Posts tagged ski resort marketing
Beach Resort Marketing
01 year ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
Sure, this blog is about ski resort marketing, but sometimes you need to look at what the “other guys” are doing, and some of the best resort marketers out there are the ones marketing the beautiful beaches of Hawaii. I recently found a very interesting article in Hawaii Business that describes the strategy and tactics that the Hawaii Tourism Authority is using in today’s fast moving market. Interestingly, there’s still a lot of “traditional” marketing with a major effort spent on trade shows, but they have brought in new tools such as QR codes (of course there’s a lot more adoption of QR in Japan) as well as the obvious, but not so simple, need to work with airlines to ensure adequate lift and options for consumers. This effort relies mostly on information which provides my favorite quote in the article:
New-age marketing is all about data.
I couldn’t have said it better myself, although I tend to look more at the fact that strategies and goals still remain the same it’s just the tools we use that are evolving. That and the fact that pretty much everything the HTA is doing can be duplicated in the ski resort industry. Anyway, give the article a read and let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Photo credit: Me – at one of our favorite Hawaiian beaches, guess away ’cause you won’t get it!
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Vertical Drop and other “Tall Tales”
01 year ago
by Eric Hoffman
in review
If you haven’t taken a look at MountainVertical.com, you might want to sneak a peak and check to see what the “true-up” vertical for your favorite resort is. It’s a bit tough to tell who maintains this site as well as exactly what their methodology and source for their statistics are. There is a Stats and Accuracy page, but it doesn’t clearly define where and how they are compiling these stats – accuracy to the foot? I would hope that topo maps with minimally 10 ft increments were used, because if Google Earth were used, it has variation of +/- 10 meters, or an over/under of over 30 feet each way which means a potential 120 foot vertical error rate. This all noted, I still like the site, with it’s clean look, easy user interface and unique perspective on presenting ski resort data.
Here’s what I like:
- It’s clean and simple
- Data is presented in an easy to understand format
- Searching for resorts works quickly and simply
- As a skier, I love long, sustained fall-line skiing, which is basically what their “true-up vertical descent” stat represents
Here’s what I still would like to see:
- Some sort of comparison tool
- Details on the “true-up” locations for each resort, on a map would be really helpful
- More details on the data collection process are needed as well
MountainVertical.com is an interesting and fun site and I hope to see it expand further in the coming winter season.
Photo credit: Flickr user Joe ShlabotnikIs Online Video Advertising an Opportunity for Ski Resorts?
01 year ago
Many ski resorts have embraced online video production and I expect to see more and more as we get into the coming 2010-2011 Winter Season. In fact, I’ve already posted example of a few interesting ski resort online videos:
- Double Diamond – Double Rainbow featuring a video from Stowe
- First Resort to Open a Boon or Bust? featuring a video from Loveland
Producing videos to show off a resort once a visitor is on your site, or a video that can be shared, or found via search is wonderful. However, a recent presentation from eMarketer got me to wondering if perhaps ski resorts should also be focusing in on online video advertising as well. Here’s the presentation:
eMarketer Webinar: Video Advertising Engagement
View more presentations from eMarketer.
What do you think?
Labor Day is the Unofficial Start to…
01 year ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
I’ll finish that title, Labor Day is the unofficial start to…the ski resort marketing season.
In the years I’ve worked in ski resort marketing I’ve often wondered a bit about why we started each winter’s marketing cycle when we did. Much of it has been related to the timing of the ski vertical publications – anyone checked circulation numbers lately? Much has also been related to traditional lead times of vacation rental bookings – anyone seen how short lead times have gotten over the past several years? A lot of timing has also been tied to the idea that Labor Day weekend is the “traditional end of summer” and that if a resort is first to market that they may seem some sort of bump in brand awareness and hopefully business over the coming season. Does any of this still hold true, and when is the ideal time for resorts to start their marketing as well as PR efforts?
Certain things like mountain improvement announcements are usually announced earlier in the summer. This is then followed by special package deals for select time frames around Labor Day Weekend. Season pass sales typically are pushed anywhere from mid-summer up through Labor Day weekend. And you can count on a big blitz of PR and marketing as soon as the first major snow storms pass blanket the mountain tops.
I think that the best time for each resort to start their marketing efforts is different, depending upon who their target audience is and therefore upon when their target audience begins to think about their winter plans. I also think that it’s integral in today’s integrated marketing environment to continually test to see if what you thought was the right time might be wrong and vice versa – see my post on testing for more.
This is also topic that we will discuss on #mrktchat tomorrow, so please stop by on Twitter at 3pm MST and tell us what you think Labor Day weekend is the unofficial start of – or just let us know in the comments on this post.
Photo credit: Flickr user iwouldstay
What do Ski Resorts Want from their Websites?
21 year ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
Every business that has any sort of a web presence should always be asking – “What do we want our visitors to do?” We know what we would do and we all probably think that we know what most of our visitors will do, but do we really?
Most ski resorts probably want their websites to help them sell lift tickets. Pretty simple, but how do they tell how well they’re succeeding at that? Probably by tracking their online sales and ideally even trying to tie offline sales to online actions – a basic way to do this is via customer surveys. The problem with this is that all of this is readily able to be tracked via analytics, probably even more accurately and in greater detail than most of us would imagine. Most of us have probably installed Google Analytics on our site and others may even have Omniture or another analytics package, but how many are holding ourselves accountable by continually setting goals and then testing different tacts to in order to improve consumers actions?
Here’s a quick example that I am currently testing right now on this very blog. Just over three weeks ago, I decided to up my posting frequency from about twice a week to every other day. The below Google Analytics chart shows that traffic was relatively even, had a big bump from a topical post, but then once my every other day schedule took effect, the visitation was markedly higher during the period when I was posting more frequently. This certainly is what I was hoping for and expecting, but now I can start to test different things, such as the best time of day to post, as well as the best way to promote by posts.
Click for full-size image.
The question then becomes, how do resort marketers use this sort of information to ‘do better’ on the web? I would suggest that they start by deciding what they want their site to do, find that metric in their analytics to determine a benchmark, and then start trying out different ideas to see which ones really to cause their visitors to do what the resort really wants on their website.
I highly recommend visiting the wonderful blog Occam’s Razor, written by the passionate and brilliant analytics guru Avinash Kaushik to learn more about the what, how, why and what else of web analytics. An additional resource that I’ve found quite valuable in finding insight into online marketing is the Marketing Profs site – on which I recently listened to a wonderful 90 webinar on Multi-Channel Analytics presented by none other than Avinash Kaushik.
