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You created amazing experiences in a fantastic destination, but getting travelers to discover and book those experiences year-round is still a challenge or are not able to get the desired growth you were looking for. That's where digital marketing can help, by reaching those customers that love your products anywhere on the world. Inspire them with your amazing experiences, connect and engage with them help them to learn about your company, the experiences you offer and your fantastic destination and guide them comfortably to a sale.
From Awareness to Booking : the Customer Journey
This is a process of guiding a traveler through a so called customer journey from discovering your brand to a booking or even recommending your company to other traveler and who know book again.
Where journeys can differ they probably involve:
Awareness : Traveler first time they hear about your company experience. In this phase you need to make sure people learn about your brand. You research based on your defined persona, where you can find them. Like which social media platforms and websites and then reach out to them through advertising, social media presence and being visible in search engines.
Planning / Interest : Your company made it to a short list of potential companies to go on holiday with, now they are looking for more information and need help to be able to comfortably book with you. Where possible you would like to get some kind of possibility to interact with this traveler; they follow your social, subscribed your news letter, or maybe used your chat bot.
Booking: A traveler is becoming confident enough to choose your destination and your company. Now you have to make it as easy as possible to book with you.
Note that travelers go through these different phase through different channels, like your website, social media, offline magazines, TV etc. But also through different devices like computers and of course a mobile phone that is always with the traveler during all phases. You can try to guide travelers through the whole phase or when you have smaller budgets focus on travelers that are already in the planning and or booking phase.
How to get started
To get started the first focus is to be able reach those travelers that love you and show them your amazing experiences in such a way they notice and engage with you by having an outstanding visual of the best you have to offer and a clear message.
Travelers interested in your destination or experiences, are bombarded with a constant stream of marketing messages. Its not easy to be noticed to people who are exposed to thousands of commercial messages a day.
To cut through the clutter and make an impact, you need to have a clear message and extraordinary visuals. To be able to do this a strategy that guides potential travelers from the discovery of their experiences and destinations to bookings, ensuring that every digital interaction moves them closer to their next adventure with your brand is a must.
Digital marketing offers powerful tools to help you cut through the enormous amount of competing messages travelers see daily and to reach those who are searching for experiences just like yours. By creating inspiring content, sharing valuable tips on how to enjoy the best of your destination, and engage with your audience meaningfully, you can turn curious travelers into loyal customers.
Which all start with having an consistent and easy to use strategy—one that moves potential travelers from discovery to booking, and beyond, to sharing their stories of your destination with others.
Having a strategy is more important then having an perfect strategy, in our 25+ years of experience, we’ve found companies struggling making a whole strategy and then execute it. By keeping your strategy simple, you increase the change you finish one and they are easier to implement. A focused strategy that reflects your unique strengths and passion for creating exceptional travel experiences. By staying true to your core values and telling your story authentically. we help you build connections that resonate with travelers, ensuring your brand stands out and thrives."
To create a well-crafted digital marketing strategy, we share our 25 years+ knowledge of digital marketing and working with tourism organizations. In this article, we will show you which components of a digital marketing strategy to define. From re-assessing your strategy, setting your messages, with compelling narratives and powerful visuals to leveraging the right digital channels for maximum reach. Discover how to create a cohesive plan that not only attracts your ideal customers but helps to converts them into loyal travelers who love to share about you and choose your brand again.
Define Your Strategic Direction for Digital Success.
Because clear and consistent messaging is so important, the foundation of any successful business lies in its strategic direction; your company's niche, mission, vision, values, and unique selling propositions (USPs) and your ability to turn that with the help of Digital Marketing Channel into content that reaches and resonates with your target audience.
Within this broader framework, your digital marketing strategy focuses on achieving your sales objectives through digital means. You plot a coherent plan to consistently communicate your core messages to your target audience while guiding them through their customer journey. A well-defined digital marketing strategy prevents confusion and ensures a seamless experience for potential travelers.
Use your favourite AI tool to help you create your strategy and analyse your competitors to be inspired.
Key Components of a Digital Marketing Strategy
In your digital marketing strategy you define how you communicate your strategic direction;
In your strategic direction you declared your;
- Vision
- Goal
- Niche
- Target Market & Audience
- Experiences and products
- Unique Selling Points
- Key Messages
In your digital marketing strategy you define your different digital channels and what kind and type of messages and content you need to guide a traveler to a sale. Also known as distributing the right content, to the right persona, at the right time.
Customers first need to discover you, than get enough confidence to try and experience your offerings, after which you love to capture their experiences and share them with family and friends.
Choosing the appropriate channels is crucial, don't use more then you can handle. Make sure your channels complement each other, and are set in support of your website with is your digital shop, see Facebook and socials as newspapers to advertise in, your website is really yours and should be the core of everything.
Don't forget to think about email marketing too, another channel that is really yours.
Where in your overall strategy you set the direction of your company. In your digital marketing strategy you set what you will do digitally to achieve your sales goals.
You plot an aligned plan to consistently share, your vision, values usp's, key products, and messages to your target audience and guide them through their customers journey.
