The travel industry is an ever-growing, adapting, and competitive one. More and more people are looking to travel to new places to escape the daily stress of life.
In such a competitive market, it can be difficult to keep up with changing marketing trends and demands within the travel business.
Marketing for travel businesses can be challenging but we narrow down the top 5 tips to help you attract more travelers.
Define Your Target Audience
The first consideration for any business is to establish who forms part of their target audience.
A good way to discover your target market is by asking who or what type of person researches and travel and makes bookings.
Another useful tool is to look at the demographic of customers in the travel industry, and specifically which groups of people make travel bookings and research travel queries online.
Once you have established the groups of people who frequent your industry, certain key questions can be asked.
For example, if you are advertising services such as sailboat rental, ensure the advertisement contains relevant information the potential client will seek.
Things such as sd the price of the trip, details of the boat’s amenities, and the area in which the boat is located are generally the details sought.
Consider Your Website
Any business should ensure that their website is user-friendly and easy to use, this will increase your chances of sales significantly.
A good travel business website should contain attractive images and videos of potential vacation destinations.
Major things to consider are whether your website is accessible on mobile devices and if the site is bombarded with irrelevant content.
For example, with a sailboat rental advertisement, irrelevant information such as what materials the boat is made of should be omitted.
The audience of a travel businesses website is ultimately looking for a brief, impactful post with minimal content to read.
Another important aspect of any website is its speed and you should try and improve the site speed to its optimal point.
Site speed can easily be improved by the website’s content short and you can test your website’s speed in any of the free website speed test sites available online.
Use Social Media Properly
Choosing the right “social media” platform is important, and a good way to choose it is to look at the platforms your customer’s demographic frequents.
Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram are the most popular sites that travel businesses use.
The key aspect of social media advertisements is to keep them short and eye-catching, you can always add a link to your main website.
For example, with a sailboat rental advertisement, an eye-catching social media post would include an image or video of the sailboat, a short description of the advertisement, and one or two amenities the boat has.
Making and implementing a social media strategy is a great way to reach your marketing goals, and this strategy should be in the promotion of your target audience’s needs.
Linked to social media is email marketing which can be used to notify prospective customers of your new website and web page
With email marketing, a great way of advertising your business is by emailing links to a blog or sending a weekly newsletter notifying your customers of new travel deals.
Utilize Visual Tools
Videos and images are a great way to entice your customer.
For example, when advertising a vacation to Hawaii, a video showing people snorkeling or enjoying a day on a beach would be attention-grabbing.
Instagram is a fantastic platform to post videos and images, a great marketing tool is to post the image or video on the platform with a link to your main website.
Instagram also allows you to post your advertisements by creating a story in which you could display deals on new holiday destinations and add links to your website.
For example, if you want to promote a sailboat rental business, it would be advisable that you include an image of the yacht and its interior.
A short description of the sailboat should display how many rooms the boat has, whether it has wifi, whether it’s child and pet friendly and how many people the boat can carry.
With a sailboat rental, for example, explaining why using a sailboat would be beneficial and what the customer can expect to experience on the sea as opposed to on land would be effective.
Other important information would include things such as the wildlife of the area in which the boat is located, images or videos of the boat traveling through the ocean, and a review of the boat by a former customer.
Progressive Web Apps
Don’t be intimidated by the jargon, these are simply websites that aesthetically appear as mobile apps.
Progressive web apps are considered to be the future of marketing, so designing your website or adapting into one will be a major stepping stone for future business.
A fantastic feature of these platforms is that you can send push notifications to your users which can increase activity on your page.
A great app for travel agencies to use is Trip Advisor which provides a platform for notifications and a means for customers to review your site and services.
These websites also present a logical flow to your site and promote user-friendliness as it diminishes the need for large amounts of content on one page and subdivides it into sub-pages.
Marketing trends are always changing and progressive web apps allow for an easy way to keep up with these trends as it is fairly basic to update these platforms.
