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There is no finish line in tourism

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“But where does it all end?” That was the plaintive question of a student in one of my workshops on social media tools for marketing tourism. Bad news: It doesn’t.

Finish LIne
Photo by cole24_ on Flickr

There is no finish line in tourism. There’s no place where you get to stop and say, “Boy, I’m glad we’re done with marketing. Now we can do all that other stuff we need to do!”

Instead, tourism marketing is an on-going project. Learning doesn’t stop. Not if you want to reach people.

See, your potential visitors are changing. People younger than you are traveling. They are more comfortable with different kinds of technology than you are. People older than you are traveling. And some of them are pretty darn technically savvy, too.

I know change moves fast, but I’m not convinced that it’s past our ability to keep up with our selected fields. If you continue to work at learning, you can do it. (I can feel a whole post coming, profiling people who are keeping at it, no matter their age…)

Two Resources for Keeping Up
Though we don’t have a finish line, we do have two resources to help you keep up with the trends in tourism marketing.

  1. Rural Tourism Marketing by Joanne Steele. Plenty to learn there for communities of any size. 
  2. Tourism Currents: Social Media for Tourism. That’s me and Sheila Scarborough, and I think it’s a pretty amazing resource. 
Learning marketing for tourism is more of a journey than a race. So, since there is no finish line, don’t be afraid to stop every so often to celebrate your victories to date. Just remember to start moving again. 

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About Becky McCray

Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.

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Comments

  1. Hi,

    Regarding ‘Learning doesn’t stop.’

    I see this as a great thing as there are so many wonderful things to learn. I guess for others it’s a chore.

    Each to their own :)

  3. Thanks Becky! I so appreciate the mention. Sometimes I feel like you, Sheila and I are the internet equivalent of the Three Musketeers for Rural, working daily to bring some order and sense regarding this enormous village of cyberspace. Perhaps we’ll get our own reality show one of these days!

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