Everyone's Favourite $6 Trillion Industry

HAPPY TOURISM WEEK

If there are two things I love more than just about anything, it's travel and online learning. That's why Junction's acquisition of tourism training platform eLearningU just over a year ago was such an obvious 'hell yes' for me. And given that today is the first day of National Tourism Week here in Canada, I want to drop a couple of updates and an opportunity to check out what we've been up to.

First, let's talk about tourism for a second. There can be a misconception that's is a fun little corner of the economy that consists of boat tours and room service, but somehow it isn't a real, significant industry. Here are a few stats that offer a different perceptive:

• Tourism makes up roughly 10% of the entire global economy
  • That means more than $6 Trillion changed hands in 2022
• 333 million people around the world are employed by the tourism industry
• Since the pandemic, nearly 20 million jobs have been recovered

Aside from the numbers, we also believe that tourism plays a vital role in bringing people together, opening up our minds to new ideas and perspectives, which has only become more necessary over the past few years.

It's also true that a lot of the trends, creative ideas, and best practices across digital marketing tend to come from teams in the tourism space. So whether your business is directly connected (ie. hotels, tours, restaurants), indirectly connected (ie. retail, apparel, CPG), or just inspired by what's happening, there will be lots of value that you can take from tourism-related content. Besides, who doesn't love to talk about great travel experiences?

The first thing we'd love for you to check out is something that we call The Big Tourism Marketing Rundown. It's an eLearningU recording that we publish quarterly where we share biggest trends, updates, and news from the past quarter, and make a few predictions for the next one. The best part: We make The Rundown available to everyone for free.

WATCH THE RUNDOWN

The next place you can soak up all of that tourism-related goodness is on eLearningU's brand new Instagram account. We're sharing some of our favourite clips from our expert guests, lessons from some of the best brands in the world, and for Tourism Week, we're celebrating some of the most creative, inspiring, and impactful tourism organizations from across Canada.

Check us out at @eLearningU_

And finally, if you or someone you know could benefit from a course in tourism digital marketing, you're in luck: We've created a 12-part certification course that builds a practical foundation of digital marketing, where each 30-minute lesson covers a specific tactic that you can use in your business today.

Check it out here: eLearningU Tourism Digital Marketing Course, and if you have any questions, please hit reply – we'd love to chat.

TIKTOK'S CONTENT PLAYBOOK

THE STAY & PLAY FRAMEWORK

TikTok is pulling out all of the stops to make it easier for all of us to wrap our heads around the types of things that we might create on their platform. In doing so, they've created a really interesting framework that could effectively be applied to any content strategy, regardless of the platform.

The basic premise is that each brand should have a healthy mix of two types of content: Stay and Play. Here's how they define them:

• Stay is the stuff that people have come to expect from your brand (helpful DIY tutorials, product demos, recipes, interviews with the team, etc.)
• Play is where you get outside of your expected lane and engage in fun ways (commenting on other brands' posts, creating content about trending topics, or just sharing stuff that makes you smile)

It's an incredibly simple framework, but one that could be super helpful for brands that are stuck wondering where they should start with content planning, because it gives permission to both create easy, functional content, and to let creative ideas fly.

INSTAGRAM GETS NEW TOOLS

THEY'VE BEEN QUIETLY DROPPING LOTS OF UPDATES

All of these are interesting, but it's shocking that it took them as long as it did to drop the first one:

1. The ability to share up to 5 links in your bio
2. Reels Trends (which is like the TikTok Trends and Google Trends tools) will make it easier to see the most popular content types and sounds that are trending right now
3. New Insights metrics, including total watch time and average watch time

META ANSWERS 4 BURNING QUESTIONS

THEIR NEW 'ASK AN EXPERT' SERIES IS WORTH THE WATCH

If you've worked in social media for more than a few hours, you'll know that there are a few questions that get asked by pretty much everyone you encounter, like: How do I get more followers on Instagram?

Meta came up with a solution. They had four experts record answers to four of the most common questions:

• How do I make videos with a small team?
• How much money should I actually spend on ads?
• How can I make my ads perform better?
• How can I get more followers on Facebook and Instagram?

There answers are actually pretty useful, so whether you're curious for yourself, or just need a better standard answer to give to everyone who asks, the article and videos, are worth the click.

Check out Meta's Ask an Expert here

4 MORE HEADLINES

THESE MAY OR MAY NOT SURPRISE YOU

• Have you booked a work trip lately? Despite everyone calling for its demise, corporate travel is back
• Microsoft is dropping Twitter from its advertising platform, Elon says he's going to sue
• Twitter finally went through with its removal of (some) blue checks, and it's a mess
• Instagram re-announces their BeReal copycat: Spontaneous Stories

Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting