The influence of Tourism e-marketing strategies on destination promotion. A case study of companies in Kampala city.

Abstract

Tour operator’s business needs effective e-marketing strategies to ensure that local tourism business is competitive in the e-market place and help destination management organization to understand where e-marketing actions can be initiated in order to improve the acceptability of tourism product and stimulate demand and thus study examined the influenceof tourism e-marketing strategies on destination promotion in Kampala city. The study was guided by objectives; To find out the existing-marketing strategies used by selected tour companies in marketing and promotion of tourism in Kampala, to assess the effectiveness of such strategies used by tour companies in marketing and promotion of Uganda’s tourism product as well as finding out the challenges faced by tour operators in marketing and promotion of Uganda’s tourism products. This research is quantitative by nature. The collection of the data was facilitated using questionnaire and documentary review and analyzed using SPSS and a sample of 20 tour companies was randomly selected to participate in the study. The findings revealed that tour companies in Kampala used different existing marketing strategies which were identified as email marketing channels, social media marketing, search engine optimization and, websites and weblogs. Additionally, social media marketing, web and weblogs and content marketing were emerged as a very effective marketing strategies for tour operators. However, most tour companies have not perfected this method of marketing strategy because the benefits aren’t immediate in that content marketing can be a long process and thus there is normally a period of trial and error to discover what works best before you to see results and lastly the study found that challenges such as maintenance costs of marketing devices that are high, difficult in building credibility and trust among clients and being active online as the critical problem affecting tour operators tour operators in trying to use e-marketing to promote tourism at the destination. It was from these findings that the study recommended a need for each of tour operators to implement the efficient marketing strategies for marketing and promotion of Uganda tourism products, government corporate on public private partnership organization (PPP) as the factor to reinforce marketing and promotion of Uganda tourism products and lastly the study recommended improvement of website contents including valuable information details to capture customers and visitor’s minds.