CULTURAL Villages have to partner online marketers
Cultural tourism is undoubtedly contributes immensely to tourism in Africa and beyond. African culture in its raw form has attracted a lot of foreign visitors to Africa for years.
Cultural tourism is usually experience in areas remote from the ding-and-ting of city life. Rural dwellers are well known for preserving their culture against dilution. A tribe or a people usually preserve its mode of dressing. Even if youth from such communities may try to match the global trend, the modification will leave the originality of their culture in place.
Another aspect that African culture showcases to foreign tourist is that of food and drink. There are dishes and drinks that are exclusive to particular cultures. For example, bull frog meat is part of the Ndau and Tsonga people in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa. The same meat is part of the Kunda tribe in Zambia. For one to experience tasty dishes of bull frog meat, s/he has to visit the aforesaid communities or cultural villages.
The main challenge which African cultural villages face is that of running on their own without incorporating the marketing world. There is no way a cultural village in Chipata, Zambia can be known by a person in Russia unless there is a marketing drive attached to it.
For starters, online marketing is where a business makes the use of the internet and mobile phones to promote the sale of products and services as well as sending messages about brands. The media that can be used to market online include use websites, blogs, forums, emails, and social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and others. It also uses mobile Apps.
There are benefits that are attached to using online marketing by cultural villages. When a cultural village is available online, it is easy for travelers to know about it when they make online searches about a particular area or region’s tourist attractions. This will definitely bring business to the village.
Online advertisements will give details like the cultural village’s location on the map, the distance it from major cities of the country, the types of roads to the place. That way, online readers can plan for their journey in advance.
Another advantage when a cultural village chooses online marketing is that tourist can make booking online and can also pay for their travel online. That way, a tourist will not worry much about the huddles of queuing in the bank in order to do currency exchanges.
The other advantage of engaging in online marketing is that tourists own their own can share the information about the cultural village using social media. In other words, the sharing duty and cost would be done by interested people and organizations.
In the advent of blockchain where advertisements are decentralised and businesses can connect directly with their prospective clientele, cultural villages can be able to know their potential visitors. Cultural villages should not lag behind but embrace the digital era and partner online marketers.