Resort Strategy Plan

The Balcaon Paradise Resort

Goals to be achieved through the plan in order of importance * New customer base development by Creating a social network following * Increase customer come back and loyalty through positive experiential feedback * Building New business partnerships through targeting * Attracting foreign tourists through online means * Increasing traffic to their website
Assumptions:
The Balcaon paradise resort is a luxury resort which has established presence on most social networking websites, but has failed to establish Visibility.
Target audience
The target audiences can be broadly classified into two parts, Business and leisure.
Business audience: 1. Corporates for B2B sales, Conferencing 2. Domestic Work Travel 3. International Business travelers
Leisure Audience: 1. Businessmen planning family Holidays 2. Travelers, Travel Enthusiasts 3. Students 4. Foreign tourists
Process
I. Planning
The first step is to analyze the current position and engagement strategies. We need to find out what consumers are saying about the resort and what the response is. We also need to review the resort’s annual marketing plans to ensure the social media strategic plan is inline with the overall goals and objectives. II. Socializing and engagement:
This step will involve creation of custom blogs, hotel profiles and pages on the top social media network websites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, to name a few. Dedicated personnel would provide ongoing responses to reviews, social postings and management of proven social promotions and campaigns on behalf of the hotel to ensure the consumer experience is always fresh, relevant and motivating (discounts, freebies on arrival, etc).
We are assuming that The Balcaon Paradise Resort has already established presence on Twitter and facebook. But it is not reaping the desired results. We will be emphasizing on 1. How to strengthen their presence on Twitter 2. Use of Qalias for control over internet visibility
Twitter
Content management
Content is most relevant to turn visitors into followers and followers into customers, clients, or regular users.
In specific, the tweets will need to be of two types: broadcasts and conversations.
Broadcasts : to convey information—to tell your followers what you’re doing, thinking, or have been doing until now. Tweets like these don’t expect replies. They’re meant to be informative and entertaining. These are the important element of a broadcast:

1. Pictures of the resort (including swimming pool, beach view etc) 2. Maps 3. Tourist attractions 4. Features of the hotel like conference availability, type of rooms etc.

Conversations: to spark Discussions. Questions and answers to other people’s questions and replies are obviously conversation tweets, but they can be much more subtle than that. Just writing the sort of thing that people will want to know more about can make for a good conversation tweet. The discussion as a whole can help to build a community and bring your followers—and potential customers—closer to your brand. For e.g.: Empowering the customers by informing them about a Christmas party and allowing them to vote for a theme.
For marketing, you will need to keep control of the message and the subjects of the discussions. Thus we need to use broadcast tweets to make sure the information we want to share gets across. And use conversation tweets to turn those followers into a community, keep them coming back and make sure that the issues they want discussed are addressed, striking a balance between the two.
We will follow a 16 step process: Step 1 | Start Catching Big Followers | Step 2 | Add more followers | Step 3 | Ask a question | Step 4 | Answer a question | Step 5 | Look for your Evangelists | Step 5 | Reel in your Evangelists | Step 6 | Do some customer service | Step 7 | Post a link tweet | Step 8 | Post a discussion tweet | Step 9 | Post an action tweet | Step 10 | Start putting your tweets together | Step 11 | Try a different sequence | Step 12 | Combine your social media tools | Step 13 | Drive followers to purchase a special offer | Step 14 | Drive followers to a Blog | Step 15 | Drive followers to subscribe | Step 16 | Drive followers to purchase without a special offer |

Use of Twitter applications in following the 16 step process
Twist
There are a number of different services that allow Twitterers to keep track of the popularity of various topics and keywords on Twitter. Some use a frequently updated tag cloud to show relative popularity, but the graphs on Twist are the best source. It is a way to make sure that you target the most popular terms and look for other people Twittering about your topic.
Twellow
Twist can help you find people with similar interests to your own but Twellow makes it much easier. Run by WebProNews, it’s supposed to be a kind of Yellow Pages of social media, but it operates more like a Twitter Yahoo! The site tracks conversations on Twitter and places the Twitterers behind them into various categories. Click one of those categories enables you to see a list of target Twitterers. Once you start sending tweets, you should find that you’re added automatically, but if you can’t find your name on the site, you can add it yourself. In any case, it’s certainly worth checking the categories that you’ve been listed under and self-editing them if necessary.

