What are the future travel and tourism trends?

Posted on February 27, 2018 by alexandrapatrick

Visit England commissioned research to identify the relevant consumer trends that will affect the development of tourism products in the next 5-10 years.

These findings will help support the delivery of world-class tourism products to help grow international travel to England in an ever changing traveller landscape.

Here is a summary explanation of the specific touch points relating to these trends and its impact on the existing and evolving travel journey in the future.

travel and tourism trends

travel and tourism trends

Top future travel and tourism trends for England

The trends affecting consumer behaviour follow a travel journey relating to four broad areas – Inspiration & Pre-planning; the Booking Process. Connected Travel and Evolving Travel Needs.

Inspiration & Pre-planning
The inspiration to travel is influenced by a huge range of online sources and voices. Once the decision has been made to travel to a specific destination the pre-planning will be a more complex, longer journey than in the past.

1. Filter Bubble – future travellers will live in a filter bubble where they personalise online searches and trust their friends and social influencers to suggest activities. Content needs to be more visible in the digital landscape and be something travellers would want to share via word of mouth and online.

2. Maximising Behaviour – future travellers have a maximising mindset and seek value at every opportunity, they are not concerned just about price (that’s the starting point), they want to combine as many cost-effective unique experiences on their journeys, so these experiences can be tailored to their own personal preferences.

3. The Death of Risk – future travellers want to find out as much as possible about their destination before getting there, they’re keen to access upfront information. They’ll conduct thorough research to minimise the risk of worrying about what might happen on the journey and balance this with the need to avoid ‘the fear of missing out’.

Booking Process
The booking process is now more instant and easier than ever before; from booking flights and accommodation to specific tourist attractions or restaurants directly from a range of interfaces (e.g. Smart TVs) – innovative touchpoints for making purchases.

4. Wishlisting – younger consumers around the world are very responsive to the idea of collecting wishlists and expect to purchase directly from them. Alternative booking channels such as Instagram are emerging, for example if there’s an ad in a post created by an influencer they expect to click and book instantly.

5. Conversational Commerce – future travellers will find it easier to make enquiries about or booking products via their own conversational messaging apps, tis will save time not having to pick up the phone or log on to a website. It makes service more compatible for the consumer, available 24/7 and flexible enough to use throughout the travel journey.

6. Impulsive Existence – there’s a desire to travel like a local and book products on the spot when at a destination, be spontaneous and access local information so they don’t miss out, this can be scuppered by the risk of struggling to find local info due to the language barrier for example.

Connected Travel
This encompasses not only how the traveller plans and books but thow they interact with the destination once they are there. Travellers are on-the-go and pushing out the latest news and images on the flip side some travellers want to completely switch off from digital distractions.

7. Locational Living – location-based technology will help raise awareness of and increase engagement with tourism products so travellers can interact more closely with their location; from offering discount vouchers to free audio guided tours to an attraction.

8. Performative Perfection – future travellers will have a strong preference for tourism products that have a strong social media connection, what’s easily shareable and the most envy-inducing? From checking in at an airport or landmark to accessing geofilters to create digital postcards to be shared on Snapchat.

9. Mastering the Mind – relaxation will be a key factor to considered by future travellers, they’re aware of the pressures of modern life and the harmful impact this has on their mental wellbeing; however not all are prepared to give up their smartphone or laptop, only a minority of 20% consider digital detoxing a motivation to go on holiday.

Evolving Travel Needs
Today’s travellers don’t see themselves as tourists and are increasingly moving away from visiting the obvious sight-seeing hotspots, alternatively they want to go where the locals go. They want to seek out an immersive experience and take part in activities that are fun but also have a sense of self-improvement.

10. Pursuit of Real – genuine, authentic tourism products are preferred by future travellers as they want to go off the beaten track and experience their chosen destination like a local. For example food is a big part of experiencing authenticity and a large number of consumers want to eat authentically when they are in a different country.

11. The Leisure Upgrade – skill-seeking future travellers will be more demanding and sophisticated and want to pursue fun and an opportunity for learning new skills or embarking on self-improving and taking part in thematic activities.

12. Customised Reality – new technologies (e.g. Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and hearables) will bring more attractions to life make it more compelling and be used to bring to life and personalise experiences for travellers that wants to unlock more engaging stories and be more immersive.

