The current global financial crisis has forced businesses all over the world to pull their socks up and market themselves harder than ever before, and the timeshare market is definitely no exception. The pie is shrinking fast, and it is unfortunately impossible for everyone to continue to hold on to their slice.

What this means if you run a timeshare resort, is that you have to stretch your current marketing budget to the very limit.  You need to be ready to innovate and to embrace the very latest marketing tactics and to find new ways to market your business as efficiently as possible. In other words, you need to become absolutely serious about harnessing the full power of Internet marketing (and especially social network marketing) and you need to learn how to leverage that power to make every penny of your marketing budget work harder than ever.

Internet marketing gives you the edge for two main reasons: 1) it allows you to rope in whole online communities to help spread the word about your timeshare resort, and 2) your own staff can easily learn to do much of the online marketing themselves in otherwise ‘dead’ office time, 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there, making your marketing budget go farther than ever before.

So, where do you begin?

Below we will present you with a point-by-point plan of action you should use to revolutionise your timeshare resort’s online marketing. We have only got space for an outline here, so be sure to follow the links to our other posts for more detail and lots tips and tricks about getting the most out of your online marketing. And, of course, feel free to contact us if you have any queries, or if you would like to discuss an online marketing plan specifically tailored to your timeshare resort.

Optimise your website

When you are running an effective Internet marketing strategy based on online ‘word-of-mouth’, it is quite common for people to decide to take action (such as contact you, schedule a visit to your resort, or possibly even buy timeshare) before they even visit your website. Nevertheless, your website is still the place where your online marketing will be directing people for the most part, and where much of the action actually happens, and so you have to make sure that it works in every way to encourage people to take that crucial step.

• Have a clean, easy navigation and simple web design. Avoid fancy bells and whistles, make sure your website loads fast and make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for.
• Make contact forms short  and simple, add photos of your staff and make sure your ‘about us’ page says who your directors are.
• Video is a powerful tool. Use it where possible to show the different aspects of your resort – your facilities, your guests (with their consent, of course) and your staff. Consider starting a podcast and make sure to post your videos on YouTube.
• Make sure you have clear, easy-to-follow directions to your timeshare resort posted on your website. A great way to do this is to use Google maps to provide step-by-step directions. Offer a printable version and be sure to include your telephone number.
• Offer in-depth information about the area around your resort. Keep your site updated with the latest news regarding events and attractions. And, of course, take lots of photos and post them up on your website and on your Flickr account.
• Add social bookmarking services like Facebook and twitter to the important pages of your website, to make it easy for your visitors to share them with their family and friends.
• Decide what action you want visitors to take on each page of your website. Is the goal to get people to make a booking, contact you, download a brochure, join your referral program, or something else? Guide your visitor with a clear call to action on each page, including highly visible links and button.
• Try new markets by developing specific landing pages aimed at different niche audiences and designed to press the right buttons for each niche. Use Pay-Per-Click advertising to send targetted traffic and test your new landing pages and use the successful ones to help you decide which markets to expand into.

Get into Social Media Networking

Social media marketing is the best way for you to build an online community made up of both current clients and prospective timeshare owners and visitors. Once you establish an online community of people with a common interest in your timeshare resort, they will do much of your marketing for you by simply interacting with each other, posting holiday photos and comments and so on. Banish all excuses from your mind and set aside 15 minutes a day to implement your social marketing plan by following these 8 simple steps and the tips below.

• Start twittering use HootSuite to manage multiple users
• Create a Facebook page for your resort and encourage owners to become fans and contribute.
• Add photos to Flickr, optimise them and join in the community.
• Start a Flickr Group, encourage guests to add their photos.
• Start a YouTube channel.
• Make a video of your resort, and post it to Youtube.
• Listen to what people are already saying about you and respond.
• Monitor your brand name with Google Alerts, so that you know whenever people are posting comments about you on the Web.
• Respond to feedback (positive and negative) on all your social networking sites and also especially on Trip Advisor.

