Authentic, engaging and meaningful story telling that aroused the curiosity of travellers and made emotional connect with captivating visual content held the key to wooing tourists in the age of new media publicity, said expert speakers at the fourth International Conference on Tourism Technology (ICTT) held here on Friday.
Even as conventional advertising is on the wane in the tourism industry, new media publicity is facing challenges in ways that necessitated experimentation. All marketing software should be mobile phone friendly, they said at the event that was organised by the Association of Tourism Trade Organisations, India (ATTOI) with the support of Kerala Tourism.
The sessions focused on the potential and role of technology, social media, and smartphone apps in catalysing the growth of the travel and hospitality industry.
Professional storyteller and YouTuber Ivana Perkovic spoke of how quick money should never be the idea behind social media videos. “It is necessary to generate credible information that can be of public interest,” she said in her talk on ‘How to Grow Your YouTube Channel’.
Aspiring YouTubers should go for videos of no less than 10 minutes and not more than 15 minutes, if the topic was “particularly interesting”. Highlighting the role of patience, Ms. Perkovic suggested creating a video each week, thus adding to 52 a year. “Don’t insist on technical perfection right from the start. What matters is that the narrative should appeal to those interested in the subject,” she said, while cautioning YouTubers not to pass judgments or opinions based on mere personal experience.
Author-trainer-blogger Prof. Seema Gupta said an end had come to the exploitation of consumer interests based on monitoring of people’s Internet choices. “Mobiles, like that by Apple, have completely put an end to advertising based on this, while Google has terminated its cookies service. Such a scenario is posing unprecedented challenges for professional digital marketing,” said Ms. Gupta, who is a former professor (Digital Marketing) at IIM-Bengaluru. “Only factual and natural advertising techniques will pay returns. The consumer’s privacy has become important like never before,” she said in her presentation on ‘How to Create an Effective Online Advertisement’.
“Paid ads cannot sustain business in the long run as any enterprise has to go for organic means to generate sales of at least 30%. One should also go for diversification in marketing, by not depending on just one or two ways of selling products,” she added.
Speaking of ‘Importance of Storytelling’ to woo travellers, Sachin Bansal, founder and chief explorer of Regenerative Travel, said story telling could be of emotional and personal appeal to the consumer. True tales can add to sales prospects. He elaborated on how augmented reality, virtual reality, and Artificial Intelligence had changed the dynamics of story telling that helped boost marketing prospects in the fields of culture, history, and cuisine.
In her address on ‘How to build online visibility through the most effective SEO’, marketing consultant-columnist Dipti Parmar noted how lakhs of searches were carried out on the Internet daily, making ‘key words’ critical for the promotion of any business.
Entrepreneur-trainer Sourav Jain, while highlighting the ‘emotional connect’, said any travel-related video must be distinct vis-à-vis the others. “Audio-visual presentations on tourism gain wide social acceptance when they carried elements like social justice and gender equality,” he observed.
The event was held amid two-third of Indian travellers, post-pandemic, booking trips on digital platforms and with online tour operators.
