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We know marketing a tourism business can be challenging at the best of times, let alone trying to navigate your way through the current economic landscape that has been thrust upon us.

Northern Beaches Council partnered with the Tourism eSchool and delivered an online training program for all tourism and hospitality businesses within the Northern Beaches Council region.

The program was designed to educate, inspire and empower businesses to actively develop and market your business to drive demand.

The skills learnt through this program assisted businesses to deal with the COVID-19 environment, and provided benefits well beyond the global pandemic.

The program provided the following: 

  1. An understanding what you can do right now, working through lockdowns and border restrictions
  2. Develop confidence in how to market your business into the future
  3. Connect with other tourism and hospitality businesses on the same journey

Program delivery

The program was delivered via four online webinars. The webinars ran weekly on Tuesdays from 9 February until 2 March 2021.

Mentoring through a closed Facebook group was also offered during the program, and for one month following the completion of the program.

Topic 1 - Tourism Landscape, Best Practice Tourism Marketing + Ideal Customers

Online webinar - Tuesday 9 February 2021, 10:30am – 12noon

  • Briefing on the current tourism landscape
  • Briefing on the Northern Beaches Visitor Economy and tactics on how businesses can engage in the industry
  • Identify, profile and complete an Ideal Customer Profile and Journey Map of your most profitable customer(s) for your business

Topic 2 - Developing Exceptional Experiences

Online webinar - Tuesday 16 February 2021, 10:30am – 12noon

  • Learn how to develop exceptional experiences for post-COVID travellers motivations to drive highly trusted advocacy
  • Learn strategies to create bookable and commissionable experiences and working with relevant distribution system

Topic 3 - Social Media

Online webinar - Tuesday 23 February 2021, 10:30am – 12noon

  • Learn how to use Facebook, Instagram and YouTube to improve customer engagement and how to best keep in touch with community to drive future bookings post COVID-19.
  • Learn practical tips to increase the engagement and reach of social media posts on their social channels.
  • Learn how to empower their staff members to become key social media storytellers for their business.
  • Learn how you and your staff can support/optimise storytelling of the Northern Beaches region through your social media channels via strategic content posting, tagging and hashtag use.
  • Understand how to use Facebook and Instagram advertising strategically to attract new customers and drive more customer conversion

Topic 4 - Customer Advocacy + Online Reputation Management

Online Webinar - Tuesday 2 March 2021, 10:30am – 12noon

  • Understand the critical importance of managing your business's reputation and how to leverage customer advocacy on review sites to help grow your bookings and sales.
  • Learn a framework of how to respond to negative customer feedback on social media, TripAdvisor and other review websites that will help turn an unhappy customer into an advocate
  • Discover practical tips on how to encourage more positive advocacy for their business on social media, TripAdvisor and other review websites
  • Learn how optimise TripAdvisor, Google, Australian Tourism Data Warehouse and other relevant online listings to drive increase bookings/sales from visitors

Contact information

Place & Economic Development