Launch a referral program

The online community that you build via your social networks has the power to become your biggest lead generator, especially if your timeshare resort offers a good service with no pressure sales. Still, there is no harm in speeding up the process and boosting it further by launching a referral program.

• Create a referral landing page and make sure that all your social media, blog and website efforts lead to this page.
• Give your referral program the attention it deserves, both online and off line.
• Make sure your referral program is not just for owners but also guests, exchanges etc., to get yourself the maximum reach and benefit.

Optimise your blog and update it regularly

Your blog is one of the key components of your online marketing strategy. It helps people get to know your resort, it allows you to keep in touch with your readers and over time it also builds up a wealth of online content about your resort and location for the search engines to feast upon.

• Update your blog regularly with the latest news and photos about your timeshare resort, activities, and everything to do with the local scene. Remember many of your clients are owners that will know your staff and your business.
• Make sure your blog is search engine friendly. We highly recommend you purchase the Thesis Theme for WordPress for this purpose.
• Write killer headlines, and make sure you include all the necessary ingredients for successful blog posts.
• Add the relevant plug-ins to promote your blog and integrate it with your other social networking sites, including Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
• Promote your blog on your social networks and also use your social networks to promote your blog.
• Start a separate destination blog that focuses on your timeshare resort´s location and use it to link back to your resort’s website and blog.

Search Marketing (SEO and PPC)

We don’t need to tell you that being found on the free search engine listings is a vital part of your online marketing strategy. Besides, you should also consider using some Pay-Per-Click advertising to boost your visibility for those keywords that your site is weak on, while you work to improve their search engine ranking.

• Focus on dominating local search keywords (for example, ‘timeshare resort costa del sol’ instead of just ‘timeshare resort’ or ‘timeshare resort spain’). Use Word Tracker to help you identify what keywords to use.
• Make sure your resort website has the right keywords in the right place (SEO).
• Appear in the Google Maps local business listings.
• Establish a web presence, not just a web site. If someone searches for your company or resort’s  name they should be able to find your website, blog, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter accounts.
• Try Paid Search Marketing (Pay-Per-Click) and track your conversions so you can determine your ROI. We suggest you start with a small set of keywords and budget on Google Adwords. There is a lot to consider when setting up a successful pay-per-click campaign, but to begin with, you will have to focus on what PPC keywords to bid on and how to optimise your landing pages accordingly.

Measure your online marketing performance

Being able to chart your progress and know how well you are doing is both a key advantage of online marketing as well as an absolute must. The secret here is to focus your limited marketing resources on doing more of what works best for your timeshare resort and your target audience.

• Understand how Google Analytics can help with search optimization.
• Track referral source types and discover where your visitors are coming from.
• Know which websites refer the highest quality traffic and forge alliances with them.
• Track the number of social media mentions you get so that you know how well your efforts are paying off.
• Monitor your social media targets, such as number of fans on Facebook, number of YouTube video views (and what kind of videos are most popular), Flickr statistics and so on.
• Determine which strategies are working best so you do more of that and at the same time try and work harder on those that are lagging behind.

Make sure your staff is up to scratch

Your staff is of course the vital link to your clients, so you have to be sure they are 100% up to the job of communicating with your prospective clients without the typical sales pressure, and of keeping your owners and guests happy.

• Employ multicultural staff on a long term basis and encourage them to get involved in your Internet marketing.
• Educate, motivate and communicate with your staff about your marketing programs.
• Empower your staff to start their own blog, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube account and also to devote some time each day to contribute to your online marketing efforts.
• Make sure your staff is aware of all the information and promotions that you post online, so that they can adequately address queries from your visitors.
• Make sure your staff always responds immediately to enquiries in an attentive, personal way.

Some other ideas

• Provide free internet access from your resort through WiFi and guest computers.
• Add new entertainment hubs (with iPod docking, etc).
• Try renting out digital cameras and videos to your guests, or just hand out a few for free in exchange for some photo or video material for your blog.
• Experiment with permission-based mobile marketing.

