Many European DMOs face a classic dilemma — they pair an every-dollar-counts budget with a small but nimble team. When a handful of team members are wearing so many hats, time is a scarce (and invaluable) resource.
As travel restrictions lift across Europe, travelers are hungry for their next trip…and it appears, willing to spend more money on big bucket list itineraries post-pandemic.
This is great for large DMOs who are able to throw down dollars to keep up with demand, but what about Europe’s underdog destinations with a tighter budget? The small DMO needs tools and skills that multi-task for you, freeing up your marketing team to work on ad copy, proofread ebooks, and seamlessly run events.
So we’ve compiled a list of ways EU DMOs can maximize their budget (and save time doing so)!
1. Automate recurring tasks.
When you think about it, the simplest tasks often take the most time for marketers, like:
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Swapping out hero creative on landing pages
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Publishing to social media
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Manually searching for images
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Cutting assets down to the correct dimensions
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Updating outdated content
While it may cost money to invest in the right tools, automating tasks like asset management and scheduling for social can increase employee satisfaction with their roles — giving your team more time to focus on bigger picture marketing like campaigns, content, and nurturing leads.
2. Create once, publish everywhere.
Content distribution is an underrated tactic to get more eyes on your marketing materials, and maximize the ROI of every blog post or social carousel.
Instead of just publishing a press release or a product launch as a blog post, consider publishing a version of content across channels. Spin up an organic LinkedIn post, repurpose your assets for a CRM campaign, or turn UGC into an auto-populating CrowdRiff Gallery that constantly refreshes with the latest and greatest imagery.
When your content has been static for a few months, repeat the process and cross-promote on new channels. This lengthens the lifespan of every marketing asset!
3. Refresh your top performers.
Speaking of repurposing, it’s highly likely the blog posts you published last year need some love. To make the most of your blog content, you should quarterly (or at least annually) audit what you’ve put out there.
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Make a list of the top 20 highest performing blog posts
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Identify if they’ve dipped in organic traffic or rankings
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Answer questions like: Is the content still up to date? Is it helpful for readers? Is it evergreen, or already irrelevant for your audience?
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If you haven’t, optimize your titles and meta-descriptions to make it easier for search engines to crawl your content
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Is anything better suited as lead gen material? Can you turn a report into a downloadable ebook, or gate interactive content to capture more emails?
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Take top posts and turn them into ultimate guides, Instagram guides, videos (Reels, Tiktok), and more
Remember — it’s better to have a handful of excellent traffic-driving, lead-generating blog posts than thousands of blogs that aren’t moving the needle at all.
4. Opt for getting imagery in real time.
Nothing takes more time and makes marketers want to pull their hair out more than figuring out images. Shoot days, rights and usage, Cloud storage, specs…it seems there’s always an obstacle to getting (and using) the perfect shot.
CrowdRiff Galleries and user-generated assets take the guesswork out of it for you, showing you imagery in real time that’s approved for use and ready to embed on landing pages or share on social.
Now, marketers don’t have to be at every event or attraction to capture images for your destination. In a year full of uncertainty for European DMOs, a repository of always up-to-date imagery frees you up to bring on new agency partners, optimize your content, or roll out new campaigns.
Putting it all together
Despite global uncertainty and the pandemic and war in Ukraine, travel plans and outlooks about European destinations remain positive. That’s why it’s critical for EU marketers to make the most of UGC and their existing content library along the way.
Looking for examples of innovation from European DMOs doing incredible tourism recovery work on budgets of all sizes? Download our ebook.
