A modern online presence | episode 7
Reading Time: 2 minutesIn this week’s video we take a “virtual” trip to Austria and talk to Dieter Scharf, the Sales Promotion Manager for the Austrian National Tourist Office.
[youtube width=”599″ height=”361″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXR4FClVzcU[/youtube]
Dieter’s job is to make the Austria brand unique and that poses some challenges that are very similar to the challenges that many hotels face every day; sometimes it is not only about pricing. It’s about the feelings and emotions that a country or a property can transmit on their website that can make the difference. Specially because a hotel website nowadays can provide good quality picture, great content and video and that can make a web visitor feel the property before arrival. Most importantly, all this information can and must be updated over time so that visitors know the hotel is ”alive”. How you present yourself online should always go accordingly to your brand.
As far as challenges for next year, no big surprises as Dieter faces the same challenges as many other travel industry players: to be found online and to have a website that attracts visitors. Now, when it comes down to how to make this happen, Dieter and his team have some interesting ideas. The area of social media has presented some challenges in the past year and they’re trying to overcome these by creating content that is not written nor posted directly by them. What they’re doing is to create collaborations with bloggers that write content independently, so this way all the content becomes very authentic. What they do afterwards is to share that content in their network and thus creating a multiplying effect with these good words.
Taking advantage of all these new constant tolls and channels seems quite the mission impossible for the smaller hoteliers, as they have something quite important that takes most of their time: running their hotel. So the big challenge is how to improve and gain visibility of your brand in a fast and modern way. This should be so easy that you could do it yourself.
Something that is really important is to monitor what these big companies with big budgets are doing and try to replicate the good ideas on your business. If you think about Dieter’s example, you probably could do something similar by asking your guests to write something about their stay and share it on their social network.
