E-MARKETING OF CULTURAL FESTIVAL AND TOURISM DEVELOPMENT IN CROSS RIVER STATE, NIGERIA
Abstract
The study determined the relationship between e-marketing of cultural festivals and tourism development in Cross River State, Nigeria. Two objectives and two hypotheses were formulated to guide the study. Co relational research design was adopted and questionnaires were administered to employees at the State Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Descriptive statistics and linear regression analysis were utilized for statistical analyses. The findings showed that there is a significant relationship between e-marketing of cultural festivals and tourism product development and revenue generation respectively in Cross River State, Nigeria. The study concluded that e-marketing is an internet-based marketing approach that promotes and advertise cultural festival to draw the attention of the target market to time, date, and venue of the cultural festival. It is recommended that the government should create an active website of the cultural festival page for tourism development on major social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Whatsapp, and so on; that the state’s tourism bureau should explore and use different options (web sites, emails, web advertising) to contact both potential and current to keep them updated, communicate with travel agencies and publicize on different web pages, among other things; that the tourism bureau should employ the services of a social media expert with depth knowledge of marketing and that a periodic report should be sent to the Tourism Bureau on the trend of site visitation as this would help the Marketing Manager to enhance his e-marketing strategy.
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