Africa Adventure Academy - your helping hand in sustainable and responsible tourism development
Not so long ago we all had to spend a fortune to print our marketing message on flyers, in magazines and books only to find that it was even more expensive to get these flyers, magazines and books to the readers who are important to us.
Shipping them off to overseas, displaying them in brochure racks and handing them out at trade exhibitions and travel shows was costly, time consuming and showed little or no results.
Today, much of the traditional advertising (anything printed) is replaced by the internet. This has ultimately lowered the costs of marketing tremendously. Don't believe it?
Look at the chart below on how advertising costs have decreased per 1000 reach.here ...
Marketing spend per 1000 reach
On average a company in tourism had to spend a staggering ZAR 4200 in 1998 to create a reach of 1000 (Viewers / Readers / Lookers) compared to only ZAR 1100 in 2014.
Today, you only spend approximately ZAR 1000 online to reach about 1000 "Lookers" compared to ZAR 4000 for the same amount of "Lookers" in traditional / printed media.
As we all know you need a lot of "Lookers" to get some "Bookers" so it is vitally important to ensure your marketing has a high reach. The internet with easy to use travel portals and social networks offers cost efficient and effective reach to your target market.
Sadly, some marketers take this trend too far and believe to do good marketing by only using "free" online advertising options such as commission based booking portals. This is a contradiction by itself as paying commission is actually not free advertising. In many cases paying commission is more expensive than paid online advertising and has the disadvantage of missing out in building your own marketing database.
To benefit most from this incredible development you need to keep a few things in mind:
Remember, never stop advertising as this will enable your competitors to be more successful than you...
If you provide quality services to travellers within the listed countries of sub-saharan Africa and agree to adhere to our code of conduct including relevant government & travel industry regulations as well as all statutory requirements you are welcome to apply for membership to Africa Adventure.