These travel and tourism trends are considered already relevant today and are said to have a significant impact on how consumers will approach the travel journey in the next 5-10 years.

Visit England also have a produced a presentation toolkit, which can be downloaded from their website.

alexandrapatrick provides original, cost-effective strategic marketing services in Kent, UK. alexandrapatrick has particular experience and expertise in digital marketing, copywriting, marketing consultancy and location/destination marketing.

If you’d like to find out more about how we could support your destination marketing needs, email info@alexandrapatrick.co.uk or contact via Twitter.

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Top 10 content tips for a tourism destination website

Posted on January 21, 2018 by alexandrapatrick

The most successful destination websites emphasise the use of personalised content and increasingly use videos to make the destination experience more real and inviting.

From seeking inspiration to book, right through to offering seasonal discounts to attractions when visiting a destination – the user journey must be easy to navigate and have a focus on local stories to stimulate the traveller’s imagination.

Despite the growing number of alternative online channels to plan and book a trip – whether via a booking website or an an influencer’s Instagram feed – destination websites still remain an important source of inspiration.

tourism_destination_website

tourism destination website

Content tips for a tourism destination website

1. Relevant, user-friendly information – make your destination website more welcoming by using video content in the home page banner, this could be 360-degree video content or a slideshow of clips, it creates an insightful, upfront snapshot of your destination. Margaret River

2. Seamless navigation – ensure you have an easy to navigate menu that include Things to do; Places to see; Plan your trip; so visitors are not more than two to three clicks away from booking a tour attraction or room on their mobile. Western Australia

3. Where is it – improve the user experience by adding a map, ideally an interactive map that pulls through and pops up relevant content about where to go and what to do, plus consider adding content that suggests transport connections to get around. New York City

4. Niche activities – include point of view content that tells a story about authentic experiences, for example, where to eat local food where locals go or finding an active pursuit that they have never experienced. Costa Rica

5. Visitor guides – create free downloadable PDF advice guides that recommends something for everyone; ideally create video guides that have influencer recommendations or a destination specialist that can add a personal touch. Visit Birmingham

6. Image gallery – create an exciting image gallery of your top attractions and activities to inspire travel, support with content descriptions, share buttons, Sat Nav location references and relevant timely discount codes. London and Partners

7. Trip builder – enable Trip builder functionality to invite the traveller to explore the site, curate personalised wishlists, a trip schedule and bespoke itineraries that can be easily shared with their friends and family. Experience Columbus

8. Help visitors – have a prominent search feature that makes it easier for the user to find what they are looking for, so offer a keyword search and options to select a date ‘to’ and ‘from’ to find personalised content for a niche traveller. New York City

9. Social connectivity – help website visitors to share your best content via quick links to social media icons, repurpose storytelling content by chunking and sharing, drip fed in a social media content engagement calendar. Visit Britain

10. Conversational contact – an obvious final tip, don’t forget to ensure a Contact Us button is easy to find that includes relevant phone numbers, email support, and / or chat services even access to street views for key locations. This is Cleveland

In summary, the content in a destination website should continually reflect the interests of its visitors, you can cover a lot of information by having seamless navigation that is fully integrated with platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and TripAdvisor.

alexandrapatrick provides original, cost-effective strategic marketing services in Kent, UK. alexandrapatrick has particular experience and expertise in digital marketing, copywriting, marketing consultancy and location / destination marketing.

If you’d like to find out more about how we could support your destination marketing needs, email info@alexandrapatrick.co.uk or contact via Twitter.

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How to use influencer marketing in travel and tourism

Posted on October 11, 2017 by alexandrapatrick

Influencer marketing is about a brand using the influence of an individual to spread the word about their offer to help influence the behaviour of potential customers.

There are a diverse number of influencers in travel and tourism, from bloggers, destination journalists, Instagram celebrities, to passionate local residents – to achieve effective influencer marketing for tourism it’s essential to target those key individuals that will have a relevant, wide reach.

If you’re thinking what’s the point of influencer marketing? Well travel and tourism brands can leverage social influencer recommendations to help achieve specific end goals such as regenerating leads or increasing sales by expanding their brand’s footprint in new and existing markets.

