Our Long Dtai marketing plan can be broken down into 3 distinct strategies;

Inbound visibility
Outbound marketing
Repeat bookings

What is inbound visibility?

This is where potential customers are actively searching for a restaurant in Samui.

The obvious places to achieve visibility are within Google, TripAdvisor and Popular travel blogs

What is outbound marketing

These are marketing campaigns sent to potential customers, even though they’re not actively searching for it. This is general advertising, social media (both organic and paid) and PR.

Repeat bookings

If we can increase the average number of bookings each customer makes, it offers are far greater incentive to win new customers in the first place. Marketing for that second booking, or a recommendation, goes beyond the in-house experience. Some perfectly timed, well created emails can significantly drive more bookings.

Inbound Channels

Google

There are 3 ways to earn visibility; Adwords, Maps, Organic Results

I don’t believe that Adwords can be run profitably here so will leave it off for now. I think the spend will be greater than the revenue.

Winning placement on the map is part of what we marketers call SEO, Search Engine Optimisation. Google is a search engine, and we optimise your Google page to help it appear on the maps feature. This is your best option for premium visibility.

The other part of SEO is the more traditional results on a Google page. Individual restaurants may struggle to achieve success here as we’re seeing the vast majority of these be awarded to listings websites like TripAdvisor and blogs.

Our recommendation would be to create your own high-power website which could feed traffic to all of your other brands, hotels and restaurants. This would be a long term strategy but would almost certainly be very profitable. Imagine creating a mini-TripAdvisor that focused on all of your own resorts, restaurants and salons.

Current Google Results

TripAdvisor & Yelp

Tourists love using websites like these. There’s both an organic component which relies on page quality and reviews (quantity and score) and a paid component. Paid TripAdvisor ads tend to work really well in tourism areas because your listing can appear at the top of the list when people make specific searches.

Outbound Channels

Facebook ads

A strong social media strategy here should include creating audiences (using Facebook’s tools) that are most likely to be interested in dining at Long Dtai.

Tourists currently in the area narrowed by ‘likes restaurants’
Locals who live in the area narrowed by ‘high affluence’

Then have on-going ads that send content to these people. It’s very economical.

Another ad we like to run is called retargeting.

We create a facebook audience from all the people who visit the website and ‘retarget’ them with social content. These are the ads that follow you around after you’ve been on a specific website. Given that tourists are often ‘researching’ where to go, these adds can be very effective at converting those people researching into bookings.