Have you ever driven up or down the Stuart Highway from Alice Springs to Darwin?

About halfway along you hit Elliott, a small town with a golf course and a couple of roadhouses.

Jack Hughes from the Business Enterprise Centre in Darwin mentioned he was chatting to someone from one of the roadhouses recently about a few issues and it got me wondering about what I would do from a marketing perspective, if I ran a roadhouse in Elliott.

There are many fundamental questions I would ask regarding target markets (it is not as obvious as you might think) and business goals, but the RITE Series this year has a focus on the use of Social Media, so I will concentrate on that for this article.

What is particularly interesting about this challenge to me is that it is quite understandable for roadhouse managers to screw their noses up at fancy schmancy gadgets and ‘silly networks’ but I imagine it would take only one operator to become really switched on and milk the Stuart of as much travelling money as possible for the others to take note.

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