Influencers can use multiple platforms and different tactical measures to engage advocates. Above all, when selecting an influencer, their message must align with the destination’s brand values, so ensure you do a thorough background check on your shortlist.

influencer_marketing

influencer marketing

Top 10 tips for a successful tourism influencer marketing campaign

1. Find your influencers – determine the words or phrases that the influencers/people you want to find might use in their content, for example, do they make destination comparisons, mention more than one location, isolate mentions about a specific resort – you can use social media monitoring too to track and research this sort of activity.

2. Frequent or relevant – when creating your wish list of tourism influencers, determine if you want to target those that have strong relevance/talk regularly about your brand, but have a low profile or talk occasionally about your brand, but have a high profile – for example do their followers provide a relevant, valuable audience for your destination?

3. Audience engagement – look for 5-10% engagement on your chosen influencer posts, see how they have built their community; so several thousand followers might actually be a better influencer than one who has a few million; an influencer with a huge following could just respond in one-way communication and may not commit to a set amount of content over a certain period.

4. Brief – establish a brief with your influencer that has specific objectives and tactical angles to engage advocates, agree the content over a number of weeks in advance; this will succeed if you have conducted thorough research and listened to stakeholders involved in your influencer marketing campaign.

5. Measures – be clear about the measures, prioritise what you want to achieve from your influencers: do you plan to measure awareness or extend your content reach by tracking online mentions; increase your tourism brand profile or trust by increasing number of Twitter followers or Facebook likes?

6. Social media – consider which platforms has the most significant authority or reach for your destination; Facebook influencers can share more detailed content to include images and video and Twitter is an effective burst broadcast platform, yet has limited SEO benefits, but both have the potential to secure a high level traffic.

7. YouTube – the travel and tourism sector lends itself naturally to YouTube’s visual impact, you can get a feel for the location before you commit to visit, plus it has the engaging ability to generate reviews or comments from the right travel audience, for example this worked well for Marriott partnered with YouTuber Jeana Smith from PrankVsPrank amongst others.

8. Travel bloggers – according to a Brandwatch study, 6.7 million people blog and 77% internet users read blogs regularly, blogs high volumes of content and generally a long shelf life actively exchanging expert knowledge and advice in a targeted community for example on the travel blog Landlopers.com.

10. Influencer ambassadors – after you have completed your influencer campaign consider those trusted individuals that could be potential ongoing ambassadors for your brand, if they have invested in the time to become an influencer their daily reach and authenticity is valuable.

Content shared online by tourism influencers can go viral so be prepared for this to reach wide global communities, this of course will depend on the credibility and calibre of the influencer and how well your campaign has been planned and executed.

We hope that you’ve found these tips useful and will be able to help you find the right travel and tourism influencers. Remember not to overlook the local influencers who often produce regular reliable content about your chosen destination.

We’re interested in your insights and thoughts on Influencer marketing in tourism, have your say on Twitter or comment below.

alexandrapatrick provides original, cost-effective strategic marketing services in Kent, UK. alexandrapatrick has particular experience and expertise in digital marketing, copywriting, marketing consultancy and location/destination marketing.

If you’d like to find out more about how we could support your brand needs, email info@alexandrapatrick.co.uk or contact via Twitter.

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How to create an Instagram tourism marketing campaign

Posted on September 10, 2017 by alexandrapatrick

Instagram is a formidable social media network for tourism brands and Destination Marketing Organisations (DMOs). With over 700 million monthly active users on Instagram, it’s over double the monthly active users of Twitter and three times as much for monthly active users on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

For sure, there’s an appetite in tourism marketing and social-media travellers to use Instagram to share beautiful photos and engaging videos. Plus, more and more brands and DMOs are making the transition to an Instagram Business profile, this ensures your contact information is more prominent and you can access meaningful analytical data.

Instagram tourism marketing

Instagram tourism marketing

Top 10 tips for a successful Instagram tourism marketing campaign

1. Add location – your tourism brand must aim to add a location to each Instagram image, research by Social Media Today found 48% users rely on Instagram for a new travel destination and 35% to discover a new place, so remember to use the geo-tagging feature.

2. Targeted hashtags – use correct hashtags, both general and unique (e.g. community based ones) and when 7 out of 10 hashtags are branded, it’s self-evident that these help content discovery and drive conversation; each topic allows up to 30 hashtags but the optimum number suggested is 11.