And finally, a few do’s and don’ts

• Never offer gimmick ‘free’ holidays.
• Stop demanding that dreaded 60-90 minute tour and be more creative about how you get your staff to show people around your resort. Get your staff to mingle with the guests and make the tour invitation in a more casual way.
• Treat your sales force with respect and demand that they do the same with your owners and clients.
• Don’t use hard pressure sales techniques.
• Go the extra mile to make sure that your customers are happy and talk about you positively. Think of resort more in terms of a hotel, in that you need to keep on winning the loyalty of your guests and owners each and every time.

Summing up, there is a lot you should be doing to reap the endless benefits of promoting your timeshare resort online, while still staying within your budget. The secret of success is (as always, but more than ever in the current economic climate) to ensure 100% customer satisfaction and to turn your happy guests, owners and even prospective clients into an online community of evangelists for your timeshare resort. Remember that a positive recommendation from a friend or even from another user online is worth more than all the fancy websites and glossy brochures you could ever throw out there!

It’s time to roll up those sleeves and get to work on your online marketing. Don’t let crucial days and weeks slip by. Get started today!

And if you need any help, just give us a shout.

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Andrew de Gabriele over at Pay Per Click Management has just published a great post on how to market your business through a recession. 

“When times are tough,  it is more important than ever – absolutely vital – to figure out how you can spend your money wisely to attract as many clients as possible …”

read the full blog post

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Well done Andrew for passing your Adwords Pro exam!! Andrew will be taking over the Pay Per Click management of our client accounts.

This was emailed to me from Google:

Thank you for taking Google’s exam. Please view your exam results below: =============================================

.

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A question I am often asked is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) or PPC (Pay Per Click) most effective? The answer for most site owners is the same…ensure that you have a balanced strategy which not only includes a healthy long term SEO plan and PPC but also includes other strategies such as advertising on other portals to generate sales leads or email marketing. We recently gained a client that had their whole Internet Marketing budget allocated to their PPC campaigns. There are some problems with this strategy -  one being that as more competitors join your PPC arena, your costs go through the roof, you loose credibility by not being the natural search and when you stop your PPC campaign you are totally wiped off the search engines, whereas with SEO you will continue to be there for some time to come..

When we started our business six years ago, we were predominantly a web site design agency, but as the demand for online results has increased our services have evolved in this direction and we now aggressively market our clients online using several strategies. Not only are we using different ways to market our web sites but we are now closely tracking conversion results and stats.

The actual design of your web site only accounts for a small percentage of what actually makes it work! Other elements in having a successful site would include; the content of the site, ranking in the search engines, how well you deal with enquiries and how well you analyse the stats to interpret how your users are using your site. We now encourage our clients to start their own blog and constantly update it to keep their clients and potential clients informed of what is happening in their company.

The principles of marketing apply online as much as they do offline. Each strategy should be part of an overall objective which is measured and reviewed. Several of these strategies should be running at the same time with those that aren’t performing dropping off and new ones being added.

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You get your fabulous new website. You put it online. You sit back, and wait.

You design a great magazine advert. You file it away in a back room. You sit back, and wait.

The two are equivalent and the end result is the same!

Nobody will ever come looking for your ad in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet and the same goes for the online world. Just because your website is somewhere ‘out there’, it doesn’t mean that any of your potential clients (or the search engines for that matter) will find it. They have to be sent there!

This is why allocating a separate budget for an ongoing Internet Marketing campaign to drive visitors to your website is every bit as important as investing in professional Web Design. Many websites totally flop because their owners fail to grasp this vital (and seemingly obvious) point.

Read on to learn more about Internet Marketing and how to go about it.

Climb up the search engine rankings with ongoing Search Engine Optimisation

The best known Internet Marketing strategy is to get your website to rank high in the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc). This is known as Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO).

