Tourism Technology Boot camp Week 3: Recap.
The week as usual started on the second day of March with a course on content curation and design. This was followed by materials on influence and social marketing and another course on affiliate marketing. As is custom, the physical meeting held on Saturday the 7th of March.
We were quite fortunate to have none other than the amazing Oluwafisayo Olayinka-bello, popularly known as TheFisayo. She is a multiple award winning travel writer, tourism development advocate, podcast host and innovator who thrives at the intersection of tourism, technology and advocacy. She’s also an acclaimed blogger at thefisayo.com and YouTuber. Her videos are entertaining and packed with useful information regarding tourism. She has been featured on notable publications such as PUNCH, THENET, TVC, STV, PLUSE, and more. She has also appeared on Pulse.ng and Travelanders list of the top 10 travel bloggers in Nigeria, and has been commissioned for projects by the Magical Kenya Tourism Board, Akwa-Ibom Tourism Board, Lagos State Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and many more to strategize the promotion of tourism in their state. With all these accolades and experience to boot, she was definitely the right person to facilitate on content curation and design.
With the advent of the internet and social media, marketing and reaching target audiences has become somewhat easier. However, in order to keep their attention, one must devise certain tactics which is also referred to as content. This very much applies to the tourism sector. A tour operator has to constantly churn out content that captures and engages the interest of his sought after community. This helps him to gain their trust and hopefully, convert them into paying customers. Fisayo imparted in our participants, the ways this can be done and she was exceptional.
Our second mentor Kanayo Bardi is a top notch sales professional with a career spanning over fifteen years. He has experience which cuts across telecoms, e-commerce and even start ups. He was instrumental in the growth of Africa’s largest e-commerce company, Jumia and was awarded best sales force manager in 2014 for his efforts. He was present on the 7th to lecture our students on Affiliate marketing.
By its Wikipedia definition, “Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing effort”. In layman terms, it simply means getting other people to market and sell your products then paying them commission off the sold products. As with all good things, it is not easy to properly execute but Kanayo was on ground to guide our participants on the concept and how they can utilize it as it pertains to tourism.
Our final facilitator for the week was the dynamic Yvonne Okoro. Yvonne has garnered deep experience in Public Relations and strategies for brand building and development. In 2019, she was recognized by SalesRuby as one of the top 50 LinkedIn influencers in Nigeria for her expertise in the use of LinkedIn to engage, educate and entertain and also promote Nigeria’s digital economy.
Through her community she speaks to the minds of undergraduates and graduates and imparts in them, relevant competencies for the workplace with focus on influence and social marketing for the 21st century.
We were elated to have her onboard and she shared her vast knowledge in influence, marketing strategies and how to pick and establish oneself on the different social platforms available today. She also touched on how to decipher and ground competitive advantage in order to properly secure customers and promote the tourism business. In all honesty, it was an insightful experience and we believe our participants are better for it.
The third week of the tourism technology boot camp was once again successful and we keep looking forward to raising the next innovative tourism experts.
