How to develop tourism | 7 destination branding and tourism marketing strategies

Are you in the tourism industry and looking for ways to more effectively market your destination to prospective visitors? We’ve got 7 actionable destination branding strategies you can start using to entice visitors today.

Tourism isn’t easy. Even if you’ve got the sandy beaches and clear blue seas that look like they’re fresh out of a commercial, or mountains or theme parks of international and cultural significance, you’re fighting with the whole world for people’s most valuable and most finite resources, and you’re asking for them in abundance: their time, and their money.

So how do you get people to start thinking about your region as a destination worth visiting? Better yet, how do you move from people’s shortlists to the selected destination when they’re booking flights?

1. Know your location’s unique selling propositions

To develop and market tourism in your area, everything rolls off of identifying what makes your destination stand out: your unique selling propositions (USPs).

For example: think of Egypt, you think of the pyramids, you think of Sydney, you think about the Opera House, you think of Arizona, you think of the Grand Canyon. But what if you don’t have buildings of international architectural significance, ancient structures that modernity doesn’t fully know how to replicate, or unique geographical marvels as laurels to rest on?

It’s highly probable that you’ll need to be more creative in how you position your destination to attract visitors, and potentially work with other stakeholders to share the burden of development. You need to think: if I didn’t live here, why would I want to visit? Any “best kept secret in town”-type deals need to become public knowledge.

Here are a few avenues you could explore:

• If your restaurant scene is strong, consider promoting that side of things to appeal to foodies.
• If you have a lot of local food and beverage producers, particularly in specialty areas like wine and cheese, creating bespoke tours could carry touristic appeal.
• You could look to host a film or a music festival.
• If you have a lot of unspoiled countryside, or dramatic landscapes, you could trade on being a haven for outdoor enthusiasts, and even invest in developing accessible hiking trails within the appropriate framework.
• Play on your local history (nothing is too obscure or silly if it captures people’s imaginations and encourages them to visit).

Pro tip: If your area is ideal as a city break, suits people looking for peace and quiet, or fits into some other category like an adventure holiday, look at specialist sites you could get listed on that are targeting those kinds of holiday makers.

2. Create captivating video content that showcases what your location has to offer

In the modern age, pretty pictures to sit in brochures and on web pages are nice, but you need to be playing with video if you’re going to seriously compete.

The hero piece of any tourism campaign to support your local area should be a compelling video that highlights your destination’s USPs. Your video needs to reflect the USPs you’ve identified, and create a compelling narrative that draws people in.

While it is more affordable to make professional standard videos than ever before, this is one area where if you have the budget, it will pay dividends to hire freelancers who really know what they’re doing. You know that big budget movie sets are famously slow-paced, and this is with, quite literally, the best in the business who get paid the big bucks. The lighting needs to be spot-on, the audio perfect, and the editing seamless and high quality, and that’s before you even start considering the expense of equipment.

Pro tip: Use diverse demographics in the video to appeal to a wider audience.

3. Partner with travel influencers

Travel influencers carry a lot of clout when it comes to where people go on holiday.

The opportunity cost to individuals, when it comes to potentially their only holiday of the year, cannot be understated. If there’s one area where people research to death, it’s how they’re going to spend a significant chunk of their time off and potentially an even bigger fraction of their disposable income in a single shot.

A travel influencer can essentially offer a kind of BETA test of a holiday. Whether they vlog, blog, livestream, or more likely, put out a combination of posts and content about their trip, it’s someone else’s (mostly) authentic experience. It’s kind of like a trailer for a movie. Travel influencer content helps address blockers or concerns potential visitors might have, and can easily turn, “I like the idea of destination X,” to booked travel and accommodation.

So if you think your destination is ready for the influencer test, check on Youtube, Instagram and TikTok, see the sort of influencers who are appealing to your ideal demographics, and reach out to them to see what can be arranged.

4. Use gamification to source local recommendations

Gamification is the application of game mechanics to improve user engagement. The chance at a prize, the thrill of a challenge, and the joy of interaction, can bring out people’s absolute best efforts.