It's important to plan this based on your strategy, to avoid that you confuse travelers
The main goal of your digital marketing strategy is to design an integrated digital marketing framework that shows your travel products to your ideal customers who will like your services and then guide them to a sale.
In short; create the right content and distribute this to the right persona on the right time.
Setting your channels right is important because you have so many of them to choose from and they only benefit from each other when you use them in the right way.
Goals
Take the goals from your strategy and break them down for what you want to achieve with your digital marketing plan. Create smart goals for the channels you select in your plan.
Content Creation
Content is the backbone of digital marketing. With your content you lead a traveller to a booking, with the help of your customer journey. In your strategy you have outlined the topics and types of content you will create to assist a customer through their journey towards a sale. You want to inspire a persona and get their attention with the best your destination has to offer, guide them further with tips and helpful resources to confirm your destination is the best next holiday destination, and then you offer them the right offer at the right timing. Each peace of content should inspire, assist, validate, and sell to your audience. This includes content that:
- Highlights the unique aspects of your destinations and experiences, making them must-visit choices for your personas.
- Demonstrates your reliability and the satisfaction of your past customers.
- Show for who your experiences are great by showing your personas in your content, and make sure they are diverse if they come from different countries or age groups.
Your content should support the core message of your vision, values, USPs, and key messages, seamlessly integrating into your overall strategy keeping your brand positioning consistent and clear to understand.
Especially think about what is preventing a persona to book, how do you need to convince them, that you are the company to trust. Iceland Air had a nice research about AI and deal breakers; they say in general travellers don't go for a company because; prices are too high, reviews are not good or inconsistent, to good to be true images and unrealistic AI listings.
Use AI to give feedback on created content, is it inline with your strategy, and when creating content with AI, always tell the system to make the messages aligned with your strategy by referring to it.
It a good idea to make a small content marketing year plan in which you define what content will be made when. What topics to focus on, what keywords you want your website to be found on. Think long-term, maybe you can make winter pictures that you will start using in your promotions only after the summer.
Please note that travel content for a B2B marketing is very different from B2C. Here you shouldn't convince a traveler why your destination is worth visiting, but explain in detail how a company can make money and happy customers by sending travelers to your destination or company.
User Generated Content
The best content about your company is the content that customers create about you. You can blow your own trumpet, much it has much more impact when guests say you are great company.
There are 2 main ways customers create content;
- Reviews
- Sharing Highlights of their experiences on social media posts or blogs
Both ways you can stimulate. You can have stickers or cards requesting for reviews, sending follow up mails that ask for a review or to tag you when then they create a social media post. By for example using a line We love to hear from you ! Tag us. (and share your handle). To stimulate your customers you can give prices for the best contributions or simply share the best entries on your main channels or website.
Reviews
For reviews make sure you distribute them over the different popular channels to make sure that low rates when something went wrong, don't impact you so much. Also don't forget to claim your listing as Google, Yelp, and Tripadvisor need to be claimed by your company to be able to fully manage the possibilities.
The outcomes of your ratings is an important part of proofing to a customer you are worth a try. Don't be satisfied with any rating that is lower then 4 out of 5, but try to have at least a 4.5 to truly stand out and using ratings as a traffic driver.
Business in Google Maps that have higher than 4.5 have a significantly higher amount of customers.
Content Distribution
Of the classical marketing 4P, maybe place was the big winner in tourism marketing. Having your tour operator office in the the crowded tourism center with attractive visual on the glasses and a board before your shop works excellent. And so it does online. You need to have your content there where the crowd is. But online it's more specific, crowds hang around topics and or algorithms, keep driving them back to content they are interested in. Understanding and planning around this will help your company making more money.
Your target audience will use different platforms for entertainment, shopping, learning, information etc. To be able to assist a potential buyer smoothly to a sale you need to be present on those platforms that are important for your target audience. You design the way to present your content and stories in a distribution strategy that defines how you will spread your content across various channels to move your target personas from awareness to planning, and finally, to booking. Doing this helps in delivering the right content and that the right time to the right person. This involves a detailed plan for each channel, including:
- Search Engines : Though declining because of AI, search engines are still on of the biggest traffic sources for tourism businesses. Strategies to enhance visibility in search engines and improve user experience. This includes creating a flow on each page that inspires, helps, proves, and sells, as well as updating content, such as repurposing blogs.
- AI Assistants: A new channel that is bringing traffic or bookings to your conversion channels are AI assistant. Their growth is currently enormous and could surpas Google in the upcoming decade.
- Email Marketing: Determining the type of content to send, frequency, and tactics for increasing subscriber numbers.
- Social Media: Identifying which platforms align with your personas and detailing your approach for each, including content calendars and hashtags.
- Online Travel Agencies (OTAs): Strategies for distributing your trips and experiences through platforms like Trovatrip.
- PR : A very good way to get your message across to the public is when online sources are writing about your experiences, destination or company. It helps to write press releases about new products or other news and send them to travel news magazines or press release distributors. You pay about 100 dollar to get articles distributed over wide networks like ap, and if you do it more often then once a year this price will go down. Examples are PR News wire, Eturbonews, Einpresswire
- Sharing by Customers: The most powerful distribution, is the distribution of your content by your customers, make sure your content is easy to share, and encourage them to share your content, and reward those who do.