SEO should begin right from the Web Design stage, by designing your website and its structure in such a way that the search engines can easily access and index its content. Besides, you should entrust the writing of the text on your web pages to an experienced SEO copywriter, who will ensure that your web pages target the very keywords your potential clients are searching for.

Once your website is up and running, don’t be disappointed if it does not appear in any of the search engines right away  it won’t! Only one thing will actually get your website to climb up the search engine rankings and continue to maintain its position there an ongoing SEO marketing campaign comprised of the following strategies:

1. Add new content regularly to your website
   By adding new web pages, articles or blog posts regularly – at the very least on a monthly basis – your website grows and gains greater credibility in the eyes of the search engines, resulting in higher rankings. On the other hand, if you do not keep on adding new content, your website will eventually be branded as ‘stale’ and penalise accordingly. 
2. Add inbound links to your website on a monthly basis
   The search engines can also estimate how ‘important’ your website is based on the amount of other websites that link to it. Some people will link to you eventually if you put a good deal of interesting and valuable content on your website, but this is not usually enough. The inbound linking aspect of SEO involves free and paying for a number of new links to be set up to point to your site. Keep in mind that rather than adding a large amount of inbound links at one go, it is much better (especially as regards Google) to add a few links regularly on a monthly basis.

Give your website an initial boost with Pay-Per-Click Internet Marketing

Achieving high search engine rankings is something that takes a considerable amount of work – and time. Your ultimate goal should be to get the majority of your visitors via the search engines and, since SEO generally takes about 8 months to 1 year to start producing results, it is something that you have to start working on right away.

In the meantime, you should drive traffic to your website using Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing, where small adverts are placed prominently on the search engines (in the search results of your target search terms) and you pay only when someone clicks on your ad and is sent to your website.

We recommend that you budget to run a PPC Internet Marketing campaign concurrently with your SEO for the first year. Eventually, once the Search Engine Optimisation is yielding results and you are getting traffic on your primary search terms, you can divert your PPC marketing budget as needed, to cover secondary search terms related to your business.

Effective Internet Marketing is crucial for your website to receive the consistent volume of traffic it needs to produce results. The sooner you embark on a properly organised campaign, the sooner you’ll begin reaping the rewards of your online presence.

You can read more about successful long term Internet Marketing here.

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 It was inevitable once Yahoo purchased Overture in 2003 that MSN would enter the Pay Per Click search Marketing industry itself. Overture had been providing paid listings to both MSN and Yahoo effectively lost its “neutrality”.

Last week MSN officially withdrew its relationship with Overture (now known as Yahoo Search Marketing) and is now running a beta version of paid listings with selected agencies. The date for a worldwide launch has not been set, we will however be signing up all our clients on the new Ad Centre as soon as it becomes available.

 

 

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The aim of a well optimized pay-per-click marketing campaign is to get a steady flow of highly-targeted potential customers to visit your website for as low a cost as possible. But, of course, visitors do not automatically become customers, and how many of them actually do depends very much on the web page they are sent to when they click on your advertising. This web page is known as the ‘landing page’.

Choosing or designing effective landing pages for a pay-per-click campaign is not a task to be taken lightly. Your landing pages have to state your offer clearly and make it easy for your visitors to know at a glance both what you want them to do (for example, enter their details on an online form, join your mailing list or purchase a product directly) and why it pays them to do so.

Don’t send your pay-per-click visitors to your home page
One common mistake is to use the web site’s homepage as a landing page. This is usually a bad idea because, unless your website is about a single product, your homepage is unlikely to be targeted enough to convert a visitor who came in looking for something specific. Your landing pages have to be highly relevant to the ad that is bringing in the visitors, so that they quickly find what they are looking for and are motivated to stay on your website.

How to find the holy grail of landing pages
Now, keeping in mind that you have just a few seconds to gain your visitors’ attention once they click on an advert and reach your website, creating the landing page that converts as many visitors as possible might seem like an elusive holy grail. But there’s good news. Excellent news in fact!

