With spring finally here, Connecticut business owners are hard at work preparing for the busy summer tourist season that will soon arrive.
While you may not think of Connecticut as a tourist hotspot, as it’s sandwiched in between the large metropolises of New York City and Boston, Connecticut has a lot to offer. To start, Connecticut has two world-class casinos, plenty of historical destinations and a long coastline full of beaches, small businesses, restaurants and bars. For these reasons, tourism is flourishing in the Nutmeg State.
According to a new economic impact study conducted by the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, last year tourism accounted for over $14 billion in sales across Connecticut, with the average visitor spending about $875; in 2011, the average consumer only spent about $677.
Now, riding high under its new marketing moniker “Still Revolutionary,” as well as a healthy $12 billion spending budget, the Connecticut tourism industry is looking to capitalize on the multitude of residents from surrounding states who will be visiting over the next several months.
This begs the question: Is your business ready for the summer tourism rush? Now is a critical time to stop and assess whether your business has the following marketing strategies in order:
- A strong mobile presence: One of the most important things you’ll want to do is to make sure your business is mobile-friendly. That’s because on April 21, Google is once again changing its algorithm to punish businesses whose mobile websites are difficult to navigate, not compatible with end-user devices or full of texts and fonts that are unreadable. Simply put, if your business’s mobile website is still not mobile-friendly it could disappear from Google altogether.
- Content marketing: Tourists are always looking for new places to visit. And what do they do to find new destinations? They ask Google for advice on where to go. So it’s critical that your business has a content marketing strategy in place to attract new customers. Right now, for instance, 87 percent of B2C companies are using content marketing for brand awareness purposes. 77 percent are using content marketing to increase sales, and 69 percent are using content marketing for customer evangelism, or word-of-mouth advertising. By enriching your website with multimedia like blog posts and case studies, and ramping up your social efforts, your business will be more attractive to customers on the Web.
To learn more about how content marketing can help your business thrive this summer, make sure to attend the upcoming Content Boost Crash Course on Thursday, April 21 in Norwalk, Connecticut. This all-day seminar will provide a hands-on opportunity to learn about the latest content strategies, and learn from Content Boost’s team of marketing experts.
Click here to register today!