As a small business in the highly competitive UK tourism market, you are all looking to
- Drive visitors through the door
- Drive traffic to your website and social media channels
- Drive leads and sales
Running a business in the tourism market is challenging, with some organisations investing thousands in marketing. Small, often single-establishment firms can’t compete at this level, as their profit margins are usually similar to the marketing spend of the big players.
I had this when I owned a self-catering cottage in West Sussex, where my problem was driving bookings out of season due to the low margins. Every week I had 10’s of companies saying “advertise with us”, “we can re-do your website”, “we can create backlinks to your website”, “SEO is what you need”, but none would say how they could book out of season weeks. It was all just too generic.
I remember one discussion with an online holiday cottage company where they said they could take on my cottage and would take a % of every booking. I asked if they could commit to filling the 12 out-of-season problem weeks, and they said no. Thus, the proposition was that they would take a percentage of the 40 weeks I could already book, which would more than offset any additional bookings they could generate during the out-of-season problem weeks.
What I realised is that the more I could get my business in front of people actively looking for a place to stay in West Sussex, the better the odds increased. Also, the fact that there were enough people specifically looking for West Sussex meant I didn’t need to market wider. For example, I didn’t need to try to convince people looking at the south coast that West Sussex was the place to visit.
I quickly realised that I was trying to solve the wrong problem; my own website was actually the place to tell people about my accommodation and convert them to a booking. The problem to solve was how to get people to my website.
I often think creating a website is like opening a shop on a high street where all the other shops do the same thing. Thus, how do you get the person walking down the street to enter your shop? With the internet, how can I get someone to visit my website?
A Website is EASY. A Business is HARD!
Your website is essential, but it is just a step in creating a business that succeeds and grows! The fact is, you may have the best website ever made, but unless people can find it and see how your products and services meet their needs, it’s nothing more than an expensive collection of text and images.
There is only one person who truly understands your business, and that is YOU. What you need is help in driving your vision forward with expert coaching in specific, prioritised areas. What you don’t want is someone trying to put your business into their template for the purpose of selling you something. This latter point was what the online holiday cottage company was offering me above, and not actually solving what I needed help with.
A Multi-Pronged Approach
Independent of the type of business you are, we all want people to visit our establishment, whether it is a place to stay, a place to eat, or an activity like a surf school.
Let’s say that the place to convert targeted traffic into sales is your “Virtual Front Door”, and this can be either your website, email or telephone.
This means you need to take a multi-pronged approach to bring warm leads right to your virtual front door! And once there, you’ll have an opportunity to establish your credibility and convince them of your offer.
But they have to find you first, right?
You have a variety of things to do, online and offline, to get the word out about your products and services. This marketing requires a commitment of time, energy and unfortunately, money. This marketing is where small businesses differ from large organisations, not only due to restrictions on time, energy, and money, but also because small, inexpensive steps can lead to significant gains. That’s where we come in!
How can we help?
I created Coast Radar specifically to help two audiences:
- Visitors to the coast to find information on beaches, places to eat and things to see and do.
- Small businesses need to get in front of people actively looking for what they do
Let’s look at the above in a little more detail. Visitors use Coast Radar in two very different ways. The first is a person browsing, looking for inspiration and then narrowing down options. This may mean they are very interested in understanding the availability of certain services to enable them to decide on the suitability of visiting that area. They are then only really concerned with booking somewhere to stay.
The second visitor to Coast Radar is the person that is already in the area and wants something very specific, this could be understanding where the nearest beach with a surf or SUP school is located or they want to grab something to eat and need somewhere that allows dogs.
We aim to inspire people to visit the UK and Ireland coast. Then, when visiting, we would like to drive as many of them as possible towards your businesses. To achieve this, we need to add you as a listing on our maps and in our search tools.
We don’t charge a penny because we want to create a central information hub with content provided by the business owners rather than short, generic, thin content.
Why not come and join us? We can help drive traffic to your front door.