Continuing from the previous article wherein someone wants to capture a wider market’s share. Example for a business based in Morro Bay, they are able to capture the demand for family friendly resorts in Morro Bay. Now they want to capture demand for family friendly resorts in california.
To accomplish this task we would essentially want to take the route of brand marketing. Marketing the destination as a brand.
- In that way the users who were never aware of the market, i.e. the location where you are based out of, will get to know about the destination.
- Once they get to know about the destination, they would now need to understand more about the destination.
- Once they get to know about the destination, they would need to know the various trip hacks, nuances and the nitigrities before they family get convinced they will take a trip to your location.
Until and unless the above 3 steps happen in the potential guests’ mind, be rest assured, the guest would not be booking with you.
Brand marketing can be done in multiple ways. I am listing down few scenarios for you to grasp and understand the concept properly, such that you can take action from today.
Primarily speaking it can be divided in 2 large buckets.
- One brand mrketing can be completely done through your DMC or Location Tourism Board, trying to promote the destination in a wider audience.
- You would need to take charge of the activity, as the tourism board isn’t doing much, or may be isn’t doing enough for your liking. You want to go ahead and create that demand yourself, then capture it.
If you do happen to choose route 2, I hav good news for you. There’s a couple of things you can start doing right now, to ensure your properties visibility is increased to a wider geography.
- Influencer marketing
- Creating your content engine
With a successful brand marketing strategy you should start seeing a lift on 2 fronts. The short term goal, the long term goal. The short term goal is where you would see signals helping you understand if the brand marketing startegy is working for you or not. The long term goal will get acheived when you see guests arriving from cities/places which you are not used to receiving guests from.
Important thing to understand before you even begin your journey of brand marketing, have few things backed up, as sort of a benchmark. This benchmark will set the playing field from which you start your experimentation of brand marketing. I had written a post on benchmarking, where I reveal how I have set a goal, benchmarked the metrics. The aim is to measure how far I am away from my goal. Could I set my own expectations properly?
Let me guide you on a few benchmark metrics you should have handy before you proceed any further.
- Get a list of the search impressions and clicks data wherein the user query intent type – “your property name + your location name”. There can be several different permutation combinations of this search intent. Talk a stalk of all of them individually and collectively.
- This metric showcases people’s intent who are specifically searching for you.
- From your analytics, get the number of users who visit your site from other locations, beyond your feeder market
- What % of the total traffic is that?
- how many types of queries you are being visible for (in both traditional + GEO) where your brand name is not mentioned but just the location in mentioned? (This metric BTW will show you, if there’s opportunity left in your demand capture/SEO/AEO/GEO strategy to get more revenue)
Another key data point you would need to have at your fingertips; which are the exact cities/town from where guests have come and stayed with you for the past 5 years. This data should be there in your PMS, CRS. If not, you should definitely start utilizing AI to create a small view of all the cities from where guests have visited you in the past 5 years.
Another key data point which can be very usable; the average room nights stayed by individuals based on the cities/towns they come from. Lastly, it would also be a great thing to know what was the average revenue generated from each of these cities/towns. For all of these data points, the more granular it is, the better insights we get from it.
Once you’ve got your hands on the key important benchmarking data points, its time, to decide which route you should take when it comes to brand marketing. I’d say, don’t choose between influencer and content engine. Start looking at both these avenues as a unified mechanism to enhance your brand presence in a wider market.
All aligned uptill now, on why and how you should start seeing all brand marketing activities as a content engine? If not, I can elaborate more in another article. If yes, I am sure, you would love to read what I am going to write in my next article. I am going to take an exampke of a place in India, which is one of the most popular tourist attractions of the nation, how I would go about ensuring this place becomes one of the top tourist destinations of the world.
I know Richard from One Planet Journey would kill me if I share a marketing strategy to influence tourist inflow even if the tourists are not looking at deep travel. But hey, you need to do what you need to do. I love selling destinations. The destination of my choice for the next experiment, Goa.
Till next time,
Thanks
DB
30th April, 2026