3. Real photos – potential travellers like to see ‘real’ photos of an iconic vista taken by family, friends, tourists and bloggers, they want to feel inspired by a potential new travel location from a genuine source.

4. Captions and filters – ensure your captions are detailed, including travel tips that are practical and useful; don’t forget to include a relevant emoji too; plus consider using Clarendon – the most all-purpose Instagram popular filter – it brightens, highlights and intensifies shadows.

5. User-generated – there are huge feeds of content for locations which include where to eat, drink, places of interest, best sunsets yet the most engaging are from ‘real’ people, these can be both residents and visitors – direct advice from authentic ambassadors.

6. Personalisation – if you personalise the travel experience, the more people will want to connect to your brand, for example the inflight magazine iFly by KLM airlines share different stories to different travellers based in the destination they are going to and what level they are within KLM’s loyalty programme.

7. Facebook collaboration – if you use Facebook’s Ad Manager you can create an Instagram tourism campaign that have specific targeting settings profiled by the audience you need to reach, this could be particularly useful when attracting visitors to attend tourism events.

8. Trusted content – many tourism brands are using local freelancers to post credible content, local people who live in the area know instinctively where to go, where to avoid and what stories will inspire and encourage potential travellers to visit, it truly humanises the brand.

9. Videos – today travel is more affordable, so make it more accessible and engaging by creating short video ads up to 60 seconds, this work really well for live events, they may cost more than a photo ad but they are effective in securing higher engagement rates and don’t forget to add travel related captions too.

10. When to post – a survey by Sproutsocial found Monday to Friday were by far the best days to post to maximize engagement and most recommended times to post include 2 a.m., 8.a.m. and 5 p.m.

Remember when you run your Instagram tourism marketing campaigns consider it an opportunity to learn even more about the destination, capture those fresh insights that resonate with tourists to improve your DMO reach and engagement goals.

We’re interested in your thoughts on Instagram tourism marketing, have your say on Twitter or comment below.

alexandrapatrick provides original, cost-effective strategic marketing services in Kent, UK. alexandrapatrick has particular experience and expertise in digital marketing, copywriting, marketing consultancy and location/destination marketing.

If you’d like to find out more about how we could support your local business needs, email info@alexandrapatrick.co.uk or contact via Twitter.

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What is brand strategy and how to develop one?

Posted on August 18, 2017 by alexandrapatrick

A clear brand strategy will ensure you achieve a sustainable competitive advantage and help leverage the true brand value in your business, product or service. Quite simply, it will provide clarity about your brand position in the market place.

A clearly defined brand strategy will detail short and long term goals that can be delivered realistically in line your brand’s core characteristics. It sets out the rules on how, what, where, when and to whom you communicate your brand messages.

To build a strong brand strategy your branding will need to identity the values that clearly differentiate your offer from competitors and aim to build an emotional connection with your key audiences.

What is Brand Strategy

What is Brand Strategy

Top 10 tips to develop a thorough brand strategy

1. Business objectives – align your brand with your existing business strategy which should outline the short, medium and long term business objectives – establish a clear vison how your business will develop and ensure your brand will help you achieve this over time.

2. Target customers – research and focus on clearly defined target audiences, anticipate and meet their service and emotional needs, the more precise and personalised the targets, the faster you will achieve higher growth and profit.

3. Purpose – early on clearly define the brand values and promises so stakeholders understand what they are and know how to deliver them; consider the functional purpose (the commercial reason) and the intentional purpose (the value beyond a commercial gain).

4. Positioning – unravel what are the key differentiators between your brand and competitors in the market; how are you different and why would your target audience choose and remain loyal to your brand – define a positioning statement and deliver on that promise.

5. Cohesive messaging – create a strategy that reflects and translates your brand positioning and personality, assume a consistent core message and refine personalised messaging for specific target audiences making it relevant to their precise needs.

6. Brand toolkit – develop tangible online and offline tools to communicate the brand, these can include the logo, strapline, website, videos etc. to support your brand positioning; a style guide will help harness this visual identity and tone voice.

7. Content – this is really about your brand story, create valuable content that will increase visibility, raise awareness and strengthen your reputation, the website can be the most important channel for valuable content and fresh consistent messaging; online content is critical to an evolving, current brand strategy.

