Reputation Management in Tourism Marketing: How to Prevent a Crisis?

Reputation marketing (or Online Reputation Management) includes a whole range of tasks that are aimed at managing the reputation and image of a tourism brand in the online environment: from monitoring brand mentions in the media space to developing a strategy for creating, maintaining and, if necessary, restoring the brand's reputation.

The mechanisms of reputation marketing in tourism are aimed at:

• finding out how consumers perceive the brand (in our case, how travelers from Russia perceive the tourism brand);
• creating and implementation of effective actions to improve reputation;
• increase brand awareness and the number of mentions on the Russian Internet;
• creating a pool of loyal consumers and increasing the level of loyalty of the audience as a whole;
• monitoring the brand mentions in the online media space (reviews, opinions, recommendations, publications in social networks, media, and forums);
• prompt identification and response to negative reviews.

Reputation marketing in tourism includes

• Collecting data on brand mentions on the Russian Internet (monitoring publications in online media, reviews, forums, social networks, etc.), as well as mentions of competitors. As a result, the tourism brand gets an opportunity to assess its position in the media market – in particular, to understand how relevant and popular the brand is today, which competitors surpass the brand not only in the number of mentions but also in their tone (this indicator can be tracked by special media monitoring systems).
• Creating a marketing strategy based on the received data. In this case, there are several key areas: building the brand's reputation on the Internet (if the number of mentions is reduced to zero), maintaining the reputation, or correcting it.
• Implementation of a marketing strategy in the Russian market. Depending on the chosen strategic direction, it can be a full-fledged advertising campaign aimed at creating a brand image and increasing awareness, or it can be a point placement of PR material in the media or special promotion activity.
• Tracking the results of the work performed, the dynamics of changes in the number of brand mentions, and their tone.

Media monitoring

What do Russian tourists write about your region on the Internet? And do they write about it at all?

How often does the name of your destination pop up on the web?

Which audience writes more often about your region?

What is written about it and on what platforms?

Media monitoring allows answering this and many other questions that are so important for analyzing the reputation of a tourism brand on the Internet.

As we mentioned above, monitoring mentions on the Internet is key to working with a reputation in tourism marketing. You can do this manually, then you will need to select an individual, or even a team of people, to monitor all sources and mention your brand in them. But there is also a more rational solution – to use the systems of media monitoring.

The most popular and high-demand monitoring systems in Russia are Brand Analytics and YouScan. These systems monitor social networks, blogs, forums, review sites, messengers, online media in real time and provide automatic reports that help not only to assess the brand's position in the market dynamically but also respond quickly to its mention on almost any online resource (for instance, YouScan monitors half a million online sources).

For example, we analyzed the mention of an Italian brand for a month among Russian travelers and saw that the greatest discussion was in the middle of May, and then went down.

The peak of mentions was for the female audience on Facebook. Analytics systems allow seeing not only the peaks of discussions but also their tone and even all messages with mentions of the tourism brand.

In addition, the services will help you to create a portrait of the most active audience and even generate the top authors. The authors' analysis can be used, for example, when generating a pool of bloggers for further cooperation in the destination promotion.

How often media monitoring shall be conducted

It is worth noting that the monitoring of mentions in the media and their tone should be conducted constantly in order to see their dynamics and adjust the marketing strategy as necessary, identify segments of the most loyal and "dissatisfied" audience, and communicate with users.

Media monitoring in today's conditions, when the majority of travelers have also gone online, will allow destinations to assess the position of their brand in the Russian market, hear Russian tourists and change their communication strategy to encourage the desire to go to the country or region after the borders are opened. RMAA Travel experts will help you to conduct media monitoring in the Russian-language segment of the Internet and create the right marketing strategy to win the hearts of Russian tourists.

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