Nestled between winter getaways, weekenders, and shoulder season trips, there’s the busiest time of year for destination marketers — summer time.
Earlier in the spring, Expedia Group CEO Peter Kern sagely predicted that “summer 2022 will be the busiest travel season ever,” and data from the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) reported that summer 2022 bookings surpassed 2021 levels by 80%.
Simply put, experiential, meaningful travel is at the top of everyone’s list after two years of pandemic hardships and travel restrictions.
So, what exactly does that mean for destination marketers and DMOs around the globe? It’s time to put your tools and technology to work for you with time-saving automations so you can bring more value to travelers in less time during what’s sure to be a record-breaking season.
Here are four ways to save time by automating your workflows:
1. Preschedule social posts
For small social media teams, it’s more than worth the budget to invest in social media tools that’ll make your life easier. With festivals, events, and community programming at its peak during the warm summer months, who has time to post on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok individually for each and every social post?
Download UGC directly from your CrowdRiff rights approved bank, or save imagery that your followers send you for social posts down the line. Then, pre-schedule your entire content calendar of images (and videos) weeks in advance with a third-party pre-scheduling tool like Planoly, Buffer, or Sprout Social.
For those of you who are already pre-scheduling your posts, here’s some next-level recommendations:
- Finding things on the fly? CrowdRiff’s social scheduling feature makes it easy to push fresh UGC live.
- Take your social planning game to the next level by scheduling a series of Reels. The new Reels template functionality in IG makes for quick creation – simply map out your summer milestones and start requesting the visuals to pull it all together.
2. Lean on automated reminders
We know that you wear many hats. Whether it’s prepping your monthly presentations to your executive or processing invoices, knowing what kinds of tasks your role requires is both an art and science.
We’re all human, so setting reminders can help you prioritize even when other tasks inevitably crop up and avoid the dread of a missed deadline.
There are more than a few handy tools and tricks that can speed this along.
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Airtable is a free spreadsheet tool with built in email notifications. Build a milestone tracker and it will notify you of key dates along the way! You can set up marketing plans, project manage blog production, and keep track of major KPIs.
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If you’re already well set up in Google Sheets, consider exporting your calendars into a CSV and importing it into your Google Calendar. With this hack, you’ll have all your major dates set up within your day to day agenda.
3. Set up scheduled reports for analytics
Like friendly reminders, a quick win for keeping your data at the ready is to schedule analytics reports to send to your inbox and other stakeholders. Skip the highly manual process to pull data and insights for your marketing, which can take ages to load and synthesize into meaningful insights.
Instead, schedule sends to the right people at the right time to track your campaigns and conversions carefully.
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Use intuitive, easy-to-grasp reporting like CrowdRiff Insights to track how Galleries and UGC performs in real time. You’ll understand what imagery on your homepage, landing pages, or partner pages is converting (and what isn’t) at a glance. Stuck on what to post? Use those insights to identify themes and content types that will perform well on your channels.
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Archiving your emailed social media analytics is a great way to keep the data on hand when your scheduling tools only allow for a certain amount of historical data.
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While Google Analytics currently offers email sends of custom reports, this feature will be changing with GA4. To get ready for the shift and keep your website data at your fingertips, you can set up email alerts for the new automatic insights function.
4. Use auto-updating CrowdRiff Galleries
CrowdRiff Galleries make it easy to pull in engaging imagery that’ll keep users on your site for longer. We’ve already seen DMOs make use of these Galleries to highlight real-time content in their destination – as the seasons change, so do the posts!
*See Visit Galveston’s real-time Gallery here.
To create an auto-populating Gallery that’s constantly showing off new visuals, simply link your CrowdRiff Galleries with your Instagram Business account and watch fresh, new visuals roll in via Instagram. As content is added and tagged via Instagram, you’ll see it auto-populate in Galleries as well.
A few notes about auto-updating Galleries:
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They can take up to an hour to correctly surface. If it isn’t immediate, don’t fret! The process just takes a little bit of time
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You can link up to 10 business accounts to your CrowdRiff Gallery to keep a steady stream of assets flowing in
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Auto-populating only happens with new content, not the old posts in your feed
Having your Galleries match your social feed saves you time in the curation process, but also presents a consistent, unified visual landscape for users.
Putting it all together
With automation options at your fingertips, you can spend more time finding similar images to compete with your heaviest hitters, writing marketing copy, or engaging with your local tourism businesses.
Not sure how it all comes together for marketers at DMOs? Book a walkthrough of the CrowdRiff platform to learn all about what helpful, time-saving automations are available with our tools.