8. Brand ambassadors – reward the loyalty of your brand ambassadors, thank them in social media feeds, feature them in blog content, even consider sending them a personalised gift, this can help reinforce those extra special relationships and show recognition of your commitment to fulfilling their ongoing needs.

9. Implement and monitor – continue to monitor the brand strategy in line with the planned objectives and tactics, track your strategy in line with competitor activity so you can adjust to sustain that critical emotional connection with stakeholders, in essence stay in tune with ‘how people feel’ about your brand.

10. Marketing strategy – branding drives marketing so remember to ensure your overarching marketing strategy is consistently aligned to the brand strategy; this will maximize your competitive edge by maintaining a high brand recognition and deep customer loyalty.

And finally, be prepared to address unplanned issues to protect your reputation, have a crisis plan in place so in the worst case scenarios you can maintain that trust and keep your brand promise to your target audiences in difficult times.

We hope that you’ve found these tips provide some clarity and will help you execute a successful long term brand strategy.

We’re interested in your insights and thoughts on developing a brand strategy, have your say on Twitter or comment below.

alexandrapatrick provides original, cost-effective strategic marketing services in Kent, UK. alexandrapatrick has particular experience and expertise in digital marketing, copywriting, marketing consultancy and location/destination marketing.

If you’d like to find out more about how we could support your brand needs, email info@alexandrapatrick.co.uk or contact via Twitter.

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How to create a successful business plan

Posted on July 17, 2017 by alexandrapatrick

Before you jump in and enthusiastically create a clever marketing campaign, you need to start by structuring or reviewing the organisation’s business plan. The business plan will drive the direction of the campaign.

Many start- ups have ambitions to scale up, but they have to focus on the opportunities that have assigned resources, anchored to specific business objectives.

A robust, realistic business plan will set out how to make the organisation a success by delivering targeted goals over specific periods of time. These will run typically for 12 months to three years, sometimes five years.

Inspired by the Smart Insights business plan template, I have offered tips to help you start to define profitable, growth strategies.

Remember you may need to tailor your plan to a specific audience, for example you may require to raise finance, to dispose of a business or even attract business partners, the objectives need to be set out accordingly.

So focus on what your reader/audience needs to know; these outline tips to help shape your thoughts.

how to create a successful business plan

how to create a successful business plan

Top 10 tips for a successful business plan

1. Financial performance – build a review of your financial performance, demonstrate a clear understanding of which products/services are profitable and where costs need to be managed more closely.

2. Business objectives – clearly outline where you want your business to be, you may aim to identify new revenue sources to expand, or develop new products to gain a competitive advantage – these need to be quantified against timescales.

3. Business strategies – if you have established clear, realistic goals you need to develop specific strategies to fulfil the objectives to differentiate you from the competition – state how to get to where you want to be.

4. Business proposition – identify your current products and services and define what makes your offer different, outline the benefits and current disadvantages and planned new developments to optimise future planned profitability.

5. Sales tactics – how to translate your strategies into action, this develops the detail of what happens, so if you want to position a high quality, high price product
how will you generate new leads that will want that type of product to help improve sales conversion?

6. Marketing tactics – unpack the classic 7Ps marketing mix, for example, audit your Product (the quality, branding, support); Promotion (how you communicate via PR or Direct Marketing): Price (do you discount, offer credit); Place (how can the customer access it by the Trade, direct salesforce, shop); People (employees, the culture and image conveyed): Process (do you focus on R&D, or being design-led); and finally Physical evidence (the packaging or online experience).

7. Operations – what is the operational structure and processes that deliver the products and services, including systems, procedures and resources; clarify the key areas of production, sales, marketing, finance and administration and any areas of existing weakness.

8. Financial forecasting – provide a forecast for the next three to five years, it may only be profit and loss or working capital requirements, state the assumptions behind the forecasts. Be realistic about the forecasts, planning a regular review process to take corrective action when you’re not hitting your forecasted financial targets, consider ‘what-if’ scenarios if not on target.

9. Employees – review existing workforce and assess the need to recruit new employees and outline the plans to develop new skills to achieve the objectives and action the strategies.

