Marketing Ideas: Long- & Short-Term Strategies [Mini Video]

For your convenience, we've included a transcript of this video below.

Hi, if we haven't met yet, I'm Sharon Elswick, with part of the Sales Team here at ThinkReservations and fellow property owner. Just like us at our property, you'll start settling into a new normal for now. What does that mean for your outreach to your customers and potential customers right now? It's critical for you to read the room and, to use another overused term, be authentic in your marketing efforts. What does that mean?

So I've put together a few thoughts on some short-term and long-term marketing strategies to help build success for when we can all go outside and hug each other again.

So some short-term strategies, which our customers need right now. Be connected. Share ideas and help them reduce stress. This is a great time to get a little more personal with your marketing. Share a bit about yourselves and your skills. Encourage engagement. Create a Facebook group of like-minded customers like a recipe testing group or gardening group or green clean group. Even a how to staycation group. On-site property owners are experts at this. Let's share our tips.

The balance is key here. Promote the positive actions happening in your community and with other businesses in the area. Don't just make it all about you. Balance is key.

Another short-term strategy is to keep answering the phone. Answering those emails. No one right now wants to feel like the world is shut down and you don't want them to return the favor for when things pick back up again and folks are able to travel.

Another short-term strategy: Can you pivot what you do to offer things online? Create cooking classes, sell some gift shop items online, have the drink of the week happy hour where you create a new signature drink every week that everyone gets to try out with you. At the very least this is great website SEO.

Get a tourism group together if one doesn't already exist in your area and develop a micro website. Start putting up similar content there because, do you know who else is hungry for information right now? The news outlets. They're dying for great stories. This can be prime PR for you.

Please do remember folks can sniff out anything that is designed for publicity right now. And it's a very sore point right now. Please be careful. It's imperative you're delivering information from the heart, really what works for you, what your skill sets are, being, again, authentic. And delivering what your customers actually need at this time.

Here's some long-term strategies as well. Think about your favorite customers and start figuring out how to get more of them into your property, through your door. Where do they get their information? How and when do they plan travel? What motivates them?

Reposition yourself in your marketing, your messaging, and your selling. Reach like minded people and make sure to figure out a way to track these results as well.

Second long-term strategy idea - look over your content in advance, like blog articles that were written. Get them edited and if possible even grab the photos. Create a backlog of things that you can return to and execute on all the rest of the year.

Another long-term strategy and idea is watch the success of your online offerings. Is this something you can actually monetize in the future - maybe your cooking classes? Maybe that one gift shop item that was flying off the shelves the entire quarantine period? Maybe your Facebook group. Just watch that and see how you can maybe make that a permanent part of your revenue stream in the future.

Another idea long-term is leveraging the PR connections that you make at this time and the tourism connections you created for your microsite. Make that year-round endeavor.

And reach out to your tourism and direct marketing office, DMO, entities for support, for larger marketing efforts in the future when things are more normal.

Those are a few short-term and long-term strategies. I can talk about this for another hour easily. But in the interest of keeping this mini video mini I’ll stop there. I hope this started to get the wheels turning for some positive action to take as a fellow business owner. And as always thank you for being a ThinkReservations customer.