Promoting digital marketing activities in tourism development

Tourism is a practical and effective international exchange bridge, for tourists from all over the world to visit, experience, understand more, share more, love more the country, culture and people of Vietnam. Vietnam is a developing country, the economy is in transition, starting from a low point, the scale of the economy is still modest, the internal strength is not large, the resilience and adaptability are limited and with a large economic openness, it is greatly affected by developments in the world situation. Besides the difficulties, there are also many opportunities and advantages. The problem is to work together to best exploit the opportunities, identify, resolve difficulties, and overcome challenges. Vietnam's tourism has improved in the past 10 months, by the end of October 2023, the total number of international tourists reached about 10 million, domestic tourists reached 99 million. However, the number of international tourists in the first 10 months of 2023 was only 69% compared to the same period in 2019 (before the pandemic). Domestic tourists, after a period of strong growth in 2022, are showing signs of slowing down. The tourism industry is facing many challenges, obstacles, and many problems that have lasted for many years and many terms and have not been resolved.
To develop tourism into a spearhead economic sector, to achieve the goal of welcoming at least 35 million international visitors and 120 million domestic visitors by 2025, and 50 million international visitors and 160 million domestic visitors by 2030, Vietnam tourism needs to truly innovate its thinking and working methods with creative, innovative, synchronous and effective measures, especially implementing "close links, smooth coordination and comprehensive cooperation". Especially promoting digital marketing activities. Because currently, using marketing and digital marketing to promote tourism development is a new direction that provinces and cities are aiming for. Current reality shows that almost all tourists use devices connected to the Internet, use social networks as well as search engines to look up information on tours or retail services such as: car rental, service rental at tourist destinations, places to stay. Most businesses in the Travel and Tourism industry that have embraced digital marketing are doing much better than those that have not. A recent report shows that there are now 3.2 billion smartphone users worldwide , which is about 50% of the world’s population. So simply attracting potential customers to a particular local tourism service can bring maximum business efficiency.

With the development of technology today, simply providing attractive tours or travel services on the Internet is a good opportunity to interact and take care of potential customers before, during and after they use the travel service. This creates trust for tourists to continue to choose the service provider for the next trip. Digital marketing is also an opportunity for travel and tourism businesses to collect and analyze data better, outline a panoramic picture of potential customers as well as provide personalized experiences for customers. From there, it will be possible to understand customers and provide them with what they are really looking for with their next trips, while promoting business development in the right direction. It can be affirmed that the tourism industry needs to promote the use of Digital marketing , this is one of the most successful business market approaches today. The development of Digital marketing is rapidly multiplied by the expansion of digital media in all aspects of life from Email to social networks, mobile devices and tablets... Tourism is one of the industries that benefits greatly from Digital marketing methods. Like other industries, Digital marketing in the Tourism industry has grown strongly in recent years and the tools to help Digital marketing succeed. The Tourism industry meets many goals such as poverty reduction, improving the quality of people's cultural and spiritual life, creating local jobs, increasing cash flow and exporting local products.

In the coming time, with the Party's orientation and the coordination of management between sectors, Vietnam Tourism will develop even more strongly, aiming to bring higher socio-economic efficiency, so that tourism becomes the country's spearhead economic sector.

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