The thing is that you can modify your landing pages at any time and so, you don’t have to get it absolutely right the first time. You can easily make small changes and test to see how they affect visitor conversion – and in fact this is exactly what you should be doing! By keeping what works best and discarding what doesn’t, you can make your landing page evolve into a killer marketing tool optimized for maximum results.

It is also possible to have multiple landing pages for a single ad running at the same time, where you send an equal number of visitors to each page and test to see which works best. This testing method is even more accurate because your results are not affected by the time of year (say, it’s Christmas one week and huge-credit-card-bills week the next).

Intuition is not good enough
Testing how different parts of a landing page affect its success is exactly what the people over at www.marketingexperiments.com have been doing recently. They found they could improve conversion ‘by more than 40% by making a number of key changes to the original page.’ If that’s not incentive enough to devote some real energy to testing and tweaking your landing pages, then what is?

Take a look at their reports here. Part 1 | Part 2

Some of the things these experiments revealed sound like plain old common sense, but others might appear downright counter-intuitive. For example, removing the price from a landing page resulted in a 6.6% drop in the conversion rate in one test they ran! In another test, removing a photo actually increased conversion by a whopping 39%.

Of course, some of these changes may have the opposite result in a different situation and the test results cannot be generalised across the board. But the clear lesson is this: take the trouble to test your landing pages to find out what works best for your market and do more of that. It will most definitely pay off with a dramatic increase in your return from your Pay Per Click advertising!

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Pay-per-click advertising services like Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing may be just the thing you need to boost your online business. Here’s the basic concept, described in Google’s own words on the front page of their website adwords.google.com:

With Google AdWords you create your own ads, choose keywords to help us match your ads to your audience and pay only when someone clicks on them.

It really makes Internet marketing seem like child’s play, doesn’t it? Just sign up, give your keywords and ads to Google, together with your credit card details and hey presto! Droves of visitors are flocking to your website wanting to do business with you.

Then, why are so many people disappointed with the results of their self-run PPC advertising campaigns?

The simple answer is that Pay-Per-Click advertising is not a magic formula just waiting to be applied, like Google would have you believe. Just as with any other kind of marketing, there are lots of factors that can make or break a campaign. For example:

• Choose the wrong keywords and you could blow your budget (by paying too much per click), attract the completely wrong audience, or both.
• Write bad adverts and you could be paying for lots of clicks from people who have no intention of doing business.
• Send your visitors to the wrong part of your website and you might put off even the most qualified prospect.

The list of potential pitfalls goes on, and each one could spell disaster for your online advertising campaign.

This is precisely why entrusting your Pay-Per-Click advertising to qualified experts will prevent you from squandering your online marketing budget and pay for itself countless times over in terms of drastically improved results. Also remember that even a finely tuned PPC campaign has to be regularly monitored – and its statistics carefully evaluated in the light of a changing market – for it to keep on performing well.
 
In spite of the misleading front-page blurb, Google itself recognises that it takes experts to run effective PPC campaigns. This is why they came up with the Google AdWords Professional certificate system to recognise proficient campaign managers. And what’s more, our PPC director, Luigi Muto says that even after obtaining his Google AdWords certificate with an outstanding 85% score, he’s constantly discovering new ways to eke out still more performance from the Pay-Per-Click marketing machine.

So, whether you’re feeling brave enough to go it on your own with a Pay-Per-Click advertising campaign, or if you’ve been disheartened by the tales of woe of those who have done so and failed, remember that there is another option. Put you campaign in the hands of our experts at PayPerClickManagement.eu and just sit back and enjoy the results.

It’s one simple and easy step to successful PPC advertising.

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A good and solid Internet presence is not something that comes free.

Whether you’re just starting out, or even if you have been online for years, your website will be totally unknown to the Internet masses unless you devote a portion of your marketing effort and budget to online promotion.

