Spring has sprung! For many of us it means refreshing, renewing, and planting the seeds for success. Think about your closet, sock drawer, garage, and garden. Imagine the sense of re-energizing that comes after a deep spring clean.
In the world of social marketing for travel and tourism pros, let’s look at how we can let the sun shine in and market more clearly with small steps to refresh, repurpose, and revitalize.
Refresh
I’ll bet you have a number of social media sites that you use regularly to market and mingle. When is the last time you took a hard look at what your clients really see when they find you socially? Here are a number of spring cleaning ideas to refresh your own presence.
- Cover images and banners can live a long life; however, a fresh new look can breathe life into your brand image. Select new images to reflect your brand, your top selling destinations, or even to give a shout out to your top suppliers. Also consider the sizing and image quality as it’s truly a reflection of your brand.
Tip: Are your cover and banner images consistent across your social platforms?
- Bio and logos don’t usually change dramatically, yet you’d be surprised at the benefits of a quick review and refresh. Sometimes it’s simply a bit of wordsmithing (oh my, did I really write that way back when?) and other times your focus, niche, or specialty may have changed.
Tip: Facebook now has a new opportunity to showcase your niche, specialty, and projects on your business page. LinkedIn offers showcase pages as an extension of your company page.
Revive & Repurpose
Spring is a busy season of booking and marketing. It’s a time to revive relationships with past clients and find new and exciting ways to meet their current needs. Your social marketing campaigns and strategies may benefit from a bit of revival and repurposing to save you time and energy.
- Social sharing and web icons are something many people miss updating when they’ve added new platforms to their repertoire. A quick check to make sure your social icons really do link people from your website to your social sites (and the reverse) may be in order. How about those social sharing buttons at the bottom of your blog and on the side of your website? Are they all working? Do you have additional social sites you need to add to that line-up?
- Social Analytics are key to our long-term success. Understanding your social audiences, timing, and key words will help integrate your social and web success.
Tip: Analytics are available on each social platform and thru 3rd party tools. Understand what to measure here.
- Old accounts? Do you have inactive, duplicate, or outdated social accounts hiding in your social marketing world? Now’s a great time to merge, delete, or unpublish those accounts. Decluttering your social presence may take a bit of time to sort thru the remnants of past social attempts, but it’s worth your while as you’ll present a clear, succinct brand image for your clients.
- Plan for your success. How about tidying up your social strategy, marketing calendar, and goals? Invest the time to revive your old strategy and study your analytics. See where you were successful. Then implement some changes in order to keep up with the newest trends in relationship building.
- As you’re recharging your campaigns and strategies, you’ll most likely find some really popular posts, tweets, photos, and videos. How about updating and repurposing them? You’ll be able to breathe new life into some great content when you simply find new ways to use it in a fresh manner. Cross marketing tips here. Get more mileage for your content with these tips.
Refuse
If we’re talking ‘refuse’ as in clutter and garbage, let’s think about getting rid of those old unused sites, tools, and strategies that aren’t working for us any longer. Go ahead, toss them into the trash. You know the ones I mean! Think about those clothes hanging in your closet that haven’t been worn for a couple of years. Do you have social platforms and tools that aren’t giving you value anymore? It’s time to de-clutter!
If we’re talking ‘refuse’ as in deny and don’t get involved, let’s think about denying to be stuck in old habits and patterns. Just because a certain style of update has worked in the past, check to see how it’s really working now. Maybe it’s time to form a newly updated habit.
Revitalize
Speaking of forming new habits, here are a couple of tips to transform your old habits into updated patterns that revitalize your social marketing strategies.
- Spring over to your suppliers’ and competitors’ social pages to see what they’re doing. Is their strategy or look appealing to you and your brand image? If so, transform those ideas and make them work for your own brand.
- There are some cool new social platforms coming on stream these days. Go ahead and explore a couple and see if they resonate with you and your talent team. Next, survey your clients and fans to see where else they hang out in the world of social. Then make your decision to invest in new social platforms based on your own time, talent, and client interests. Check out Blab tips here.
- We all set our privacy settings and online permissions when we created our business accounts. It may be time to revisit these settings on each platform to make sure they still align with our brand and goals. While it may be boring, like cleaning out your sock drawer, you’ll be sure your settings are free of holes.
- Advertising is one of the fundamentals of social marketing success. Are you up to speed on:
- Your key word choices
- Graphics and visuals
- Target audiences
- Custom audiences
- E-mail capture lists
- New advertising options
- On-going campaign strategies and goals
- Elevate your strategy with these tips.
- Spring is a time to re-energize your image. Have you considered trying a fresh look and incorporating new styles of infographics and memes? Trying some new video options like live-casting or screen-casting tools can easily revitalize your style and help reconnect with your clients in a renewed manner. Here are some trends.
- Make new friends and fans. Social relationship building can be a mammoth undertaking, but the heart of it remains about growing conversations. Growing your fan base and engagement is part of the spring cleaning effort. How about actively seeking new fans and reconnecting with some inactive fans? It’s all about quality, not quantity.
While we’re busy cleaning our closets and garages, let’s keep in mind all of the small social marketing tactics that can bring a sense of renewed interest from our fans. Refurbishing our image, strategy, and goals will breathe new life into your social marketing and grow your success.
Catherine Heeg, international speaker and trainer, focuses on social media marketing & communication for the travel and tourism industry. Join the conversation and connect with her at www.cmsspeaking.com and socially.