Customising a Video Contest or Photo Contest and opening it to your local population to identify, for example, the hidden gems that make your region special, alongside a recommendation, could be a great way to not only mine local knowledge for selling points you might not be aware of, but also generate high quality user-generated content.

Have you looked at the picture quality people have been getting out of iPhones and the Android phones trading on having more pixels than an IMAX frame recently? In the hands of people who care about the end-result, these devices, which nearly everyone owns, are seriously capable pieces of kit.

So, hold a Media Contest and open it up to locals with appropriate prizes to incentivise participation, and voila: you’ve got a load of media to promote your location, alongside a ton of recommendations from local residents – the people who know the place best. Afterall, what’s the saying? “When in Rome…”

Pro tip: If you create a Media Contest on the Drimify gamification platform, you can easily connect to a Voting Gallery, and release the Voting Gallery to your target audience. Find out first hand what local attractions move the needle the most for prospective holiday makers, while promoting the shortlist to that very market segment.

5. Optimise your website for local SEO to maximise tourists visiting your establishment

If you operate a local business, like a restaurant or a small attraction, you should focus on optimising your website for local online searches.

This ensures tourists searching for nearby amenities see you in the results.

If you’re a local tourism board: Helping with this aspect can be a great way to assist local businesses in making the most of seasonal trade.

6. Implement a referral programme

Tour operators and travel agencies can get more customers by implementing and running referral programmes.

You should encourage satisfied customers to refer friends and family with automated emails after their holidays. You could offer incentives such as discounts on future trips, free upgrades, or vouchers or exclusive deals to people who successfully refer new customers.

7. Invest in sustainable tourism strategies

Wherever you operate in your local tourism ecosystem, you should make sure you’re either supporting or enabling sustainable tourism strategies to minimise negative impacts on your destination, both ensuring it remains attractive for future tourists, and more importantly, continues to serve the people who call it home.

Ultimately, when it comes to tourism, the region or area you’re selling is a resource. For a dramatic and frighteningly literal example, consider Venice. It’s sinking at a rate of 1 to 2 millimetres per year through subsidence, mass tourism, and rising sea levels, and is now the subject of a number of sustainable tourism initiatives, including reducing the number of cruise ships entering the Venetian Lagoon, and promoting exploration of the city by foot, bike, or gondola wherever possible.

Venice is of course, a dramatic example, but it shows the importance of planning ahead when you develop tourism in an area. Among other initiatives, you should look to implement eco-friendly practices, support local communities, and actively preserve and protect natural resources like the native biodiversity.

Pro tip: Sustainable tourism initiatives go beyond what operators and local communities do. It also involves influencing responsible behaviour by visitors, and when it comes to influencing behaviour, there are few more effective strategies than modern gamification.

To take the Venice example, you could use the Drimify gamification platform to create a multi-level playable experience that educates visitors on Venice’s history, Venice’s unique architecture, its current challenges, and ways they can help protect Venice during their stay.

By intersplicing informative but entertaining content in the form of videos and text, alongside Quizzes and mini-games, you can more effectively educate tourists to help protect your region. You could then distribute the game by direct links in marketing emails, and by using QR codes which could be included on magazines, bus stops, hotel rooms, and anywhere else tourists are likely to congregate.

Key takeaway

Tourism’s competitive, but incredibly lucrative for the places that do it well. To develop your region into a tourist hotspot on the level of a Santorini or a Bora Bora, it takes cooperation, hard work, creativity, and an understanding of market trends.

You can attract tourists to destinations with any combination of the actionable tactics listed here, choosing the ones that will be most applicable to the persona types you’re trying to appeal to.

The integration of these strategies, particularly when underpinned by sustainable and responsible tourism ethics, can transform any region into a coveted destination. The use of gamification in particular is versatile enough to not only engage, but also educate tourists, fostering a more sustainable and enjoyable experience for both visitors and locals.