New trends and opportunities for E-marketing in tourism businesses

Abstract

This dissertation was developed as a part of the completion of the postgraduate study program in Hospitality and Tourism in the Department of Business Administration of the Technological Educational Institution of Central Macedonia. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the way in which tourism businesses can predict new tourism trends in e-marketing and adopt them before their competitors in order to develop competitive advantage at the least possible risk. In order to achieve the objectives of the dissertation, we reviewed at the beginning the literature and the business practice with regard to the basic strategies and techniques of E-marketing in the tourism sector, emphasis was given to some recent development with regard to Search Engine Marketing, Viral Marketing, E-mail Marketing, Marketing through the use of Social Media, as well as exclusive E-marketing tourism techniques. In order to identify the emerging trends in e-marketing in the tourism sector, we employed the Gartner Hype Cycle as a method that shows in a graphical representation the development, the evolution and the maturity of marketing technologies. This way we identified five emerging trends in e-marketing that are considered already mature and they can be implemented currently and exploited by the tourism businesses. These trends refer to advocacy marketing, content marketing and native marketing, as well as to the technologies related to personalization marketing and social analytics. We explain the characteristics of all these marketing trends and techniques and examine their potential impact in tourism.