10. Potential threats and opportunities – a threat might be a downturn in the economy or a new competitor, what strategies do you have planned to address this possibility; an opportunity might be a dramatic increase in demand or a competitor going out of business, how can you scale up quickly to gain a competitive advantage.

To summarise a business plan outlines the long-term corporate strategy of an organisation. Once you have established your business plan, it will remain a benchmark for your ongoing business performance, a guide to step up to the next profitable level over three to five years.

We’re interested in your thoughts on business planning, have your say on Twitter or comment below.

alexandrapatrick provides original, cost-effective strategic marketing services in Kent, UK. alexandrapatrick has particular experience and expertise in digital marketing, copywriting, marketing consultancy and location/destination marketing.

If you’d like to find out more about how we could support your local business needs, email info@alexandrapatrick.co.uk or contact via Twitter.

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McKinsey on Digital Personalisation – top 10 marketing insights

Posted on April 6, 2017 by alexandrapatrick

McKinsey recently published a feature on digital personalisation. It summises that personalisation is about providing relevant information that satisfies a customer quickly. If you use digital tools to make a customer feel exclusive, you have an open opportunity to increase engagement and loyalty.

So, digital personalisation is about creating relevant online messages about your services that are based on customer experience and their online search behaviour.

But how can digital personalisation benefit you as a business and your customers? According to McKinsey, the key challenge is to transform your business processes to achieve the full potential of personalisation.

Quite simply by remembering and presenting relevant offers to customers will increase conversions and win more customers.

digital personalisation

digital personalisation

10 McKinsey insights on Digital Personalisation

1. Behavioural data – personalisation is rooted in acting on customer behavioural data, so group customers by similar behaviour and needs and segment them according to your service offer – customers rapidly get frustrated when they are fed content has nothing to do with them.

2. Customer journey – unpack the series of interacations with your brand from the customer’s initial information gathering to purchase and use; this data can be powerful if integrated from your website, instore purchases or phone enquiries.

3. Customer signals – be in tune with your target customer activities by monitoring their purchases, online browsing, and even social media posts, your brand in turn should respond to these signals with a relevant, timely message or ‘trigger’ – trigger messages must dynamically match the customer signals.

4. Messages – customers can decide in a matter of seconds if a trigger message is relevant, trigger types include images, copy, headline titles and offers that directly relate to their behaviour, this must be monitored and refined to capture its full value.

5. Dedicated teams – empower a team to search and identify for target customer signals that have the highest potential value and develop iterations of both personalised and localised messages that achieve results.

6. Respond quickly – encourage your team to revise copy, produce inspired content that can be mixed and matched to create a number of personalised variations to help deliver triggers more efficiently.

7. Conversion – if you need a good reason to invest personalisation, it can drive conversions, and increase sales for use of pre-filled purchase forms, offering relevant deals saving them time hunting for them or even pre-loaded landing pages with bespoke customer information.

8. Cost efficiencies – MicKinsey maintains personalisation can reduce customer acquisition costs by as much as 50 percent and lift revenues by 5 to 15 percent.

9. Relationship building – personalisation can allow you to develop meaningful relationship with your customers that become special by gathering more and more data on their habits and preferences to make it feel truly personal.

10. Wider campaigns – email campaigns can benefit from personalised messages which focus on quality, rather than quantity, this in turn can help reap better open and click rates than content stuffed one-size fits all emails.

In summary, digital personalisation can help improve your marketing efforts, it can help marketing become more predictive and position what the customer wants before they even request it.

alexandrapatrick provides original, cost-effective strategic marketing services in Kent, UK. alexandrapatrick has particular experience and expertise in digital marketing, copywriting, public relations, location/destination marketing, healthcare marketing and marketing consultancy.

If you’d like to find out more about how we could help introduce digital personalisation to support your business, email info@alexandrapatrick.co.uk or contact via Twitter.

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Top tourism facts and figures in the UK

Posted on March 9, 2017 by alexandrapatrick

Visit Britain regularly measure the UK performance in terms of key trends such as number of visits, journey purpose and the different modes of transport visitors use. Visit Britain has forecast in 2017, visits will grow by 4.0% to 38.1 million. This represents a faster rate of growth than their projection for 2016. Here are the latest tourism insights.

