If you are a B2B business, leaving your marketing up to the chance is a big no! It is vital for companies to be nimble in trendy marketing and promotional gimmicks, including algorithm updates and evolving technology. In tourism marketing throwing tactics at the wall to see what sticks or works can be catastrophic for businesses. Hence, a well-thought-out promotional strategy is the most vital aspect of tourism marketing.
The global tourism sector is expected to grow from USD 10.5 Trillion to US$ 17.1 Trillion by 2032 at a CAGR of 5%. It is evident from the numbers that the tourism industry is gradually coming out of the grappling hook of the pandemic and is pacing itself toward growth. This growth signals an immediate need for a fresh marketing strategy for tourism businesses. In this blog, let us unpack some top-of-mind promotional strategies that will drive results in tourism marketing.
Persuade Through Geotargeting and Geo-fencing
Businesses considering tapping into the booming domestic tourism market must include geotargeting and geofencing in their promotional strategies. Travel and tourism B2B marketers can deliver content to a user via mobile or web leveraging the recipient’s geographic location information, including country, state, postal code, or even a specific address. Owing to high inflation and rising prices, about 48% of the population is inclined toward domestic tourism. With effective geotargeting in place, businesses can successfully remind travel enthusiasts of what’s in their immediate neighborhood or backyard and lure them to sign up. One more tactic that tourism businesses should consider is geofencing. Using geofencing in tourism marketing, companies can create a virtual fence around the user’s geographic location and serve ads whenever their devices enter the “fenced” area.
Use Videos as an Immersive Promotional Medium
Users travel to broaden their perspectives and experience new cultures. So, leveraging a promotional strategy that speaks to the emotion helps tourism marketing capture the audience’s attention. Video is one such medium that is engaging and immersive, allowing tourism businesses to sell an experience using visual cues and achieve 150%. More booking conversions. Tourism enterprises can utilize videos to showcase their experiences, captivate the user’s attention through visual storytelling, and nudge them to make a booking for a weekend getaway. Additionally, tourism marketing can benefit immensely by exploring the realm of video campaigns on connected TV(CTV). As CTV provides a natural, full-screen experience by running video ads on this visual medium, tourism businesses get to hold the user’s attention particularly well and entice them to book travel.
Unleash the Potential of Contextual Targeting
Tourism businesses will get the desired outcomes when they are able to reach people who are considering traveling. Contextual targeting enables businesses to primarily engage with users most likely to travel by using practical algorithms to place ads based on website content, keywords, and metadata, eventually gaining 70% more attention. By targeting the audience based on the environment in which an ad appears, tourism businesses can focus on the user’s current frame of mind to promote their product or service in a hyper-relevant manner. For instance, a travel agency can leverage contextual targeting to promote their vacation packages by displaying ads on websites featuring travel guides and destination reviews to grab the attention of users interested in travel.
Highlight What Makes Your Offering Stand Out
Tourism marketing campaigns with messaging that speak about the value of their offering will go a long way in persuading users to click on the book now button. When businesses convey to the users what makes their offering the best of the rest, it fosters a sense of confidence among their target audience. By saying out loud the value their business is offering, tourism businesses can easily rope in users looking to travel with a purpose. The business’s value becomes the deciding factor that persuades users to buy their vacation package. For instance, an eco-friendly resort should highlight this as its value proposition in its promotional message. By letting the audience understand that the resort is doing what aligns with the user’s value, it can attract tourists who are interested in sustainable tourism.
Give Local Listings a Try
Registering their enterprises with Google My Business is the most straightforward promotional strategy travel businesses can incorporate into their tourism marketing plan. Google listing is free advertising for tourism companies, allowing B2B marketers to update their business profiles, add new photos about their services or products, and update the hours and days they are willing to function. With the increased internet usage, the majority of prospects are using Google to obtain information about everything. As 97% of users search online to locate a local business, Google listings are the perfect way tourism hubs can ensure they appear in all the searches.
Apply User Journey in Your Promotional Strategy
User journeys are tourists’ various touch points or interactions with travel agencies or companies. It starts from the moment they hear about their businesses, giving B2B marketers a fair chance to strike a good impression. Mapping the user’s journey allows businesses to target their audience at each stage. By crafting messaging to be with each user, businesses can understand their journey and also be in sync with their audience. Walking with the prospects through their journey helps tourism businesses perceive their behavior and pain points. It lets companies know where to engage and the right way to communicate. By understanding the user journey, companies can narrow down their users and track them easily.
Capitalize on the 7 Ps of Tourism Marketing
The tourism marketing mix is a broad guideline for businesses to market tourism and seamlessly achieve their objectives. The combination of factors in the marketing mix allows tourism businesses to effectively influence a guest’s or visitor’s decision to book with them. Here are the 7 Ps of tourism marketing that companies can mix and match to formulate winning promotional strategies.
One effective way to formulate a promotional strategy is building tourism marketing campaigns highlighting their product. By including nuances of their product, such as special features, itinerary, and duration in their product description, businesses can create ample awareness about their offerings.
In their promotional strategies, tourism marketers should focus on the place where they want to direct prospects to book their experiences. Tourism businesses should apply due diligence and facilitate easy booking process when they direct users to their offices or chatbots.
Tourism businesses should pay heed to the price they expect their guests to pay for their services. With travelers choosing affordability, marketers should come up with effective price value after considering competitors’ charges, prices prevalent in the market, the cost they have to incur to provide a specific experience to the tourist, and their enterprise’s revenue target.
