Do you feel overwhelmed by the diversity of sources to follow to stay up to date with tourist news? Follow our advice and you'll feel in control without spending too much time on it.
Why is strategic intelligence important?
There are certainly a thousand and one good reasons to incorporate business intelligence into your schedule. Here are three.
1- Stimulate your creativity and that of your team
The arrival of the Internet and information technology has accelerated the pace of innovation in organizations. Today, consumers are connected and have varied experiences and share them with a multitude of people. It is no longer possible to continue doing things as we have always done them, without asking questions.
Stimulating creativity within teams is an important challenge for many organizations. Keeping up to date with trends and best practices in your sector and competitors allows you to draw on a diversity of ideas that will broaden your thoughts and stimulate your imagination for your current projects. And since good ideas can come from any level of the organization, business intelligence shouldn't be an activity just for management.
2- Stay on the lookout for opportunities
It is important for any organization to remain attentive to the preferences of its target customers and to identify any changes in behavior that could affect your activities. Beyond consumer trends, strategic intelligence can also allow you to identify potential partners for your projects, grant and assistance programs that you may be eligible for, regulatory changes, etc.
3- Develop your skills and those of your team
The tourism industry is mostly composed of SMEs and the workforce in these organizations is generally required to combine several roles and tasks. In addition, tourism courses are rather general. If this is your case, your teams will benefit from deepening their knowledge and skills according to the missions you entrust to them.
In some areas, such as marketing, tools and trends are evolving at breakneck speed. It is therefore important to keep these skills up to date.
Our advice
Here are our expert tips for setting up effective monitoring.
1- Make a list of sources to follow
When compiling your list, look for sources that are relevant to your industry, areas of expertise, and target markets.
General sources on tourism news or trends are a good start. You will find a selection of topics that will affect you directly or indirectly.
A few examples:
- Express tourism
- Tourism Monitoring Network
- eTourisme.info
- The page Articles from Touriscope:)
Sources specific to your sector of activity are more targeted sources of inspiration when it comes to trends and best practices that are often directly applicable to your reality.
A few examples:
- HRI Mag
- Hospitality Net
- Museum Next
- PAX News
Specialized sources in a field of expertise will allow you to acquire or keep up to date your skills in certain areas.
A few examples:
- Marketing, for example the blog of Gonzo Marketing
- Human resources management, for example the CQRHT
Your tourism associations will tell you about their current advertising campaigns, assistance programs you may be eligible for, tools and training that may be useful to you, and much more.
- Your destination management organizations (Destination Canada, the Quebec Tourism Industry Alliance, your ATR, etc.)
- Your sectoral tourism association
Local and regional general media often talk about interesting local initiatives that are not covered by other sources. On the other hand, they are in a way drowned out by other current topics.
*Pro tip: consider including local sources of information, as well as others that will tell you about your main markets (English Canada, United States, France, etc.).
2- Subscribe to RSS feeds from sources when possible
Many websites allow you to subscribe to their RSS feed, which means receiving new content all the time. To subscribe to it, you need an RSS aggregator, which will gather content from all your sources and present them to you on the same page.
The Touriscope team uses the aggregator Feedly. Accessible through an Internet browser or in the form of an application for tablets and mobiles, its free functionalities allow effective monitoring.
In particular, you can:
- Add new sources from Feedly
- Organize your sources by theme for example,
- Visualize an overview of the articles,
- Save the items you are interested in and organize them in tables.
3- Subscribe to newsletters
Unfortunately, not all relevant sources offer RSS feeds. Subscribe to newsletters from sources that you can't follow via RSS.
4- Search by keywords on search engines and social networks
To complete your RSS subscriptions and newsletters, you can create a short list of keywords to search for on search engines such as Google or social networks. For example, you might want to follow more closely the subject of agrotourism, cultural tourism, etc.
To do this, use the function News of your search engine. Google also allows you to create alerts for these keywords so that you can receive the news directly in your inbox.
We recommend that you set aside a moment each day or week to consult your RSS aggregator and the newsletters received. This will give you a satisfying feeling of being in control of your time, because a task done all at once is more effective than a task that is interrupted.
You can also delegate this task to a person in the organization who will then be responsible for distributing the most relevant articles in order to share knowledge and stimulate the creativity of the entire team.
Our business intelligence services
If, despite our advice, you still lack time to carry out a monitoring worthy of the name, know that we offer this service. We can prepare weekly newsletters, for example, composed of articles as they are or accompanied by parallels to be drawn with your reality. We can also write exclusive analyses for your needs, based on the trends observed during these surveys.
To find out more, contact us and we will be happy to help you.
Featured image: Pexels - Jéshoots.com
POSTED
1/5/2021