Obama Wants More US Tourism

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Saw this... http://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Government/Obama-wants-U-S--to-be-worlds-top-tourist-destination/ and all I could think of is how much trouble it is for Canadians to get into the US, not to mention the new $5.50 fee recently added for Canadians taking mass trasit to visit the US.
But my other question is... how many people actually actively market outside of your own borders, if you get foreign visitors (if you don't, just ignore me!)
We specifically target certain markets and 2/3rd of my visitors are from outside of my country with 1/3rd of them being from outside of this continent. We actively ask guests to review us in their native tongue. We have even tried to market outselves to foreign languge guide books.
I've even considered making our pages available in more languages. What have you done specifically to target foreign guests?
 
We're in a handful of foreign language tour books. We used to offer Canadians the ability to pay in Canadian but no one took us up on it.
Other than that we don't have any real targeting toward non-US guests.
The major complaint from Canadian guests is the wait at the border and how to avoid paying the VAT. Everyone wishes it was the way it used to be. OTOH, half of my family cannot go back to Canada now without a gov't exemption. Youthful follies are keeping them in the US.
 
I'm wanting to actively target the foreign tourist market. I guess what we need to know is where those tourists go when they're looking for vacation ideas. I know Lonely Planet guide books are popular in some countries. What about websites foreign tourists frequent? Anybody know some good places to start looking?
I've read that Brazilians have replaced the Japanese as the biggest travel spenders on earth, but they have terrible trouble getting into the USA. It's a big problem that hurts us all.
 
I got around to reading the article and Obama even mentioned Brazil specifically. I'd read months ago that they are now the world's biggest-spending travelers. Glad our country is finally courting them. So that's one place we need to be advertising.
When we were in Italy a couple of years ago, visiting a little town in the middle of nowhere, we had a nice chat from some people from Brazil and found that they had passed through Arkansas the year before, doing the "Great River Road" tour.
toddburme! HELP US!
 
Lonely Planet seems to be particular popular in Australia/New Zealand.
Here's an idea... using Amazon for different countries lookup the most relevant category. For my city, the top tour guide on Amazon.com was Frommer's, Amazon.ca was Knopf Guide, Amazon.co.uk was Lonely Planet, Amazon.fr was Guide de Routard, Lonely Planet for Amazon.de (but the national edition, not the city edition) etc.
And then target those specific guides :)
 
Knowing how to hit certain target markets outside the US is the big ???.
If you use Google Adwords, you can specifically tailor a campaign for one country or region. I use it to target some countries specifically that way.
 
Knowing how to hit certain target markets outside the US is the big ???.
If you use Google Adwords, you can specifically tailor a campaign for one country or region. I use it to target some countries specifically that way.
.
Eric Arthur Blair said:
If you use Google Adwords, you can specifically tailor a campaign for one country or region. I use it to target some countries specifically that way.
Orwell and Big Brother would both appreciate the technical ingenuity and targeting. Our dollar has been strong vs. the Euro lately, which hurts our European recruitment, but we press on. Other than the language barrier, there's a benefit to recruiting South American tourists: very little jet lag since they're mostly traveling north-south.
I guess Facebook can also target specific things, but not as useful as Google.
Keep thinking EAB, and keep sharing those thoughts here!
 
Knowing how to hit certain target markets outside the US is the big ???.
If you use Google Adwords, you can specifically tailor a campaign for one country or region. I use it to target some countries specifically that way.
.
smileystooges.gif
Dang, that's a good idea! Never occured to tailor it to countries!!! duh!
 
Knowing how to hit certain target markets outside the US is the big ???.
If you use Google Adwords, you can specifically tailor a campaign for one country or region. I use it to target some countries specifically that way.
.
smileystooges.gif
Dang, that's a good idea! Never occured to tailor it to countries!!! duh!
.
It first occured to me when I was looking at my click-through countries and bounce rates. That was the last day that my ads appeared in Morocco, Tunisia, Russia, Indonesia, Bosnia, etc.
Basically I used my Google Analytics to see who was visiting and wasn't staying (high bounce rate) and made sure that they weren't in my adwords, so that I wasn't paying for those bounces. Then I used pareto's principal and targetted those who were, but weren't my natural customers. So basically most of my traffic was naturally coming from the US and Canada. France and the UK were next. You can then use analytics to break down into regions, if you need to. For example, 33% of my French visitors are from Ile de France (ie the Paris region).
You might be surprised when you look at region/language, for example. For example, I found that many Canadians have their language set to en-us or en-gb. And Belgians... I'm getting French speakers to my website.... and then English speakers... and then Dutch speakers (which if you think about it makes sense, the EU and NATO are in Belgium, both of which often function in English) so targetting people set to English might be useful (and with a 7% bounce rate... they are reading my pages... good perspective clients!) But my English speakers in France have a 25% bounce rate, so either they aren't my perspective clients or I'm not serving them well enough to stay with me. And Luxembourg in English... just a disaster.
 
I've also done google ads targeted to specific european countries (and further targeted to language and age). I set it up to go to a landing page with messaging and a package specific to that market.
Europeans and Brits make up a significant part of our summer business and I'm a bit concerned that the economic troubles there will have an impact this year.
The good news is we've definitely seen an uptick in visitors from South America in the past two years. Argentina and Brazil are the biggest, but we also get some from Ecuador and Columbia. I'll be looking at ways to target these countries more.
 
we are lucky here in a lot of ways as anyone can visit from anywhere in europe really easily and Japan and the UK have always had a good tourist relationship there must be hundreds of thousands of them come every year. There is a hugh row on about visas from China which they are trying to get issued faster and easier as its bunging up that market which is obviously huge and will be mega when the olympics come later this year so they need to get it sorted fast.
Its one of the reasons I have kept the booking.com button on our web site as it translates into 25 different languages which I presume is helpful to our international guests.
 
I've also done google ads targeted to specific european countries (and further targeted to language and age). I set it up to go to a landing page with messaging and a package specific to that market.
Europeans and Brits make up a significant part of our summer business and I'm a bit concerned that the economic troubles there will have an impact this year.
The good news is we've definitely seen an uptick in visitors from South America in the past two years. Argentina and Brazil are the biggest, but we also get some from Ecuador and Columbia. I'll be looking at ways to target these countries more..
South American travel to the US is up. I just had some from Columbia, Chili, and Argentina, not a market I would think of targeting until these last few.
 
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