Increase your direct bookings as a tour operator
Marketing is one of those things that everyone knows is essential but is often treated as a nice-to-have. If you want to increase direct bookings, you’re going to need to get your product in front of your customers. Marketing is a long-term strategy. While there are some quick wins to be had, you should be thinking months or a year down the line.
Palisis has put together a series; Marketing for Tour Operators: How to stand out in a crowded market to give you as much information as possible on how to run your marketing. In this article we cover the basics of content creation, paid advertising, and whether you should work with an agency or keep everything in-house, as well as much more.
Define your target audience
The first step in any marketing campaign is to know who you want to talk to. You do this by creating a persona. To do so, make a list of all your customers and analyse it. What traits do they have? What age are they? What are their interests? You should include the amount spent and whether they’re a repeat customer.
Then you can carry out interviews or send questionnaires or surveys to those who have visited your experience. Doing a deep analysis of your reviews could also work, but this might not give as much detail. This information will inform your persona.
Having personas helps you craft your messaging for your website, emails, content and social media. It will also determine where you use your messaging. Different age groups research their holidays in different ways. For example, older people are more likely to read blogs, while younger people will search Instagram and watch short-form videos.
Craft compelling content
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The first and most important stage of creating compelling content is writing headlines that people will click on. Then you have to choose a picture and write a meta description that reinforces this. For social, there will often be a third piece of copy. An SEO tool called Yoast can help with this.
It is better to be short and concise on your sales pages. Tell people exactly what they will see and what they can expect. Use an inspirational paragraph or two to seal the deal. Feel free to take a look at how online travel agencies (OTAs) display your products and what aspects they emphasise.
Your supporting content, such as blogs, should be much more inspirational. Many of you are excellent storytellers who know every secret about your location or have staff who do. Don’t be afraid to use this knowledge. Show potential customers that you are an expert.
Social media has two main benefits at either end of the spectrum. At one end is direct sales and at the other is branding. Each platform has different advantages depending on what it lets you do.
Choose the platforms that your target audience uses. There’s not much point putting a lot of effort into making videos for TikTok if your customers are Boomers and there’s no reason to share blogs to Facebook if you’re targeting Zoomers. Each platform has different styles and user expectations. That means you should take a bit of time to research what works and what you like, and tailor each post to the platform.
The two biggest tips for any social media platform are consistency and engagement with your followers. Many people give up too easily and early because they don’t see results. Keep going, keep experimenting, and once you find what works, do it again.
Learn more about leveraging organic social media in our in-depth article.
The platforms owned by Meta, Facebook and Instagram, are generally the only ones that have a good ROI. Use inspirational content to find people who may be interested in your experience and then retarget them with sales-focused ads. Articles and landing pages will work much better than videos.
Meta is relatively honest about their advertising algorithm — they don’t really know how it works. That means you should ignore all the work you’ve carried out on your personas and trust the algorithm to find the right people. Target your ads to as broad an audience as possible.
Test every ad with a small budget before boosting it to a larger audience. You want to have multiple options of headlines, copy and pictures running against each other. Generally, pictures with people in them get more clicks, as do headlines with a number at the start, such as: “10 things to do in Winter.”
Optimise your website for conversions
A potential customer who is browsing on social media or search should never be more than two clicks away from your sales pages. Inspirational content should be full of calls to action (CTAs) and widgets, and every page should promote your products. Dig into optimise your website for conversions here.