Choosing the right channel to promote their business and reach the audience is also vital to tourism marketing. B2B marketers can take a look at what channel and content format got them the most traction, explore various social advertising opportunities on social media, and create a 360-degree communication strategy to promote their business.
Promotional strategies in tourism marketing coined around the people facilitating the experience to users can work wonders for businesses. The overall experience a tourist receives is greatly influenced by the people they interact with. Promoting what their tour guides can offer, how skillfully their travel agents help users to book travel, or how their chefs dish out delicacies to suffice their prospect’s taste buds in the marketing campaigns will enable businesses to build a positive image about their brand and bolster sign-ups.
Tourism marketing should promote the processes they have implemented to guarantee users the best experience from the get-go. Promotional tactics about short check-ins, easy refunds, and options to change destinations and add more members to the vacation package allow businesses to instill confidence in their services among the prospects. By creating a good perception of their services through efficient processes, tourism businesses gain users’ trust and give them valid reasons to book quickly.
Tourism businesses can benefit immensely by including proof that their guests had the best time in their resorts, hotels, or homes or enjoyed their company’s offerings in their promotional strategy. Tourism marketers can create promotional campaigns centered on good online reviews to grab their audience’s attention and boost travel bookings.
Tap Into the Potential of Macro and Micro-influencers
Influencer marketing is a remarkable promotional channel allowing tourism businesses to position their brand, gain good reach, and persuade their audience to consider buying their offerings. Considered a low-maintenance promotional tactic, 70% of travel and tourism businesses are embracing influencer marketing as they can repeat and use it over time. Macro influencers have a vast and diverse reach that allows businesses utilizing them to connect with new audiences and establish their brand in new territories. Micro-influencers usually specialize in a specific niche within the industry and help companies gain higher engagement, loyal followers, and a better conversion rate on the social verse.
Explore the Facets of Virtual Reality
Businesses need to consider promoting their services through virtual reality, which is gaining ground among travel and tourism companies. With virtual reality, businesses showcase their destinations, products, services, and activities in a never-before-seen way, offering potential prospects a blend of the experiential aspect of destination and activity marketing. By adopting VR in their promotional strategies, tourism businesses will have an edge and attract many travelers and prospects.
Non-negotiable Strategies for Tourism Marketing
Tourism businesses can latch on to the latest trends mentioned above. But here are some non-negotiable promotional tactics that companies cannot afford to ignore.
Social Media Accounts Must Be Up and Active
With 75% of users taking inspiration from social media to travel, tourism businesses must have their social verse accounts up and running! Tourism businesses must focus on maintaining their profiles on several platforms and promoting their products or services on social media. It allows them to engage with their prospects as the target audience relies on social networks to find information about the business and verify their offerings before booking travel.
Take Up Blogging Regularly
Including regular blogging in their tourism marketing strategy can help enterprises witness good growth. By letting their websites brim with interesting blogs about unforgettable tours and articles about tips to travel better, tourism businesses can effectively grab the attention of their target audience. By getting users to latch on to such interesting content on their web pages or websites, businesses can motivate them to hit the book now button. Additionally, using blogs or high-quality content as a promotional tactic allows travel and tourism marketers to position their companies as domain experts. It gives businesses a lot of mileage and empowers them to rank well in Google searches.
Make Your Website the Ultimate Selling Tool
Any of the promotional efforts in tourism marketing typically take prospects to a travel company’s website. Hence, tourism businesses should make their website the ultimate selling tool. A website studded with captivating photos, having well-structured information about travel and tourism, latest offers, coupon codes, quick options to book travel, etc., conveys leaps and bounds to users about what the business does and offers to travel enthusiasts. Hence, having an experiential website enables businesses to captivate the suitable attention of prospects genuinely inclined to travel.
Become Proficient in Email Marketing
Email newsletters are an easy promotional strategy for tourism businesses to interact with users. It provides classic avenues for businesses to invite people to sign up for their newsletters built into their websites or social media platforms. By offering users the option to subscribe to their newsletter, they can regularly promote their seasonal tours and discount offers to their prospects.
Email marketing is one of the most effective promotional tactics tourism businesses can employ to push their potential leads down the user journey funnel. As users tend to plan vacations one to three months in advance, tourism businesses can utilize this opportunity via email marketing services to attract prospects to book travel with them. During that time, a customer becomes aware, considers your business, and does their research to decide eventually. So, this is your chance to educate on benefits and options and offer exclusive discounts to speed up the decision process through tourism marketing. Marketers can leverage email marketing and campaigns to connect with potential travelers or tourists, educate them and create ample awareness about their offerings, sweeten the deals with some discount offers, and persuade them to click on the book now button.
Gain Google Search’s Trust
Tourism businesses should gain Google search’s trust. By doing so, they can quickly garner the user’s trust. By adopting organic and paid approaches, companies can increase their chances of being recognized by Google search engines to appear in the top searches. With a top-notch SEO game, businesses can command authority and drive traffic to their website’s SEO. Optimized content on a travel company’s website tells users that they are the experts in what they do and have all the answers to their questions.
Wrapping Up
As the tourism sector is going through massive changes, businesses in this sector must be agile and adapt accordingly. Tourism businesses must understand that their users don’t just pay for products and services; they are splurging cash on gaining experiences and making memories. The trick in tourism marketing is that businesses should find their unique selling point and incorporate it into their promotional tactics to gain the required attention.