UK tourism facts and figures

UK tourism facts and figures

UK tourism facts and figures

1. International tourism – for January to September 2016, international tourism arrivals were up 3.7% year on year. Visits to Europe overall were up 1.6% and the EU up 4.1%.

2. UK inbound arrivals – these were up 1% compared to the same period (July to September 2016) in 2015, this equates to 10,655,000 arrivals and their spending was up by 3%.

3. EU referendum – since the EU referendum the value of GBP has fallen significantly meaning that the UK is now much more affordable for many visitors, in fact visit numbers from Turkey were up in Q3, contributing to a strong year to date and record breaking figures for the 12 month period at 207,000.

4. Reason to visit – visits to friends and family (VFR) have seen large growth in the last four quarters, up 8% and a new 12 month record and business visits were up 4% which set a new 12 month record, however spend has decreased by 4%.

5. How they travel – travel via air continues to increase, the most recent 12 month period set a new record at 27.07 million visits, yet visits via the tunnel or sea remain more stable, with tunnel visits growth at 1% in the past 12 months, and sea visits were flat.

6. Where they visit – growth in visits for the Rest of England is currently outpacing growth in London and visits to Wales grew 9% in July to September 2016 and set a new record for the year to date.

7. International markets – many countries experienced a decline in visits in July to September 2016, although USA visits increased 7% to 1.2 million and Irish Republic visits increased up 20% to 846,000 setting a new quarterly visit record.

8. European visits – visitors and spend are both up for Netherlands, with the most recent 12 month period setting a new record at 2.1 million visits and visits from Austria were up 12% in the last 12 months, visit numbers from Spain have increased sharply over the last two years, and continue to grow.

9. Long-haul visits – the USA is one of the UK’s biggest inbound markets, it saw strong growth in July to September 2016 boosting the 12 month period by 6% to 3.4 million visits. Visits from New Zealand were up in Q3, and the last year has seen growth of 14%.

10. Asia and Gulf – India continues to generate high volumes of visits, Visits from Malaysia continue to grow and Bahrain and Oman show an increase in visits too.

Visit Britain assume that there will be no unforeseen major events that will significantly disrupt travel to Britain, e.g. related to security, health scares or natural disasters. View the full Inbound Tourism Trends Q3 2016.

alexandrapatrick provides original, cost-effective strategic marketing services in Kent, UK. alexandrapatrick has particular experience and expertise in digital marketing, copywriting, marketing consultancy and location/destination marketing.

If you’d like to find out more about how we could support your local business needs, email info@alexandrapatrick.co.uk or contact via Twitter.

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How is the UK ageing population transforming?

Posted on February 25, 2017 by alexandrapatrick

It might be comforting to think that we will all ‘live long and prosper’. But the impact of the ageing population may lead to increased health and social care costs or the growing number of older people may create new economic and social opportunities.

The UK population has continued to grow since 1975 and currently sits at 65.5 million in 2017. Factors that have contributed to this rise are net migration, births exceeding deaths and women of child bearing age have rising fertility.

People’s ideas of ‘later life’ are changing, as there are now more people in the UK aged 60 and above than there are under 18. But it could be argued an older UK population has the potential to continue to do well and thrive and transform the norms of previous generations.

ageing population

ageing population

Ageing Population Trends

1. Growing old – by 2040, nearly one in seven Britons will be over 75, according to a report by the Resolution foundation thinktank.

2. Living to 100 – almost a third of people born today can expect to live to 100; the number of UK residents aged 90 and over has almost tripled since the early 1980s,

3. Working longer – 2017 will see the ratio of non-workers to workers start to rise for the first time since the early 1980s, in addition a report by the Resolution Foundation thinktank report the state pension age could be forced up to 70 by the late 2030s.

4. Life expectancy – it is claimed we have vastly improved life expectancy, which is growing by five hours a day an there is the capacity of longer life in more families.

5. Inequalities – these are greater in the aged 50 to 74 than any other, they’re either depicted as rich and successful, even powerful; on the flipside there are those living in poverty, with difficulties maintaining and heating houses, suffering from malnutrition, needing help and care and being unable to find it.

6. Average age growing – in 2014, the average age in the UK exceeded 40 for the first time, it’s predicted to rise to 42.9 by 2039; this will present greater demands on healthcare and pensions in the future.

