How to market for sustainable tourism
Destination marketing vs. destination management
Many destinations have learned the hard way that endless upward growth is simply not sustainable. Overtourism has been just one negative result of mass tourism marketing. It’s time for us to rethink the traditional marketing metrics like doubling international arrivals and increasing the number of heads in beds. From environmental degradation and overtourism, to pollution, increased cost of living, traffic, and poor quality of life for local residents, destinations are finally catching on to the shift from destination marketing to destination management.
How do you measure success when it comes to sustainable tourism?
So how do we reframe success? As with any marketing campaign, you first need to determine your goals or what you’re trying to achieve. The first step is rethinking the measure of success. This may look different for every destination, but one thing is true—destination management requires a holistic approach. You need to set your foundation, whether it means developing a Sustainable Tourism Plan or a Destination Stewardship Plan, or simply identifying new key performance indicators (KPI’s) for your destination’s measurements of success—think quality of life for local residents, protection of natural and cultural assets of the destination, and increased time spent in destination (yes please to more slow travel and responsible travelers!). You must rethink these measures of success in order to change the old paradigm and move towards a more sustainable tourism model. We’ll be sharing more on what these new measures can look like from GLP’s perspective, in an upcoming article. In the meantime, check out the Sustainable Tourism Plan from our partners at Visit Sedona for some inspiration.
Marketing for sustainable tourism:
Step 1: Infrastructure and support
Once you have your goals and priorities in place via a Destination Stewardship or Sustainable Tourism Plan, you also need to ensure your destination is ready for sustainable growth. This means building up your infrastructure, supply chains, stakeholders, and resources so they’re able to accommodate increased interest (before you market and promote). Some key questions to consider include:
Can the region, roads, operators, communities, and hotels accommodate an increase in visitors?
Will an increase in visitors negatively impact the destination or its residents?
What will the local residents think about growth in visitors? Have you included local residents and the community in your plan?
What can you do to ensure local communities benefit from tourism?
Step 2: Content Strategy
Before you publish or promote any new content or marketing campaigns, you need a content strategy. Your content strategy is a plan that connects content and marketing to your overarching Sustainable Tourism Plan. It should help address destination challenges and align with your sustainability goals—for example, focusing on content that can disperse travelers to less crowded areas, off-season experiences, lesser trafficked trailheads, and more. To develop a good content strategy, you need to identify stories and experiences that support your destination goals and address challenges or pain points. You should aim to alleviate some of the problems your destination is facing, or better yet, to anticipate challenges and avoid them altogether. Some examples of content strategy that support sustainability goals include:
Help dispersal and overcrowding: content that features walking tours, bike rentals, kayaking, lesser-known hiking trails, off-season trips, etc.
Support diversity and inclusion: content that spotlights women and solo travel, accessibility/mobility, Indigenous communities, cultural tours, etc.
Support local community businesses: content featuring arts, culture, local tour guides, etc.
Educating visitors: content that shows how to respect and be good stewards when visiting
When you plan ahead by identifying your destination’s pain points and challenges, you can develop an informed content strategy that works for you to help promote more sustainable tourism experiences rather than contributing further to negative impacts of mass tourism.
Step 3: Community + Stakeholder Engagement
An integral component (if not the most important piece) of marketing for sustainable tourism, is community and stakeholder engagement. You cannot have a successful Destination Stewardship Plan or content strategy without including your local community. Your community includes local residents, supply chain, and industry stakeholders. Inviting community input can take many forms, but some successful ideas we’ve seen in practice are town halls, community kick-off events, or surveys to gather insights and feedback. Inviting the community into the planning process keeps them informed, empowers them to be part of positive change, and ultimately turns them into advocates that are excited to share a common vision and message. When your community is on board, you have a powerful force of organic marketing and word of mouth that can amplify your message.
However, opening the flood gates to community input can also bring out the naysayers and critics. You need to be prepared to spend time and resources to make sure that everyone who wants to be heard has the opportunity. There will be times when you cannot appease everyone, but you can still make sure that all voices are treated equally and fairly, and thoughtfully engage with any opposition. This can bring out important discussion and debate, which breeds ground for new perspectives and perhaps even new solutions. As a destination, it is important to be inclusive and invite all opinions to the decision-making table. This makes a better overall experience for everyone, even through tough moments or disagreements. Ultimately, your community is part of the story. This is their story. This is your story. And you are stronger by telling it together.
Step 4: Targeted marketing
With your infrastructure, content strategy, and community all prepared, you are now ready to promote your destination. Remember when we said we need to rethink our marketing goals? Well, the same goes for your marketing strategy. You no longer need to reach mass tourism audiences. It’s not efficient and puts your destination at risk for overtourism. Instead of trying to reach everyone, spend your time and resources on targeted marketing that reaches your ideal traveler. Each destination’s ideal traveler may be different, but we recommend focusing on high-value, low-impact travelers—think slow travel (travelers who stay in one place longer), or adventure travelers. And to be clear, high-value, low-impact does not only mean luxury. “High-value” can simply mean that the value is spread and felt across the community in a meaningful way, rather than meaning a trip is luxurious or expensive.
Once you have identified who your target audience is, you need to identify the target marketing channels and tactics that work for your goals and budget. We recommend a multichannel approach, with a mix of paid, earned, shared, and owned promotional channels. Be sure to develop a strategy to leverage your free resources of earned and owned media, such as your local stakeholder community and local publications. You can then amplify those resources through paid methods like influencers or paid social media. See a few of our recommendations on how to leverage these channels for sustainability marketing:
In addition to focusing on a mix of the right channels, you also want to think about who you’re working with in your responsible marketing efforts. When working with travel writers, influencers, or other creatives, be sure to do your research. Find creative talent that aligns with your destination values. This person will be an extension of your brand and your marketing efforts, so it’s important to work with people that share your vision and goals for how they will promote your brand. You can facilitate this process by sharing your vision and brand values (ex: no geo-tagging in social posts) with any content partners. You should also design familiarization trips that showcase your responsible and sustainable travel experiences—slow travel, longer stays, cultural experiences, off-season, etc.
Destinations have an opportunity to lead by example in your marketing. The shift from destination marketing to destination management doesn’t mean destinations can’t market and promote your experiences. Especially if you’re doing sustainability right, you should be shouting about it from the rooftops (or the TikToks, Instagrams, and other media platforms out there)! Sustainability storytelling is the most responsible way to market sustainable tourism. It offers meaningful exchange, shares authentic stories of real people, and can positively impact local communities and businesses—when done in a thoughtful way.