D: Make sure it works

Measuring whether your communication works should start with assessing the impacts on the various sustainability metrics you are trying to affect. For example:

• Are you selling more plant-based meals than before? Or buying less meat? Or throwing away less food waste?
• Has your electricity bill gone down?
• Are you ordering less single-use plastics?
• Are more people arriving by train? 
   

Since most of these actions are designed to engage your customers, it’s worth checking with them how well that is happening. You can include questions about their awareness, and response to your sustainable tourism efforts into customer feedback surveys for example. 

Just as you would for any marketing or online communications, you should be taking some time to assess your website, online newsletter or social media analytics to measure the performance of sustainability-related pages, blog posts, social media messages etc. While it is easy to get bogged down in such data, it’s worth spending some time monitoring metrics such as page views, time spent on page, open and conversion rates to evaluate the effectiveness of sustainability messaging in driving website engagement and action.

Advice on search engine optimisation (SEO) develops all the time, as search engines become more advanced and more attuned to spotting techniques designed to game the system. The most reliable advice is perhaps the simplest and most common sense. Write your text to be read by your visitors rather than to be scraped by a search engine. Use words that people are likely to use to search for you (People might search for an organic restaurant or eco spa. They are less likely to look for a carbon negative hotel). Regularly refresh the text on your website - perhaps with a blog or other easily updatable content.