7. Community minded – on average 23.9% of the elderly participate in volunteering and they contribute financially through volunteering, which has a hidden value of £10 billion per annum, most volunteer in more than one business.

8. Spending power – older people have spending power of £76 billion, set to rise to £127 billion by 2030 which is a growth of 68%.

9. All alone – Kings Fund suggest a high proportion of older people in the future will be living on their own and are therefore likely to require formal care; currently 3.5 million 65+ live alone and nearly 70% of these are women.

10. Social care – Kings Fund further state the number of older people with care needs is expected to rise by more than 60% in the next 20 years.

The UK population is both increasing and ageing. Current projections show this pattern is set to continue with an anticipated 74.3 million projected by 2039, where one in 12 people will be aged over 80. Yet if people can stay healthy for longer, they will remain engaged members of society.

alexandrapatrick provides original, cost-effective strategic marketing services in Kent, UK. alexandrapatrick has particular experience and expertise in digital marketing, copywriting, public relations, location/destination marketing, healthcare marketing and marketing consultancy.

If you’d like to find out more about how we could support your research needs in 2017, email info@alexandrapatrick.co.uk or contact via Twitter.

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What are the smart digital marketing trends for 2017?

Posted on January 10, 2017 by alexandrapatrick

It’s that time of year when the thought leaders put forward their take on what will be trending in 2017. These always make for interesting reading, but remember to consider them in context of how realistically they can boost business for you in 2017.

Smart Insights are a reliable source of what digital trends are the ones to watch particularly as they they crowdsource and canvass opinion widely to ascertain the true importance of these techniques. Here’s a short summary of their results for the year ahead.

Smart Insights Digital Trends

Smart Insights Digital Trends

Top 10 digital marketing trends for 2017

1. Content marketing – more businesses are employing a strategic approach to content marketing, there are more examples of rich content with interactive marketing apps feeding into personalised data that can be dynamically responsive to a visitor’s profile.

2. Big Data – is about market and customer insight and predictive analytics; Big Data presents an opportunity to increase sales through personalisation on a website and clever email marketing that’s driven by predicative analytics.

3. Marketing automation – a top trend in recent years, yet still has potential to be improved by using more applications of a CRM or capabilities of automated web personalisation – ensure you know the knowledge gaps to get the best results.

4. Mobile marketing – this embodies mobile advertising, site development and mobile apps; despite the increased adoption of mobile responsive websites the conversion rates are still low on smartphones, so brands need a better mobile strategy to make the most of the different mobile touchpoints.

5. Social media marketing – this shows continued growth for 2017 but some networks like Twitter and Facebook are becoming less popular yet Snapchat, Instagram and Pinterest are still growing; for example there have been some innovative, interactive campaigns on Snapchat in 2016 that have reached wider audiences.

6. Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) – this is really about making more of a data-driven approach by improving website experiences to increase leads and so generate sales, this can be achieved through more extensive testing, ignore it at your peril.

7. Internet of Things (IoT) – given that there is said to be 75 billion connected devices by 2020 with an enormous potential to share data; this certainly has the most relevance to device makers and retailers.

8. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO or organic search) – Smart Insights predict Mobile Marketing SEO will be particularly significant in 2017. Note Google can search on your mobile device Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) – the technology allows you to make pages on your website load more quickly, currently targeted at publishers.

9. Wearables (e.g. Apple Watch, activity trackers, augmented reality) – these are without doubt innovative consumer commodities and will continue to become more mainstream as prices go down, more people will embrace wearables.

10. Paid search marketing – Google AdWords will be the most important type of Pay Per Click in 2017 and making these mobile first is important, brands should follow up on this in the year ahead, particularly as mobile traffic has overtaken desktop for internet usage.

The digital marketing world continues to innovate faster than businesses can adapt. So consider a few of these insights and make them work for your brand in 2017. Make content more informative and engaging.

alexandrapatrick provides original, cost-effective strategic marketing services in Kent, UK. alexandrapatrick has particular experience and expertise in digital marketing, copywriting, public relations, location/destination marketing, healthcare marketing and marketing consultancy.

If you’d like to find out more about how we could support your business ambitions for 2017, email info@alexandrapatrick.co.uk or contact via Twitter.

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