TweetBeep
Twellow tells you who tends to talk about what, but you’ll also want to know who’s talking about a resort now. TweetBeep, sends out regular alerts whenever a keyword is used on Twitter, is really a must for anyone thinking about marketing through microblogging.
You can set up your alerts at tweetbeep.com.

TweetDeck
Twitter’s strength is its simplicity. Short posts, short replies, and quick conversations make for a service that’s simple to use. But it’s also very limited. It’s not easy to keep track of conversations, for example. You’ll be holding multiple chats with multiple followers all at the same time and often on different topics. As one tweet comes in, the last one will be pushed down the list, making it difficult to follow the course of an exchange. Nor does Twitter allow you to group tweets and followers according to subject. TweetDeck lets you do that. This service really is a must-have for anyone with a humble list of followers. You can create multiple columns and group them according to topics. It’s the closest you’re likely to get to Facebook’s groups.

On the whole though, the toolkit should contain applications that let you find people to follow, track keywords, organize your followers, and tweet and reply easily. Those are the basics. In addition, the resort needs to experiment with using Twitter as an advertising channel by inserting targeted ads into their timeline. Twittad (www .twittad.com) allows Twitterers to turn their background images into advertising billboards onto which companies can place their own ads.

Qalias
QAlias will provide the resort online presence where it can control what the web is saying about Balcaon. The service gives a professional environment in which to place a bio, email-able bulletin, business cards and earn priority presence on search engines. This is a key part of their service: being found on page one when someone searches the name through major search engines such as Google and Yahoo.
It supports local, independently owned businesses like the Balcaon resort - by rewarding the consumers that support locally owned businesses. This allows local businesses like Balcaon to battle the big boxes and national chains and compete with other local businesses not yet a part of their strong network.
The biggest advantage of Qalias is that it helps you tremendously improve the google search rankings and brings you to page number one of the search results. All this when key words are typed in. for eg: Typing ‘Beach resort at Calangute’ will bring Balcaon in the top searches if Qalias is carefully used. This is a particularly important tool as foreign tourists are also targeted in resorts ased out of Goa, Kerala, Pondicherry etc. in India.

Flickr: Since Flickr is a picture sharing website, the primary aim will be to aim at Travel enthusiasts through this medium.

Other Commonly used websites would include Facebook, Myspace and youtube, which can help the resort in advertising pictorially with ease. An integration of all these media would ensure higher visibility. For e.g.: there can be contests amongst followers and visitors on youtube wherein they can upload their videos shot during their stay at the hotel and the best one wins a prize.

TripAdvisor: Regular participation in TripAdvisor forums to fulfill the broadcasting role.

III. Measurability: This is the final step in planning the social media marketing strategy. The power to broadcast is in the resort’s hands—and the power to earn from those broadcasts too. That’s especially true of Twitter, whose users are made up largely of high-earning, highly educated professionals. It caters to over 9 million users in India alone with a median age of 31. So when you send out tweets to your followers, you can be sure that they’re being read by a valuable market, one that can also supply all sorts of useful information and connections, too.

Task implementation:
However for successful social media management it is imperative to hire the right people .Not everyone has the skill set required for such work.
The resort could either outsource this work or have an in house department for the same .
Outsourcing would provide more flexibility and enable the resort to make use of the expertise of the service providers. Capabilities of workforce, infrastructural constraints , capital requirements are certain issues to be dealt with if it decides to have an in house department.
Both the departments have their own pros and cons. Decision between both can be made after doing a proper cost benefit analysis.

Project Timelines

9-10 weeks | Building a good online following | 6-8 weeks | targeting and segmenting the followers | 2 months | creating a thread of updates and classifying them | 1 month | studying the trend and defining a procedure/ pattern to be followed | Total Time (approx.) | 7-8 months |

Results of the Strategy 1. Increased Visibility and following for the resort 2. Better access to corporate for B2B bookings 3. More clicks to their website for views through the improved search engine rankings 4. More positive feedback through controlled and monitored visibility