Posts by Colleen
How to Host a Travel Writer: A Guide for Destinations
A travel writer or blogger wants to visit your hotel, attraction, restaurant – or maybe do a full FAM weekend in your destination. That’s great! But the initial excitement might start to wear off as you ask yourself, How do I prepare? What do I need to do? What do I tell my staff? Here…
Read More5 Pieces of Content You Need in Your Travel Media Kit
Although the world of marketing and public relations is constantly changing, a media kit is still an important aspect of working with the media. Media kits (sometimes called press kits) consist of promotional materials that are shared with the media to promote a product, company, or in our case – a destination. From attending media…
Read MoreMaking the Most of Tourism Media Events
For travel and tourism brands, attending media events are a great way to get your destination in front of travel bloggers, journalists, editors, and freelancers. But it’s more than just showing up. A lot of time and effort (and sometimes money) goes into attending tourism media events. I’m going to walk you through our process-…
Read MoreThe Evolution of Welcome Centers
Welcome centers were created to provide travelers with helpful information to improve their stay. They provide suggestions on things to do and aim to convince visitors to stay a little longer. Visitors often needed to seek out these centers to get brochures and maps, within a destination or at a highway stop on the way.…
Read MoreHow to Promote Local Tourism
When it comes to promoting your tourism business – whether you’re an attraction, restaurant, museum or hotel, you may feel like you’re all alone. Luckily, that’s not the case. By working with your Destination Marketing Organization (DMO) or Tourism Promotion Agency (TPA), you’re able to get some “free marketing” that will help to distribute your…
Read MoreDeveloping a Strategic Content Marketing Plan
We recently defined content marketing and its importance in your overall marketing strategy. But how can you take this information and dive into creating a content strategy? Developing a content strategy. It’s important to create content. It’s more important to create good, quality content – and make it available to the right people at the…
Read MoreTapping into Niche Market Tourism
What is Niche Tourism? Niche market tourism uses programs to attract visitors focusing on a very specific market segment built around a well-defined product. We’ve said it before, tourists are looking for experiences. So it only makes sense that visitors are throwing out generic “everything but the kitchen sink” trips, and planning vacations that align…
Read MoreA DMO’s Guide to Understanding Travel Influencers
You didn’t really go on vacation if you didn’t post a picture of it on Instagram, right? Your social media posts about your latest trip are doing more than inducing FOMO in all of your friends – they’re starting to inspire and influence the travel decisions of others. And since we all know that consumers…
Read MoreCreative Travel Writing for Your Destination
I was fortunate enough to attend the amazing PRSA Travel & Tourism Conference in Palm Springs last week, where I participated in a creative writing skills workshop with the very talented Pam Mandel. During this day-long workshop, we talked about creative travel writing: what it is, how to do it well, and how to avoid common…
Read MoreCreating Experiences to Create Memories
Earlier this week I attended the Empire State Tourism Conference by NYSTIA in Lake Placid. Talk about gorgeous! While each presentation provided great information in and of itself, the best lesson that I learned was an overall idea strung together from bits and pieces of various presentations. In the keynote presentation “Traversing the Disruption,” Bill…
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