On the Internet, all websites, great and small, are just like shops set up in unfrequented side streets on the edge of town. People will not visit unless they are actually sent there. And you’ll need a good online marketing and advertising strategy to draw them in.

In recent years, Pay Per Click Marketing in the search engines and on other websites has established itself as an excellent way to quickly attract targeted visitors to your website.

In fact, the second best thing about Pay Per Click Marketing is that you can have your website’s traffic shoot through the roof almost instantly. And the best thing about it is that you can calculate your cost-per-lead, or even cost-per-sale down to the last cent and see exactly what you are getting for your investment.

Pay Per Click works so well that we would recommend you spend up to 70% of your online marketing budget on this method while your website is still new.

And yet, even such a great thing can be overdone! Many businesses completely give in to the temptation of quick returns that Pay Per Click offers and totally ignore other complementary Internet marketing methods that promise even better results in the long run.

If you want to get the most out of your online marketing, you should aim at ranking high in the free search engine listings related to your business. Although this, so called, Search Engine optimisation is something that will take a considerable time to yield results, it should be your long term goal and will boost your credibility way over that of your competitors who only appear in the paid listings.

So, how do you go about it?

1. Optimise your web pages for the search engines
One aspect of SEO involves optimising your web pages by embedding targeted key words or phrases in the text on your main website. These key terms must be carefully chosen to be ones that your potential clients are likely to search for. The overall design of your website should also be taken into account as it can affect your rankings too.

2. Allocate some of your budget to obtaining inbound links to your site
Many search engines also place a lot of importance on the number of links to your web pages from other websites. This is based on the idea that the more people link to you, the more important (and relevant) you must be. By spending a portion of your online marketing budget on acquiring inbound links from other websites, you work your way towards an even higher ranking in the search engines.

3. Regularly add new information to your website
The search engines tend to notice when you don’t add new information to your website and your content becomes stale, and you will be penalised by sliding down the search rankings. And of course, your human visitors just won’t return unless you regularly add new web pages and interesting articles to your web site.

4. Start a blog
Starting a web log, or blog, where you post news and short articles related to your business is an excellent way to keep your website fresh. But a blog is much more than accumulating relevant content for visitors and search engines. Blogging is a great way to interact with potential clients who can leave comments about what you write. And, if you go beyond pure self promotion and post worthwhile content that people will want to link to, you’ll eventually end up with lots of free inbound links and traffic too. We’re barely scratching the surface of the awesome marketing power of blogs here, so watch out for more in future posts.

There are also other non-SEO marketing strategies that you should seriously consider, including:

Advertising on other websites
Although not usually a cost-effective way to get inbound links, advertising on other websites can be a great way to piggyback on their popularity to spread the word about you. For example, if you sell real estate, you can have your portfolio displayed on web portals related to the country or region where you operate and reach thousands of potential clients that way.

Opt-in e-mail marketing
The key word here is opt-in. Spamming a random e-mail list is not only illegal, but highly inefficient too.

By encouraging visitors to your web site, as well as your current clients, to subscribe to receive interesting information, together with news and promotional advertising by e-mail, you build up a highly valuable mailing list of targeted people who are actually interested in your services.

You can also consider purchasing mailing lists from list brokers, but you have to make sure that the people on the list are not only highly targeted, but are there because they have expressed an interest in receiving info from your kind of business. Otherwise, it’s just a waste of time.

Well, those were a few Internet marketing ideas to consider as you plan your strategy. Remember, the secret is to think long term and, of course, to diversify your efforts for best results.

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In early 2004 Sorted Sites started offering clients Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign Advertising. So successful has this part of our business been that we have decided to market our Pay Per Click services via a separate website that will purely focus on providing a better service to our present and new clients. We hope that this new site will help educate and dispel some of the myths about Pay Per click Advertising.  Please feel free to give us any comments on the new site: Pay Per Click Management

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