.
Inspire, Help, Proof, and Sell: The Website Framework
Inspire
This is where the passion of the people and businesses from your destination meet those of your target audience. A destination marketing website should instantly wow and inspire potential travelers. Do this by using your best visuals and short videos with compelling narratives that highlight the destination its unique selling points and top experiences. The top parts of your website called 'hero sections' should be visually engaging and clearly communicate the value of your offerings within a sec.
Help
Make navigation intuitive and user-friendly. Provide visitors with helpful resources and direct pathways to your services and experiences. Highlight must-do experiences with vibrant images and descriptive text that emphasizes the benefits to the visitor, not just the name of the experience.
Proof
Incorporate testimonials, reviews, and accolades to build credibility and trust. Show that others have had positive experiences and endorse your offerings.
Sell
Guide visitors toward making a booking through well-placed calls to action (CTAs). Each section of your website should encourage further interaction, leading seamlessly towards the booking process.
Preparing for Development
With a clear strategy and understanding of your website's role, prepare a detailed briefing for your web developers. In a briefing you define your requirements. Now that with AI content is created easier, creating content that fits with different audiences like nature lovers, cultural lovers, leisure seekers etc. That makes it difficult for a destination, because there is so much to share and there is so much to do, for different types of groups. Presenting all the possibilities in a way that makes sense for a traveler is an true Art and not easy, you need to think thoroughly about this, look at many examples and get yourself informed by specialists.
The problem is that if you give a visitor of your website to many choices, they might back out. This is called that paradox of choice.
A web designer or an information specialist can help to make the right design choices. Part of the solution can be to "predict" what somebody wants, and to remember viewed pages or likes from previous visits. Technical solutions in which you can like an experience to later make an itinerary of it with the help of AI can be useful.
Prevent that a user needs to read a lot before they make the first choices, especially the first 2 steps need to be very easy. You can do that by making these first choices as visual as possible.
You could present you best experience first like for example Sydney is doing on their website.
Direct Bookings or Conversion on a DMO website
An ongoing debate for destinations is weather to offer direct booking or not and or using booking platforms and OTA such as Booking.com, Tripadvisor etc. The benefit of sending traffic to an OTA is that its, easy and your DMO can earn some money to finance the website. Working together with an OTA can also bring in a lot of data of your destination which can be useful as input for your marketing campaigns. A downside is that the commission costs of a booking have to be paid by the businesses in your destination.
In this video you see some examples of destinations offering direct booking or refer to a reservation page of a tourism business.
Another problem could be which OTA to use, you probably want to be as local as possible.
I prefer a hybrid system, with a white label booking engine, so that as a destination you can help smaller SME's to convert traffic into real bookings. The current digital landscape is unfortunately unfavorable for most SME's to be visible online when not specialized in a niche. But that you also keep space for bigger organizations that are able to convert traffic into bookings to do that themselves. For a tourism company that is beneficial because you don't pay commission, and you have all data yourself and are able to do upselling themselves.
Of course it would also be great if as DMO you have a system to do upsells, especially if the system is good this could lead to more bookings.
Value of having direct booking for a DMO
- Integrated conversion, customer doesn't have to go another website
- Cross & Upselling Possibilities
- Stirring customers to certain products, days, or locations with pricing and offers.
- More Data that can help to understand the target audiences
To consider when doing direct bookings on your DMO site
- Do you have the service organization to run direct booking ?
- Manage deadlinks, expired offers
- Do big businesses who are capable of direct booking want to control the bookings themselves ?
Supporting companies to market & sell your destination brand
One of the main roles of a destination is to help companies in and outside the destination who sell products, services or experiences from the destination with their marketing. You can do this through a destination website by offering branding guidelines, image collections, and tips on how to sell your destination. Most of the bigger destinations choose to do this on separate website, to avoid that consumers get confused with trade information.
An example is Seattle that offers for example logos but also a way how to describe Seattle
Customized vs SAAS / Standard Solutions
Because a good destination website is complicated, when a destination i s big or includes several cities or more building a customized solution can be pretty expensive. Going for a standard solution could be a very interesting option.
SimpleView from the United States, is an interesting solution for DMO's they offer a flexible modular solution including a hybrid booking option, where tourism businesses can choose for direct bookings or use their own reservation systems.
The opening or hero section of the Door County shows the destination is an outdoor destination, with lots of exploration possibilities. The menus come from a smart set up CMS where Door County only has to organize the content, the systems feeds it to the visitors is a structured way. You can argue that there are maybe a bit to many options in the menu. The extra attention for Food & Drink feeds into a trend and the events and festivals button shows there are lot of things to do. You could think if those are the traffic drivers for Door Country. The business directory show all businesses in the area in a very structured way, interesting in the system is that its connected with a direct booking tool that helps to bring ecommerce to all the tourism companies in the area.
A full booking solution of experience and accommodation providers is offered by LocalBooker
If you need something simpler webflow is a great choice, its an easy to use website builder with many templates, it does have a small learning curve, but also a big community to who you can outsource your website development for very affordable rates. VTP is training and making websites with youths in Africa and Asia to deliver tourism websites. When you are a smaller community or city do contact us. We are probably able to offer great solutions for you, for the most competitive prices in the world.
Continuous Improvement and Engagement
Once your website is delivered, that is where your journey really starts, you need to go for continues improvement. When hiring a tech partner, you therefor want to look further than just the delivery of the website, you want a multiyear plan how you are going to influence the different persona that are most important for your destination.
Leverage tools like A/B testing and analytics to refine your approach and ensure your website not only meets but exceeds user expectations. Engage with your audience through social media, blogs, and direct communications to keep them informed and interested in your offerings.
By following these strategic insights, your tourism organization can create a website that truly represents your brand and effectively converts visitors into travelers.