- Advertising : Boost what works and or find new audiences that match your persona and guide them into your customer journey. AI can be a big help to identify where your persona is online and with what kind of advertising methods you can reach them.
Channel Strategy
It's essential to recognize that email and your website are owned assets by your tourism business. Investments in these areas remain under your control. On the other hand, social media platforms are borrowed spaces where you distribute content. Its not yours and when the hype changes, think about younger generations shifting to TikTok, you loose your audience too. Investing in your own channel is preferred because it will be always there. When creating a channel's strategy keep this in mind, use the social channel to amplify your brand, but make sure your audience will also be directed to your newsletters and website.
To select the right channels you can use the help of AI, find me the best channels that fit my persona, or the best channels per stage of your customer journey.
Website as a Central Hub
The website serves as the central hub for your digital presence. It should be designed to be user-friendly, incorporating elements that inspire, assist, validate, and sell across all pages. Detailing what specific improvements will be made and what new content will be added is crucial for a comprehensive strategy.
Email: Engaging Your Audience
Email marketing remains a powerful tool for direct engagement. Your strategy should outline the content you'll share, how often you'll send emails, and methods for growing your subscriber base.
Social Media: Building Communities
Social media strategies should be tailored to each platform, focusing on creating a community around your brand. This involves sourcing and posting content that resonates with your audience, using the right type of posts, and engaging with your community.
OTA's
Especially if your not very strong in digital marketing, distributing your experiences through OTA's can help you get customers. But it comes at a price, commissions lack of data, and if your product is not very different, competition on price. Therefor you need to use OTA's smart, pushing new experiences, getting business and try to get repeat business direct.
PR
A good way to get attention is to be mentioned by magazines and online portals. To facilitate your mentions, write press releases about new experiences you have launched. Ask AI to help you turn your promotional material into a press release. To increase your change you can even customize your press release for individual travel magazines.
Places to distribute your news are: E Turbo News, PR Log.
Magazine to share news with are; Travel and Tour World
Besides magazines, try to get your website listed in online directories to make sure your company is visible in as many places as possible. Start with optimizing your presence in listings like the local chamber of commerce, local destination marketing sites and local news outlets.
Lead / Contact Follow Up;
You have been successful, people go to your channels and start inquiring. Now what ? How do you automate these follow ups and how do you chose to put extra attention in those prospects you think have the highest change of becoming a customer. Standard templates, procedures and scripts to call back can help to increase your conversions drastically.
Pricing
While in general the pricing is set in your overall marketing strategy, pricing does become a component when you are going to work with dynamic pricing. Where you charge more for your experiences when there is a high demand and less when demand is low.
When you are working with OTA's it also requires a smart pricing strategy, on which platform do you offer what for what prices, without being hurt by price parity algorithms.
When publishing prices, think about the psychological effect of prices. Prices ending with the numbers 9 and 7 in general feel cheaper, and can lead to higher conversions.
Realizing the Integrated Approach
An integrated digital marketing strategy ensures that all your digital efforts - from your website to social media, emails, and OTAs - work in harmony. This cohesive approach not only amplifies your reach but also enhances the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, ultimately guiding your ideal customers through their journey from awareness to booking.
Measuring
The great thing about digital marketing is that you can measure the results of your actions, instantly and build a very short learning curve. Break your numbers down per target market and try to make buckets of your target audiences to learn which experiences and destinations work best with which travelers.
To set up your measuring system you will define hypotheses and goals and start to observe and measure and them.
Does my target group find me ? (Discovery Phase)
The first thing to measure is if people are able to find and consume your content, by measuring the amount of views, time spent on a channel.
Does my target group interacts with my content ? (Planning Phase)
Do they click on links, view videos, download files, register for newsletters. How many pages are opened per session on my website, percentage of users that clicks certain number of pages to make buckets of not much engaged, engaged, heavy users.
Does my target group buy my experiences ? (Buying Phase)
Total number of sales and conversion rates (how many views / visitors do i need to get a sale. For a destination marketing organization tracking if people are doing experiences can be done by letting people do actions with a mobile. Can you let a visitor download an app that gives value and or maybe discounts that are location based ? You can also let visitors scan qr codes that provide data. Real data of purchases in a destination can come from financial services providers like Mastercard that sell data.
Can i turn my customers in brand ambassadors ?
Number of repeat sales, sharing of your social media posts, number of reviews and the quality of reviews.
In brand ambassadors you also have top fans that share your experiences on their socials or mention you, you can measure this by checking mentions and used hashtags. You might have also people who mention your company in a blog or create other User Generated Content. Especially if you are managing a destination, these are very good metrics to measure the success of your destination.
Get Started
Do you need help to get started with your digital marketing ? Contact VTP Digital Marketing for senior digital marketing knowledge in combination with the latest AI insights.
We are proud to be able to offer any tourism business solutions. Don't worry if you are a smaller company and have a lack of resources. We have a unique way of working where you can grow with us together, you are linked up with youths from Zambia or Myanmar who can assist you under the guidance of senior digital marketeers.
